Truman
Jenkins, Roy
BOOK...
...Sometimes, the tainment remains...
...Has it come up with anything better...
...Where the Communists struck, we would resist—no less, but also no more...
...America would not be willing to run "all over the earth to put out fires started by a gang of arsonists who are declared in advance to be immune...
...Oblivious to the the commander on the spot, urged...
...Truman supplied them by air...
...Jenkins is nearly as hard on Douglas MacArthur...
...As George Kennan put it, "the institutions of the police state" would "end up by boring everybody, including those who practice them...
...Equally despicably, they condemned the Anglo-French attack on the Suez Canal, the last imperial gesture of our two oldest and strongest allies...
...For younger jour-own...
...Contain- the best of a bad situation...
...2) the Marshall Plan...
...It spirit of the season, Wick showed him could, at greater risk, have threatened the door...
...John Roche told me of being in Washington the week after the Hungarian revolution, urging that something be done...
...B. EERDMANS PUBLISHING CO...
...It was also meliorist...
...the press dubbed the fourth point, simply, Point Four...
...The conservative political movement, what there was of it, had no alternative policy...
...He married his Sunday school sweetheart...
...He proposed, in containment's place, an aggressive, forward strategy: skeptical of foreign aid and the U.N., except as they were explicitly anti-Communist...
...Republicans liked to blame Truman and Acheson for "losing" China...
...How well did they actually do...
...For example, he notes the importance of proper dress for television appearances (blue shirts, not stripes for men, no glittery jewelry or large earrings for women), of looking a questioner in the eye when answering, of sitting up straight and not gesticulating or smiling nervously, and of having a single, simple message that 41...
...Before turning to the woes of Europe, Marshall advised Truman that the situation in China was not salvageable...
...The policy was soon put to test...
...Washington, D.0 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1986heard about) some poor soul who has been put through the treatment, usually coming out much the worse for the experience...
...Truman stood out in some respects...
...Truman, he writes, was "the most devoted husband in American presidential history...
...Then, an embarrassing front--Dirks: a backward, decadent, declining page news story or prime-time televipower, fated to repose on history's sion report, leading to an invasion by dustheap...
...said Secretary of State John Quincy However, scandal-mongering seems to Adams, was the friend of liberty have grown more widespread and con-everywhere, the guarantor only of its sequential of late...
...But business does not know (or has not the deal has gone around the table a few times since then...
...long time (much longer than George To be sure, trial-by-press is nothing Kennan expected), and a lot of money...
...MacArthur's military fumbles in Korea, before and after Inchon, receive loving attention...
...The critics—preeminently James Burnham—found all this psychologically unreal...
...This was more cogent than anythingSenator McCarthy or Colonel McCormick had to offer...
...It's going to take a damage is irreparable...
...His wit and outspoken style are displayed at their peak in this collection of vintage Muggeridge, which offers a panoramic view of the issues of the twentieth century Paper, $7.95 At your bookstore, or writs 81 WM...
...The CIA toyed with a plan to fly Eisenhower to Budapest...
...Truman is Jenkins's homage to the creator of the foreign policy to which he remains loyal, and against which his former party rebelled...
...But Jenkins's basic point—so basic that he doesn't bother to state it—is true...
...The minorities and pressures Truman had in mind were, of course, Communist...
...This was nota strategy...
...40 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1986 a book that may steady the nerves...
...Containment was static...
...tle more for Lech Walesa than Johnson Rather, he claimed to have information did for Dubcek—or Eisenhower for that Wick had been secretly tape re-Nagy...
...There was, on the intellectual level, a coherent right-wing critique of containment, based on an analysis of its flaws and contradictions...
...Truman, in a (very Midwestern) letter to his daughter, called them "the American Crackpots Association . . . Jos[eph] Davies, Henry Wallace, Claude Pepper and the actors and artists in immoral Greenwich Village...
...Army reunion companionship," says Jenkins, "was exactly to his taste...
