The Golden Age (44 page)

Peter made his way on foot to the Capitol. For March the day was unpleasantly warm and humid, and he himself was both warm and humid when he got to the Diplomats’ Gallery, already full up while the floor of the House of Representatives was crowded with senators as they, irritably, tried to find places for themselves on the fringes of the House. The front row had been reserved for Supreme Court and Cabinet.

Peter ended up on the steps of the Diplomats’ Gallery with one half of the
Herald Tribune
’s Washington column “Matter of Fact,” Joe Alsop himself. After an active war, attempting single-handedly to defeat the Chinese communists, Joe had resumed his political column in tandem with his brother Stewart.

“
The American Idea
made flesh,” said Joe, merrily malicious as Peter lowered his heavy self onto the step beside him.

Seated nearby, Joe’s cousin Alice Longworth waved at Peter—to annoy Joe?—“Come to lunch Sunday.” Peter said that he would. Although he had served a good deal of time at Laurel House lunches and dinners where the grandees of national politics were to be observed, exchanging information for publicity, only recently had he begun to exist in his own right as a guest in demand.
The American Idea
was not much read by the reigning hostesses, except for Virginia Bacon, who read everything, doggedly. But Pauline Davis, the grandest of all hostesses now that Frederika had cut back on her entertaining, quite liked him, or so she said, “because you are the balance of power to Joe—at least at table.” Peter feared that they were doomed to become a clown act, Joe with his Achesonian warnings of the noxious apple of communism and Peter with his unfashionable view that nations were nations and did not change identity despite revolutions and invasions. Czarist Russia and even Roman Scythia had seemed to him more worthy of study than Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin, recent phenomena only to be understood in the light of what had preceded them for a millennium or two.

“I suppose,” said Joe, “that you will take the view that today we are crossing the Rubicon.”

“With Harry Truman—your little gray man—as Julius Caesar?” Peter knew that Joe much regretted his first summing-up of his great
kinsman’s heir. “No. We’re not dealing in clichés except for your neighbor in P Street, who has compared our rivalry with Russia over Greece as the greatest conflict since the Punic Wars.”

Joe swiveled on the step until his bloodshot eyes had Peter’s in full focus. “Where did you get that from?”

“Acheson’s rhetoric is still echoing throughout the whispering gallery of our city. He took the floor when Marshall proved to be less than inspiring. Acheson spoke powerfully of that one rotten apple which spoils a barrel …”

“
When
was this?” Joe did not enjoy the needling of those who did not feel as he did about the manifest destiny of the United States.

“At the White House. The President called in …”

“… the congressional leaders. I know. To ask for money, to support the Greek democracy …”

“Resting comfortably in peace ever since Philip of Macedon came to town.”

“You tend to overdo the history, dear boy.”

“Mr. Acheson is overdoing the history. Not since Rome and Carthage, he says, has the world been so polarized, which is nonsense. We’re no Rome, while landlocked Russia is no maritime empire like Carthage or even Britain …”

“Don’t niggle. We stand at Armageddon.”

“Theodore Roosevelt? Oh, God, not now.”

“Why not Uncle T when we need him, in spirit at least?”

“My Aunt Caroline quotes your Cousin Eleanor as saying that your Uncle T’s love of war killed dead all attempts at progressive reform in this country.”

Joe gave his most disagreeable snort, causing Bess Truman, First Lady of the Land, to turn around in her place to identify the snort’s source.

Fortunately, the doorkeeper’s roar brought silence to the chamber. “The Cabinet of the President of the United States.” Peter looked at his watch—almost one o’clock. History was in the making, as the Cabinet came down the aisle and took their places in the front row. Acheson sat in for Marshall, who was in Moscow—or should one say Carthage now? Next, the doorkeeper announced, “The President of the United
States of America …” The entire chamber stood, including Peter and Joe Alsop. To Peter’s amazement, there was as much of a roar of applause from the Republicans as from the Democratic side of the House. History was flinging the dice. For war.

Truman took his place at the clerk’s desk beneath the speaker’s rostrum; opened a black folder; waited for the applause to stop. Then he began to read in a high-pitched nasal voice. Peter made a few notes. Although he would soon have the entire text, he liked to test himself against it, liked to test the speaker against the speech. What were the key lines? The declaration of war, if there was to be one.

Peter and history did not have long to wait. The President not only briskly assumed for the United States global primacy but made it clear that from this moment forward the United States could and would interfere in the political arrangements of any nation on earth because “I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.” There it was:
droit de seigneur
. Peter waited for an analysis of what constituted “attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressure.” After all, the United States itself was both armed and outside Greece and Turkey. But no further explanation was given other than “I believe that we must assist free peoples to work out their own destinies in their own way.”

What, Peter wondered, was a free people? Had Americans ever been free of a governing class that often acted against that majority rule which was supposed to be the source of all political legitimacy? If the Canadians had the military and economic power, might they not have had an equal right to save their southern neighbors from two European world wars on the ground that an American minority, armed with great wealth, could so subjugate the American political process as to oblige the many to go glumly to war for the benefit of the few?

Peter suddenly realized, as the little President recited his Achesonian message, why it had been so necessary for Roosevelt to provoke the thunderbolts at Pearl Harbor and then, even more necessary, for the excluded majority never to know what he had done to them. The few always knew best; the many must always follow their lead. This was the “democratic” way in the United States.

Suddenly, everyone was on his feet except for Peter, who remained seated, scribbling in his notebook. Standing ovation. Loud applause. Raw imperialism? Or simply a tribute to a plucky actor whom no one thought capable of pulling off such a role.

