Truman (15 page)

Marshall, although he was certainly not encompassed by military rigidity (Acheson was struck by the fact that even in wartime he thought about military problems, let alone political ones, in a broad political framework) had certain limitations of imagination. He did not create ideas. He needed them to be put to him. He was good at choosing between them. And although he played a major role in calling the old world back into being, not exactly to redress the balance of the new but to stand more or less upright alongside it, I know of no evidence that he ever had a friend amongst the
leaders of Europe. Acheson was on close terms with at least three, maybe even five, of them; but not Marshall. Language was no doubt a barrier with some, but hardly much with the British. Yet, although Ernest Bevin's reputation depends substantially upon his partnership with Marshall, and Marshall's depends at least equally upon Bevin's swift response to the Harvard Commencement Speech of June 1947, without which response the Marshall Plan might never have assumed reality, there was no hint of intimacy between them. Mainly through a misunderstanding Marshall thought that Bevin let him down at the London Conference of Foreign Ministers at the end of 1947, and subsequently held this against him. But even before that there had been no warmth. Acheson in 1949, for all his Groton and Yale style, immediately got on close terms with Bevin. He relished Bevin's earthy jokes. Marshall, who did not make many jokes himself–for such a remarkable man there are few anecdotes about him, and those there are somewhat pale—did not have the same appreciation of Bevin's humour. Despite what might have been thought his more promising provenance of Uniontown, Pennsylvania, Marshall always, I suspect, thought Bevin a rather coarse fellow. This showed a certain lack of imagination and narrowness of taste. But even at the superificial level of attraction of personality as opposed to the more important one of solidity of achievement, this is balanced by the near universality of affection as well as respect which Marshall commanded from a wide range of Americans (some of them of very critical temperament) who knew him well.

Marshall was very American. Not only was he unintimate with foreigners,
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he also had little taste for European life or travel. The paradox was that while he saw his duty as being to uphold the interests of his own country, he conceived of them in sufficiently broad terms that, with the possible exception of Acheson, he was objectively the most internationalist of all the 59 (then 49) Secretaries of State in the history of the Republic.

His return to Washington did four things. First, it gave a greater tautness to decision making in the State Department, even though Acheson as under-secretary (in which post he remained for six
months with Marshall before leaving government for eighteen months of private law practice) had done his best while Byrnes perambulated the world. Second, on all issues except Palestine, he re-united the policies of the State Department and the White House. Third, he added the weight of his non-partisan authority to Truman's partisan incisiveness in promulgating several major advances in the foreign commitments of the United States. Fourth, and not least important, his presence substantially increased the self-confidence of the President.

This accretion of strength came at a crucial time. In 1947 the defeated countries of Europe remained impoverished and demoralized. France and Italy in particular looked on the brink of revolution. Of the two victorious countries Britain, snowbound and fuelless, was forced to begin the long process of withdrawing from its world power illusions and responsibilities. Russia, moved by a mixture of truculence and fear, had become sullenly uncooperative, iron-handed in Eastern Europe and menacing beyond. There was no approach to a stable balance in the continent.

The third week of February was a climacteric in Britain's adjustment to post-war reality. On February 20th Attlee announced in the House of Commons that power would be handed over in India no later than June 1948. On the 21st Bevin caused notes to be delivered to Marshall informing the United States Government that British aid to Greece and Turkey could not continue after the end of March 1947. For Britain the former was the more momentous decision. But it posed no problem for Washington. It did not immediately affect the East-West balance and gentle support for Indian nationalism had long been settled American policy. Such support had been one of the main sources of friction between Roosevelt and Churchill during the war. No action from Washington was called for.