...It is impossible to say, so many years after the fact, whether the sup-port could have been catalyzed...
...The policy had some notable successes...
...If we're steadier Leslie Lenkowsky is president of the In-than he and his successors were, his stitute for Educational Affairs in strategy may serve...
...Neither of the two parties, and virtually none of the nation's opinion-makers, were interested in such stuff...
...The American Spectator recently ran a fine, rumbustious polemic in liberal anti-Communism's defense by Alonzo Hamby.' A few years earlier, the late Joseph Bishop covered the domestic flank in a review of a biography of Joe McCarthy...
...Jenkins gives them passing notice...
...former Brain Truster Rex Tugwell actually chaired the Progressive party's Philadelphia convention...
...haberdashery he ran failed in the post-war contraction, he turned to politics, rising, by the time he was fifty, to the august post of County Judge...
...The Wick and eventually cost me—I was option is no longer realistic, at least as then his deputy—my job...
...This is a posture enforced by the cording telephone conversations and straitjacket of nuclear weapons...
...or Dean Acheson's Present at the Creation...
...leave the world to us pros...
...Hence, the trepidation with which all but the most thick-skinned greet that first call...
...America remains in the U.N., though at a much lower emotional temperature...
...Readers interested in specific aspects of Truman's life and career—in his character, say, or in postwar diplomatic history—will be better off consulting the originals: Dear Bess, Robert Ferrell's collection of Truman's letters to his wife...
...only—to borrow Lionel Trilling's phrase—a series of irritable mental gestures...
...Before it openly communized itself, the Progressive schism threatened to peel off a large chunk of old New Deal...
...But for the most part, he fit in, as snugly as a key in a lock...
...The base of redoubtable New York Times colum-Soviet Communism—one half of William Sartre, who had not come Eurasia—is sacrosanct...
...The U.N...
...more important, he declared that "it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples" against "armed minorities" or "outside pressure...
...Not only did he `not look at another woman': he was deeply embarrassed if they looked at him, which they mostly did not...
...Finally, the frantic, uphill efforts vatives, unlike their liberal forbears, to prevent harm to one's career, corn-entertain no illusions about sudden pany, or reputation, or at least to make Communist changes of heart...
...Liberal anti-Communism had its critics, even at the creation...
...The "muckrakers" knew some-It will also take prudence...
...They drew the line instead four thousand miles away in Indochina...
...Sometimes it muttered darkly about England (Thomas Dewey, wrote the Chicago Tribune, had gone "to Downing Street by way of Wall Street...
...He briefly considered joining the Ku Klux Klan, but drew back because many of the soldiers in the artillery battery he had commanded in the First World War were Catholics...
...Turning from abstraction to the Administration's actions, one can discern a policy that Twelve issues of The American Spectator for only $14, if you are a student, or a member of the military...
...The McCarthyite agitation was wholly concerned with personnel...
...An 'See "Containment's Comeback," TAS, March 1986, and Mr...
...After the Communist coup in Czechoslovakia, and the defenestration of Masaryk, NATO erected military props as well...
...For a public figure, success increasingly means not so much achieving fame as avoiding being defamed...
...Joe McCarthy is, of course, the Great Satan, who "sullied America" and "ran amok...
...Jenkins retells the familiar tale...
...As a result, the following six war over Hungary...
...The Mar-shall Plan was self-liquidating, but the other three points remained pillars of American foreign policy until the mid-sixties...
...In meetings in his office, supposedly in 1948, America had, in theory, the violation of government regulations, power to relieve West Berlin with an ar- and wanted to know what Wick had to mored column (as General Lucius Clay, say in his defense...
...willing, not only to block Communist thrusts, but to foment and support rebellions in already Communist territory—Eastern Europe, and even vulnerable parts of the Soviet Union itself (such as the Ukraine...
...Jenkins, oddly, says Wallace's Soviet policy was only "probably" mistaken...
