Worldmaking (39 page)

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Sumner Welles's collaborative ideas were put to the test from August to October 1944, when representatives from the United States, United Kingdom, Soviet Union, and China met in Dumbarton Oaks, Washington, D.C., to draw a blueprint for a successor organization to the League of Nations. During these discussions the four major components of the United Nations were established: the Security Council, the General Assembly, the International Court of Justice, and a Secretariat. Significantly, the four delegations agreed that the United Nations should possess a military capability. This would be created through member states placing their militaries at the disposal of the Security Council at moments of crisis. Woodrow Wilson's dreams were being realized. As were Mahan's and Lippmann's nightmares.

In a long letter to his friend Grenville Clark, chairman of the Citizens Committee for a National War Service Act, Lippmann poured scorn on events at Dumbarton Oaks. He complained that “the Dumbarton Delegates have sought to create a universal society to enforce peace before the world has been sufficiently pacified … With these conventions to pacify and unite, we should not be quarrelling with Russia over the conundrum of legal equality, but should be bound together with Russia to make and keep the peace in the critical generation ahead of us.” Lippmann thought that the creation of the United Nations was a foolish distraction at a time of profound global flux. When world peace became reality was the right time to vest faith in a new geopolitical experiment. It was “a false major premise” to believe that Dumbarton Oaks could conjure up “a universal society to pacify the world.”
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On this count, Lippmann's skepticism was well founded.

Remarkably, the creation of a United Nations was not even a campaign issue during the general election of 1944. Both Roosevelt and the Republican candidate, New York governor Thomas Dewey, agreed on the wisdom of establishing a new global organization to keep the peace. Lippmann had grown mightily tired of FDR's presidency—then in its twelfth year—but Dewey struck him as a worse prospect. Dewey had criticized Roosevelt for refusing to confront Stalin over his future plans for Poland. In “Today & Tomorrow” Lippmann criticized Dewey's support for those “reactionary Poles” who were foolish enough to resist compromise with Stalin over the nation's frontiers and political composition.
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John Foster Dulles was furious with Lippmann, writing that “the basic issue between you and the governor is that you do not believe that the United States should have any policies at all except in relation to areas where we can make those policies good through material force. The governor, on the other hand, believes in moral force.” Unwilling to accept a sanctimonious attack from a man who previously favored the appeasement of Hitler—even after the fall of France—Lippmann penned a cutting retort: “I wonder if it would be profitable to argue about who is more aware of the moral issues involved in this war, for that would involve examination of the record, whereas I for one prefer to let bygones be bygones.”
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Lippmann did not so much endorse Roosevelt as eviscerate Dewey. In “T&T,” he wrote, “I cannot feel that Governor Dewey can be trusted with responsibility in foreign affairs. He has so much to learn, and there would be no time to learn it, that the risk and cost of change during this momentous year seems to me too great.”
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The voting public appeared to agree with Lippmann, reelecting Roosevelt with 432 electoral college votes to Dewey's 99—a winning margin of 3.5 million cast ballots. Isolationists such as Hamilton Fish and Gerald P. Nye were voted from office. Self-declared “internationalists” entered Congress in considerable number, including a young, well-traveled Rhodes scholar from Arkansas named J. William Fulbright. Lippmann was pleased with the outcome at both the executive and legislative levels. But he remained concerned by the administration's still buoyant enthusiasm for the United Nations and the prospect that growing U.S.-Soviet discord might derail his hopes for postwar stability. Roosevelt's new vice president, Harry S. Truman, did not inspire much confidence in this regard. On June 23, 1941, Truman had observed, “If we see that Germany is winning we ought to help Russia and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany and that way let them kill as many as possible.”
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Engaging in diplomatic cynicism of a different kind, Winston Churchill visited Moscow in October 1944 to propose to Stalin a “percentages deal,” whereby Eastern, Central, and Southern Europe (excluding Poland) would be divided into distinct spheres of interest. The Soviet Union would secure a preponderant stake in Romania, for example, while Britain would play the dominant role in Greece. This was a diplomatic gambit of which nineteenth-century prime ministers such as Disraeli and Palmerston would have been proud. Churchill appeared oblivious of how the times had changed, however, so when his proposal went public, a significant backlash ensued—FDR was compelled to disown his ally's proposal. In Lippmann's opinion, Churchill had displayed considerable skill in extracting a quid pro quo from a relatively weak diplomatic position. He was dismayed by such a violent response to sensible diplomacy. Lippmann wrote in December 1944 that American troops had not died to “have a plebiscite in eastern Galicia or to return Hong Kong to Chiang Kai-shek.”
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The irrational passions of the masses were again skewing the pursuit of sound diplomatic strategy driven by those privy to “insider” knowledge.

Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin met for a final time at the Crimean resort town of Yalta in February 1945. While Germany stood on the cusp of defeat, the daunting prospect of a sea invasion of Japan remained likely. The U.S. atomic bomb was still in development. It is in this context that we must comprehend FDR's primary goal of securing Soviet support for continued military action against Japan—to which Stalin agreed at a fixed point three months after Germany's unconditional surrender. The Big Three also hammered out a Declaration on Liberated Europe, which called for free elections in those nations liberated from Nazi occupation. This read well on the page, but the terms were ambiguous and effectively unenforceable.

Attempting to extract a Soviet concession on Eastern Europe, Churchill made clear that an independent Poland for him was a matter of honor. Stalin retorted testily that for the Soviet Union a friendly Poland was a matter of security. Roosevelt interjected that free elections in Poland “should be as ‘pure' as Caesar's wife.” Ominously, Stalin replied, “They said that about her, but in fact she had her sins.” Five days of grueling negotiations had produced cloudiness on the fate of Eastern and Central Europe. When Admiral William Leahy, serving as the president's chief of staff, complained that the common declaration was so elastic that it could be stretched from the Black Sea to Washington without fear of rupture, FDR replied, “I know, Bill. But it's the best I could do for Poland at this time.”
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Lippmann agreed. Yalta was as good an agreement as could have been made in the circumstances. In “T&T” he wrote that “there has been no more impressive international conference in our time, none in which great power was so clearly hardened to the vital, rather than the secondary, interests of nations.”
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Lippmann was as enthusiastic about Roosevelt's presidency as he had ever been. Then, at this high point of goodwill, reports began circulating about the fragile state of FDR's health. The long trip to Yalta had taken a severe physical toll on a man with serious and long-standing health problems. Upon his return, Roosevelt had retreated swiftly to Warm Springs for rest and medical attention. The prognosis was not good, as photographs of a visibly frail Roosevelt at Yalta testified. “Fearing that the president might not live much longer,” Ronald Steel writes, “Lippmann, as a final gesture to the man toward whom he had such conflicting feelings, decided to write a tribute to FDR—in effect an obituary—while the president was still able to read it.”
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Having subjected Roosevelt to scathing critical treatment throughout the 1930s, Lippmann graciously observed that his performance during the Second World War had been exemplary. In this respect, the warmth of Lippmann's assessment was aided by the fact that Roosevelt's narrow conception of the national interest had come to converge so closely with his own. Painful concessions to Stalin at Yalta had proved beyond doubt that “[President Roosevelt's] estimate of the vital interests of the United States has been accurate and far-sighted. He has served these interests with audacity and patience, shrewdly and with calculation, and he has led this country out of the greatest peril in which it has ever been to the highest point of security, influence, and respect which it has ever attained.”
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It was an accurate and generous premortem eulogy. America's greatest twentieth-century president died from a cerebral hemorrhage five days later.