The eastern Mediterranean decision was quite different. It was to be implemented with brutal speed and it was bound, in the view of London and Washington alike, to result in an important shift of power to the Soviet Union unless America would step in where Britain was forced to withdraw. Bevin indeed would probably not have assented to the decision had he not judged that the US Government was just about ready to accept the new commitment. Major issues were therefore at stake. Had America refused the new burden, not only would a dangerous flank have been opened to
Russian influence, but Anglo-American relations would have been gravely impaired, and the United States, having once resisted a ‘bounce', would have been the more difficult to move in the future. If the Greek-Turkish gamble had gone wrong the Marshall Plan would have been unlikely to take shape.

In fact, however, although playing for high stakes, Bevin was not doing so against long odds. It was overwhelmingly likely that Truman, advised by Marshall and Acheson, would want to pick up the check. The more open question was whether the new Republican Congress would allow him to do so. The key meeting for this was at the White House on February 27th. Truman, Marshall and Acheson met the leaders of both parties in both houses. Acheson's account of what occurred, while somewhat vainglorious, is the most vivid and well-supported from other sources.

‘My distingushed chief [Marshall], most unusually and unhappily, flabbed
[sic]
his opening statement. In desperation I whispered to him a request to speak. This was my crisis. For a week I had nurtured it. These congressmen had no conception of what challenged them; it was my task to bring it home. Both my superiors, equally perturbed, gave me the floor. Never have I spoken under such a pressing sense that the issue was up to me alone. No time was left for measured appraisal. In the past eighteen months, I said, Soviet pressure on the Straits, on Iran, and on Northern Greece had brought the Balkans to the point where a highly possible Soviet breakthrough might open three continents to Soviet penetration. Like apples in a barrel infected by one rotten one, the corruption of Greece would infect Iran and all to the east. It would also carry infection to Africa through Asia Minor and Egypt, and to Europe through Italy and France, already threatened by the strongest Communist parties in Western Europe. The Soviet Union was playing one of the greatest gambles in history at minimal cost. It did not need to win all the possibilities. Even one or two offered immense gains. We and we alone were in a position to break up the play. These were the stakes that British withdrawal from the eastern Mediterranean offered to an eager and ruthless opponent.

A long silence followed. Then Arthur Vandenberg said solemnly, ‘Mr President, if you will say that to the Congress and the country, I will support you and I believe that most of its members will do the same.' Without much further talk the meeting broke up … ‘
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The Truman Doctrine was effectively launched. The only trouble was that Acheson, determined rightly to get it into the water, had pushed it down the slipway with too much champagne. Well before Dulles the domino theory was promulgated, and the susceptibility of the majority of Congress to the rhetoric of the Cold War was established.

When, therefore, Truman laid before a joint session of Congress on March 12th his proposals to make available an immediate $250 million for Greece and $150 million for Turkey he was proposing something much more far-reaching than the spending of $400 million (although that sum was then a great deal more substantial than it is today) and he was deliberately doing so in ideologically provocative terms. In particular, he set no limit to the geographical framework within which support was to be given: ‘I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempts of subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressure.' This somewhat flat sentence, when supported, as it was, by the Congress, can be regarded as one of the four or five most decisive in American history, even though Truman did not act uniformly upon it throughout the world. Viewed favourably, it proclaimed several decades of the
Pax Americana.
Viewed unfavourably, it set the country on the course to the
débâcle
of Vietnam. Viewed neutrally, it achieved its purpose. Both houses of the Republican Congress voted for the Truman Doctrine by approximately three to one.

