Worldmaking (37 page)

Lippmann's views on the Republican Party, conversely, were scathing. Writing to Congressman John M. Vorys of Ohio in February 1941, Lippmann observed that “there is nothing in the record of the Republicans, either on questions of national defense or on our relationship to the Allies, to justify any belief that they have had foresight. If they had had it, they would now be compelled to reverse themselves so completely that the only issue left between them and the Administration is one of procedure.”
102
Wendell Willkie had proved a major disappointment during the 1940 campaign, declining to adopt a clear pro-Allied position and instead accusing FDR of harboring cynically concealed interventionist goals. Willkie had refused to follow Lippmann's earlier advice that “you have nothing to lose … by being the Churchill rather than the Chamberlain of the crisis, and by charging Roosevelt with being the Daladier, the weak man who means well feebly and timidly.”
103
But Lippmann detected graver problems with Willkie than his refusal to assume the Churchillian mantle.

After his election defeat in 1940, Willkie showed admirable grace in supporting President Roosevelt's foreign policies. It was too late to make a political difference, but Willkie had surmised that Lippmann's campaign advice to him had been sound: U.S. support for Great Britain was a just cause and Churchill was the model statesman in such tumultuous times. Willkie thus gave his strong support to Lend-Lease, before going one step further in calling for the unlimited supply of Britain's war effort in the summer of 1941. Delighted to have his support, FDR asked Willkie to travel the world on a goodwill mission as the president's personal envoy. Willkie promptly agreed, visiting Great Britain, the Middle East, the Soviet Union, and China throughout 1941 and 1942. Impressed by the commonality of human experience he encountered in these diverse nations and regions, Willkie surmised that it was possible and preferable to govern the postwar world through a global peacekeeping organization. Woodrow Wilson had been correct, Willkie decided, to believe that human progress had no geographical limits and that universal peace was attainable if the right kind of multilateral organization was established to lead the way.

Willkie began the process of writing up his travel experiences in a book, published in 1943 under the title
One World.
Drawing on his fresh, cosmopolitan understanding of nationalities and ethnic groups, Willkie contended that the altruistic, sociable traits that unite humanity are far stronger than those that divide it. Under these circumstances, imperialism must be rejected, racial divisions should be addressed as a priority at home, and all nations must cede some sovereignty to live in one world—not many—in which mature, open diplomacy would eliminate the bloodletting that had so scarred human affairs. The book captured a transitory moment of multilateral idealism in the history of U.S. diplomacy. Willkie had channeled Woodrow Wilson, and then some. An opinion poll in 1942 had found that 73 percent of Americans believed that Wilson had been correct about joining the League of Nations, up from 33 percent in 1937.
104

Having recanted such idealism through painful experience during the First World War, Lippmann was adamant that the United States must avoid repeating the blunder of substituting concrete goals with platitudes born of wishful thinking rather than comprehension of history. Lippmann wrote that “I felt that the One World doctrine was a dangerous doctrine … I felt it wasn't possible to make one world, and the attempt to do it would produce a struggle … that the right line was to recognize the pluralism of the world and hope for an accommodation among many systems.”
105
There were certain geopolitical phenomena that could not be transcended: nationalism and the naked pursuit of commercial self-interest were at the top of the list.

Writing to Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. (who had followed his distinguished grandfather in representing Massachusetts in the Senate), Lippmann poured scorn on his self-righteous and self-deluding observation that the United States, unlike Great Britain, was not an imperial nation. “In this respect,” Lippmann wrote, “we have exactly the same definite practical aim as Britain: we too intend to maintain our prewar position—in Alaska, Hawaii, the Philippines, in the Caribbean, and in South America.” Lodge had also made a rash remark regarding the utility of international collaboration, which Lippmann took to task: “I think that the first point in your summary—about ‘effective international collaboration'—is an example of the cosmic transcendentalism which you deplore. It is too late in the day for any man to use such empty phrases: the time has come to particularize and to be practical by defining the strategic positions, the commitments, the alliances which give substance to the phrase.”
106
Lippmann had embarked on this process of particularization by writing a book of his own. He halved the frequency of his weekly column to write the book in just four months, aware of the advanced stage of his adversary's book in progress. While “Willkie's
One World
helped to educate the people of this country to a participation in world affairs,” Lippmann wrote, “it also helped … to miseducate them to an expectation about things which caused a furious resentment when it didn't come true.”
107
America's world position would be gravely harmed by the unchallenged dissemination of such ignorance. Lippmann's contribution to public education,
U.S. Foreign Policy: Shield of the Republic
, was published in the spring of 1943, at the same time as
One World
. Rarely have two foreign-policy books combined so perfectly to capture the public's imagination.