“I suppose you’ll object?” Joe smiled his lupine smile, somewhat disconcerting viewed from below.

“Are we to aid every country?”

“Why not?”

Peter wondered if Joe was serious; if Truman was serious; if the current “crisis” was serious. But if what had already been billed in advance as the Truman Doctrine were to take effect, would a total world empire ever be in anyone’s interest? The war industries, now languishing, would profit. But would the general economy improve?

Would …?

Back, alone, in his office, Peter began to fit together—and find a pattern for—Truman’s various statements, starting with the news that Hiroshima had been destroyed. “This is the greatest thing in history,” he had said. It was not recorded whether he smiled or wept when told that Europe had lost thirty million people in the war while the United States had lost a “mere” three hundred thousand military men. Where Roosevelt saw four world spheres of power—American, British, Russian, and Chinese—with the United Nations as their joint police depot, Truman saw only two great powers, which, as of today, were in open conflict: Rome versus Carthage. In this context, Acheson had pretended that the Soviet Union was on the march everywhere in Eastern Europe, which, true or not, could hardly put them on an imperial par with the American acquisition of three-fourths of Germany, soon to be an American province, and of militarily occupied Japan, an American dependency. Then, of course, there was all of Latin America, most of the Pacific islands, while in Africa …

How had Acheson and Truman got away with so much misrepresentation, leading to so many false conclusions, without anyone seriously questioning their hectic and hectoring analyses? It reminded Peter of British intelligence before the war—White Cliffs of Dover rolling over and over Mrs. Miniver and her parched rose, awaiting FDR’s legendary life-saving garden hose. But what was the American equivalent
of England’s well-motivated propagandists? In just eighteen minutes at the Capitol, the President had arbitrarily divided the entire world into two “alternative ways of life,” when the truth was that if the United States was not so eager for war, there were many alternative ways of life from the fragmented Chinese and the turbulent Indians to the Soviet Union which had already “lost” Yugoslavia while never getting much of a grip on the Chinese communist leader, Mao Tse-tung, a positively celestial figure in his self-absorption.

Nevertheless, a deliberately leaked cable from General Lucius Clay in Berlin suggested that war with the Soviet Union was imminent. It was hard to take seriously the cries of Truman and Acheson that the skies were falling in when, as of 1947, the United States was responsible for half the world’s industrial output. Clipped to this fact sheet, Peter found a Truman quotation from August 1945: “We must continue to be a military nation if we are to maintain leadership among other nations.” This had been said in Cabinet shortly after the two nuclear bombs had fallen upon Japan. The enemy appeared to be something Truman called “totalitarian states.” Apparently, he had said, “There isn’t any difference between them.…” Except the ones that were treasured allies like Iran and South Africa.

In the file that contained a number of Truman quotations, he found a memo from the Joint Chiefs of Staff dated 1946:

“Experience in the recent war demonstrated conclusively that the defense of a nation, if it is to be effective, must begin beyond its frontiers.” Aeneas must have collected this. When a senator had asked the secretary of the Navy, James Forrestal, if he meant for American ships to be based everywhere, Forrestal had replied, “Wherever there is a sea.” Aeneas had also found a copy of some twenty places where the United States would maintain air bases or air transit flights. They girdled the earth from Indochina to Guatemala, Canada, Peru, Karachi, New Zealand, while most of the Pacific’s islands had been more or less officially annexed. All in the name of “security” against an enemy or enemies unknown except for the nonatomic and fleetless Soviet Union.

When Truman was asked in 1945 if the United States would now become the world’s policeman, he said, of course it would have to. After all, “in order to carry out a just decision the courts must have
marshals.… To collect moneys for county governments, it has been found necessary to employ a sheriff.” In the vigorous effort to make a case that must at times be, in Dean Acheson’s own exquisite phrase, “clearer than truth,” only the United States had the power “to grab hold of history and make it conform”—to what Acheson did not say.

So there it was. The grab was in. On March 21, nine days after Truman declared his “doctrine” to Congress, he created a Loyalty Review Board before which several million government workers would each be forced to swear that never, ever, deep in his heart of hearts, had he for an instant lusted after the evil, the godless, the monolithic, the world-conquering doctrine of communism, whose Vatican was the Kremlin and whose dupes were everywhere in the government, in the classrooms, and even, it was whispered, in the churches of God’s last best hope of earth. Aeneas and Peter had fought over the text of their editorial deploring this astonishing restraint on a “free” people. Their compromised result was hardly Miltonian and, sadly, Peter agreed with Aeneas that his own inspired heading,
Ein Reich Ein Volk Ein Truman
, was perhaps almost as excessive as the Loyalty Board itself.

It came as no surprise to Peter that
The American Idea
was promptly included by the attorney general in a list of subversive periodicals and organizations while FBI agents wondered, in the course of a long visit, why—and to what end—the paper was published in a Negro neighborhood. In due course, when Aeneas applied for a passport, he was warned by the State Department that journalists critical of America’s foreign policy could—and would—be denied the right to travel abroad. But, as Peter wrote, there were also intermittent joys in the course of that remarkable year, 1947. The Office of Education had created a program to nurture patriotism in the schools; it was called “Zest for American Democracy!” This soon became a regular feature in
The American Idea
while, for the editors, “Zest” became the adjective of choice to describe the latest hyperbole from the Administration and its thundering chorus of approval in the press, whose Heldentenor was Henry Luce with his surging aria “American Century,” all rights unreserved, as Aeneas had noted.