Did Truman employ overkill? A surprisingly large proportion of those intimately involved thought that he did. George Kennan, the most important State Department adviser on policy towards the Soviet Union, did. Acheson did not: it sprang directly from his powerful and spontaneous presentation of two weeks previously. In the White House, George Elsey did, but Clark Clifford did not. More importantly, Marshall, who had left Washington for the Moscow meeting of foreign ministers several days beforehand, was somewhat unhappy. Acheson thought that he had got
him to clear the draft on his way through Paris, but the Russian expert, Charles E. Bohlen who was with him, recorded that they both found ‘the rhetoric too flamboyantly anti-Communist.' So too did Bevin who had just reached Moscow after an endless train journey across the snowbound plains of northern Europe. He and Marshall may both have been somewhat influenced by their knowledge that they were to be shut up in the drabness of an end of winter Moscow for over six weeks,
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and a feeling that the President's speech, wholly desirable in substance, nevertheless condemned them to the certainty of an unproductive sojourn. Lord Bullock recorded that Bevin said in his final report on the Conference that ‘Truman's announcement removed any chance of agreement on the general principles of a German settlement and changed the whole scene.' Bullock added however that without access to Russian sources Bevin could not really know.
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Truman himself was as usual unrepentant about his language. But he had found the decision peculiarly taxing, more so apparently than that to drop the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs, nineteen months previously. With the speech out of the way he went again to the familiar submarine base at Key West, Florida for a short holiday. From there on March 13th he wrote a typical and revealing letter to his daughter:

‘We had a pleasant flight from Washington.

Your old Dad slept for 750 or 800 miles—three hours, and we were travelling from 250 to 300 miles an hour. No one, not even me (your mother would say) knew how very tired and worn to a frazzle the Chief Executive had become. This terrible decision I had to make had been over my head for about six weeks. Although I knew at Potsdam that there is no difference in totalitarian or police states, call them what you will, Nazi, Fascist, Communist or Argentine Republics. You know there was but one idealistic example of Communism. That is described in the Acts of the Apostles.

The attempt of Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin,
et.al.
to fool the world and the American Crackpots Association, represented by Jos. Davies,
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Henry Wallace, Claude Pepper
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and the actors and artists in immoral Greenwich Village, is just like Hitler's and Mussolini's so-called socialist states.

Your Pop had to tell the world just that in polite language.'
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Between the proclamation of the Truman Doctrine and Marshall's Harvard Commencement speech, which is generally regarded as the launching date of the Marshall Plan, there was an interval of only 85 days. It was a period of major policy making at a formidable rate. In fact, the ideas of the Marshall Plan were ready well before June 5th. There was indeed some thought that it might have been launched in tandem with the Truman Doctrine, and proposals for economic aid to Western Europe submitted at the same time as those for military sustenance to the Eastern Mediterranean.

It was decided however that this might be too heavy and rushed a meal for the Congress to digest. More preparation was required. Furthermore Truman wisely and modestly thought it undesirable that his name should be memorialized by attachment to a major programme for spending American taxpayers' money on economic aid which in principle was to be offered to any state in Europe, non-Communist or Communist. The Truman Doctrine was one thing. It was military aid presented in a specifically anti-Communist context. It would be accepted by a Republican Congress even under Truman's name. For the European Recovery Programme, as it subsequently became, a less partisan label was required. Marshall provided it. Truman shrewdly saw the tactical advantage of this. He also thought that the General deserved the accolade and had no jealousy about letting him have it.

Nonetheless the broad policy behind the Plan was essentially Truman's policy and the detailed ideas were essentially worked
out by Acheson, supported by a trenchant series of memoranda written by Will Clayton, then State Department assistant under-Secretary in charge of economic affairs. Acheson also commissioned and skilfully used a report from a body known as the State/War/Navy Co-ordinating Committee. This committee reported on April 21st and, strangely for a body composed of three middle-rank military gentlemen (even the State Department representative was a colonel) deployed with limpid logic the far-sighted economic self-interest case for generosity. It pointed out that in 1947 the United States was likely to export $7.5 billion more goods and services than it imported. But resources to pay for this export surplus were running down. ‘The conclusion is inescapable that under present programmes and policies the world will not be able to continue to buy United States exports at the 1946-7 rate beyond another 12-18 months … A substantial decline in the United States export surplus would have a depressing effect on business activity and employment … if the export decline happened to coincide with weakness in the domestic economy, [the effect on] employment might be most serious.'
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