U.S. Foreign Policy
was Lippmann's best book on diplomacy. Writing with his typical elegance and sustained by pertinent references to America's historical experience, Lippmann interrogated foreign policy with a sharpness and accessibility that few writers before or since have achieved. Consider Lippmann's presentation of his core argument: “The thesis of this book is that a foreign policy consists in bringing into balance, with a comfortable surplus of power in reserve, the nation's commitments and the nation's power. The constant preoccupation of the true statesman is to achieve and maintain this balance.”
108
The essence of realism has rarely been captured so well.

A central target in
U.S. Foreign Policy
is Woodrow Wilson, whom Lippmann lambasts for failing to enunciate America's war aims clearly—a familiar theme throughout his interwar journalism. “The reasons he did give,” wrote Lippmann disapprovingly, “were legalistic and moralistic and idealistic reasons, rather than the substantial and vital reason that the security of the United States demanded that no aggressively expanding imperial power, like Germany, should be allowed to gain the mastery of the Atlantic Ocean.”
109
In Lippmann's opinion, Wilson had entered World War I “without a foreign policy,” and that “it was made to seem that the new responsibilities of the league flowed from President Wilson's philanthropy and not from the vital necessity of finding allies to support America's vast existing commitments in the Western Hemisphere and all the way across the Pacific to the China Coast.”
110
In this respect Wilson operated in a regrettable tradition that sanctimoniously misread the nation's history. The cause of this diplomatic naïveté was miscomprehension of the Founding Fathers' views and actions. George Washington decried “entangling alliances” only because fixed allegiances did not suit the young republic at that time. The Louisiana Purchase and the Monroe Doctrine proved beyond doubt that U.S. foreign policy was not conceived in a vacuum, unsullied by consideration of the Old World. And nineteenth-century America nearly always possessed sufficient military power to serve its limited purpose: subjugating a continent and winning territory from weak adversaries in the form of Mexico and Spain. “Though Jefferson had some odd ideas about the navy,” Lippmann wrote, “the Founders never thought of making unpreparedness for war a national ideal.”
111
Thinking otherwise was America's original diplomatic sin.

It was the dawn of the twentieth century that compelled the United States to reconsider its foreign-policy responsibilities with a clearer head: “As soon … as Britain no longer ruled all the oceans—which was after about 1900—our own strategic doctrine ceased to be adequate.”
112
In respect to the Spanish-American War, Lippmann quotes Mahan's view that the United States was fortunate to face such an incompetent enemy. This scenario was unlikely to be repeated during future conflicts, making it essential that America's vital interests be firmly established. Lippmann did so in observing that “we are committed to defend at the risk of war the lands and the waters extending from Alaska to the Philippines and Australia, from Greenland to Brazil to Patagonia.”
113
That this represented a major commitment—nearly half the world's surface—was not lost on Lippmann. But hostile encroachment into any of these areas could pose a mortal threat to the nation's independence. Germany's quest for hegemony in Europe, for example, made the continental United States considerably more vulnerable:

The fall of France laid Spain and Portugal open to the possibility of invasion and domination. This in turn opened up the question of the security of the Spanish and Portuguese island stepping-stones in the Atlantic. The fall of France gave Germany the sea and air bases from which Britain was besieged and American shipping along our Eastern shore and in the Caribbean subjected to a devastating raid.
114

It was this reality of American vulnerability—little appreciated across a parochial nation—that compelled participation in the Second World War.