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Lippmann had emerged from war as the nation's most powerful journalist-analyst of foreign policy.
U.S. War Aims
had failed to hit its intended target, but his “Today & Tomorrow” column went from strength to strength in terms of its national and international readership. Losing a president devoted to a friendly relationship with the Soviet Union, however, was a major blow to Lippmann's persuasive aspirations regarding the postwar world. President Harry Truman's blunt, straight-talking style and provincial roots concerned Lippmann. Yet there were other political problems that commanded Lippmann's attention. Foremost was the imperative that the Republican Party be prevented from turning lethal fire on FDR's legacy—in the same way as Woodrow Wilson's diplomatic goals were crushed after the First World War.

Senator Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan was the likeliest candidate to emulate Henry Cabot Lodge's spoiling role in 1919. Participation in the Nye Committee in the 1930s had convinced Vandenberg that participation in the First World War had been a colossal error of judgment. Vandenberg argued that the Neutrality Acts did not go nearly far enough and that Roosevelt had been misguided in condemning Japanese aggression toward China. He was equally adamant that the rise of Hitler did not threaten America's vital interests. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor gave him little option but to abandon isolationism, but it was a reluctant recantation. As war commenced, Vandenberg offered a despairing appraisal: “We have tossed Washington's Farewell Address into the discard. We have thrown ourselves squarely into the power politics and the power wars of Europe, Asia, and Africa. We have taken the first step upon a course from which we can never hereafter retreat.”
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Lippmann was determined to keep him to his elegiac word.

Vandenberg was unenthused at the prospect of the United States assuming a central and proactive world role, but he possessed thinly disguised presidential ambitions, which Lippmann adeptly manipulated. Lippmann advised Vandenberg that running for the presidency in 1948 required a conversion to a responsible internationalism. The United States was the world's most powerful nation by a vast margin—controlling approximately 50 percent of all world trade—and this came with grave responsibilities in respect to maintaining benign international conditions to sustain this dominance. Lippmann and James Reston of
The New York Times
collaborated in drafting a major speech that Vandenberg delivered to the Senate on January 19, 1945. In an address that bore Lippmann's distinctive authorial mark, Vandenberg declared, “I do not believe that any nation hereafter can immunize itself by its own exclusive action. Since Pearl Harbor, World War II has put the gory science of mass murder into new and sinister perspective. Our oceans have ceased to be moats which automatically protect our ramparts.”
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His congressional colleagues were stunned at this volte-face. For their part, Reston and Lippmann complimented Vandenberg (and their own phrasemaking) in their respective columns the following day. Lippmann later spotted Vandenberg at a diplomatic reception, striding from one admirer to the next “just like a pouter pigeon all blown up with delight at his new role in the world.” A keen student of psychology and a seasoned observer of politicians, Lippmann knew exactly how to deal with this “vain and pompous and really quite insincere man.”
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President Truman would prove less susceptible to Lippmann's bag of persuasive tricks. He never invited Lippmann to the White House, and their correspondence was limited to a few stiffly formal notes. Truman's first order of business was to preside over the creation of the United Nations at the San Francisco Conference that commenced on April 25, 1945. Addressing the fifty national delegations whose job was to revise the Dumbarton Oaks agreements and devise a foundational Charter, Truman remarked that the moment had come to give “reality to the ideal of that great statesman of a generation ago—Woodrow Wilson.”
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Such words were never likely to rouse Lippmann's enthusiasm—or indeed those of a continental Americanist like Charles Beard. When the United Nations Charter was signed on June 26, Beard joined realist skeptics in rubbishing the UN's decision-making procedures. “It gives Russia, Britain, and the United States a veto on everything they do not like,” Beard complained. “How people with any knowledge and intelligence can be taken in by it passes my understanding.”
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Predictably, Lippmann took the opposite tack, contending that the Charter foolishly empowered smaller nations and failed to appreciate the centrality of great power relationships and systems of “orbits” that better reflected reality. The negotiations also brought sharp disagreements with the Soviet Union into the open.