The book's other purpose was to identify the alliances most likely to sustain a stable postwar world. In this respect, Lippmann expected the core relationship among the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union—the so-called Big Three—to prove as indispensable in peacetime as it had proved in fighting Germany. To maintain cordial relations with Moscow, it was imperative that Washington accept that the land to the east of Germany was firmly within the Soviet sphere of influence: “To encourage the nations of Central and Eastern Europe to organize themselves as a barrier against Russia would be to make a commitment that the United States could not carry out … the region lies beyond the reach of American power, and therefore the implied commitment would be unbalanced and insolvent.”
115
Ensuring peace after the defeat of the Axis depended on acceptance by the great powers in general—and America in particular—that traditional diplomatic cooperation was a surer bet to avoiding war than vesting faith in a world parliament or binding arbitration. Maintaining close postwar relations with its two major wartime allies, furthermore, required Washington to look beyond behavior that clashed with cherished norms and values—whether in respect to Churchill's determination to preserve the British Empire or Stalin's heavyhanded creation of a cordon sanitaire in Eastern Europe.

U.S. Foreign Policy
was a work of stark political realism that struck a resonant chord across the United States—a nation prone to gazing admiringly at its innocent self-image. Lippmann is better than anyone else at capturing the reasons for its remarkable popular success: “I think
U.S. Foreign Policy
has had by all odds the greatest circulation of anything I've ever written. It's been translated into almost every language. Its virtue was that it had certain very simple and fairly obvious ideas which just happened to be apropos. It was a time when people were beginning to take foreign affairs seriously.”
116

This short volume of “simple and fairly obvious ideas” sold close to half a million copies. A condensed version was published in
Reader's Digest
, while the
Ladies' Home Journal
published a remarkable rendering of Lippmann's thesis in the form of seven pages of cartoon strips—unique testament to his accessibility. The U.S. Army distributed a version to its troops, priced at 25¢.
117
On June 14, 1943, Lippmann appeared on the cover of
Time
, which hailed the quality of the analysis provided by the “pundit Lippmann.”
Newsweek
praised Lippmann as “perhaps the foremost editorial voice of enlightened conservatism in this country.” A review even appeared in the French Resistance magazine
Les Cahiers Politiques
, published under the perilous circumstances of German occupation.
118
In November 1943, Charles Beard complained that Lippmann was the “Dean of the World Savers,” and that he was keen to “take a whack … [But] I haven't the time or strength”—a prospect that would have cheered Lippmann immensely.
119
Yet in spite of the global attention and review plaudits, Lippmann viewed the book as a failure. In the final calculation,
U.S. Foreign Policy
simply did not make good on its ambition of educating Americans out of their tendency to view the world immodestly through an idealistic lens. As Lippmann noted, “The theory that the nation's commitments and its power must be in balance is really an obvious idea, but it was a new one. It's one that we haven't learned of course. The book is a complete failure in that respect, because we proceeded right away to make more commitments than we had power to fulfill after the war.”
120

Through the spring and summer of 1943, the first rumblings of grand alliance fracture had become audible. Stalin believed that Britain and the United States had been purposefully tardy in refusing to sanction a cross-channel invasion to carve open a second front and relieve pressure on the Red Army, which bore the overwhelming burden of fighting Germany. For his part, Churchill had grave misgivings about the Soviet Union's territorial intentions in Eastern Europe. The prime minister had no desire to sacrifice Polish independence—for which Britain had declared war on Germany in the first place—for the sake of hypothetical postwar unity. At this stage Churchill did not view Eastern Europe as a sacrificial lamb. At the Tehran Conference of November–December 1943, Churchill and Roosevelt agreed to launch a cross-channel invasion the following spring. But Stalin was relentless in holding the line that Moscow would assume a “special” stake in the nations the Red Army occupied on its path to Berlin. The Soviet Union would swallow the Baltic states, and Poland would never again fall into hostile hands. At Tehran the disagreements that lurked beneath Allied bonhomie presaged new rivalries, which Lippmann was keen to avoid.