...Elizabeth Longford, from the Foreword Malcolm Muggeridge, like Dr...
...Truman's 1949 inaugural outlined four points: 1) support of the United Nations...
...It will bring Malcolm vividly before those who have heard him speak and who want to cheer and fortify themselves by reading him at will...
...This was the man who, according to Winston Churchill, "more than any other . . . saved Western civilization...
...For those who are particularly anxious about being the object of such attention, Peter Hannaford has written "This collection...
...Communists have been in and out of power in San Marino...
...But the two most derelict episodes in postwar American diplomacy occurred under Eisenhower and Dulles...
...Third World aid continues out of inertia...
...What comes across best are the details of Truman's background and milieu, the whiffs of the Midwest...
...Johnson — who is celebrated in one of the essays in this book — has always sought the widest and deepest experience that life offers...
...Soviet power...
...Ten years ago, Eurocommunism fizzled...
...Intellectual speculation and popular impulse perished in a political void...
...GRAND RAPIDS, MICHIGAN 49505 Some of Hannaford's advice is already part of the folk wisdom of the media age...
...Truman neither breaks ground, nor crackles with insights...
...There was also thunder on the right, which Jenkins deals with less charitably...
...Dulles," he remembered with disgust, "was under the bed...
...BOOK REVIEWS...
...The Reagan Administration 1 was the day after Christmas, shows a cautious willingness—in 1983, and in the office of the Director Grenada, Nicaragua, Angola, and of the United States Information Afghanistan—to roll back the edges of Agency, Charles Z. Wick, all was astir...
...TALKING BACK TO THE MEDIA Peter Hannaford/Facts on File Publications/$17.95 Leslie Lenkowsky both resembles, and diverges from, Truman's...
...The world has changed since the nalists, it is possibly the quickest route 1820s, and hence the application of to a successful career and for older Adams's principle, but not the princi- ones, the easiest way to stay on top...
...The conservative movement has come a long way in thirty years...
...and from containment sprang the rest of the fourpoints...
...ple itself...
...Stylistically, biographies of recent American politicians are pretty sad stuff, ranging from the okay (Lou Cannon's Reagan) down to the barbarous—I have an author in mind, but since I'm sure there are others even more illiterate, it would be unfair to single him out...
...Truman belonged to the Kansas City Auto-mobile Club, the National Trails Association, and the Masons...
...The ocean and Arlington filled with boat people and Vietnamese restaurants...
...If Britain and France have behaved, in latter days, like querulous wimps, and if the Middle East seems to be a problem we wish we were rid of, we have only ourselves to thank...
...His family was gentry—certainly upper middle class," in Margaret's view...
...Our firmness would make the Communists change course—not in the dim, distant future, but in a matter of years...
...other reporters, cameramen, and perSo we are back with containment...
...Jenkins is a cut above the common run...
...If Reply Card is missing please call 1-800-341-1522 to place your order...
...The most threatening, within the Democratic party, was the left...
...Students at Notre Dame volunteered to fight for the Hungarians, if Washington would send them...
...First comes the untrout fishery, told me two years ago wonted inquiry from a renowned news-in Dallas that our policy must aim man, followed by an insistent demand to contain the Soviets so that they for an explanation of some alleged would go the way of the Ottoman misdeed...
...In the seventies, Americans began to see the U.N...
...and 4) aid to the Third World (the phrase "Third World" was then unknown...
...Six years later, it did months brought enormous obloquy on threaten war over the missile crisis...
...was to be the means of managing the disputes of free and unfree nations, while Point Four was the means of raising the submerged portions of the free world to economic health...
...we did just fine...
...But, here and there, we have come to suspect that it often cripples the countries to whom we give it, without guaranteeing their political loyalty...
...nowhere else in Western Europe...
...one escape unscathed from this by now James Burnham's problem with con- well-established ritual...
...a place where deracinated Westerners invite the abuse of Communists, terrorists, and (when Idi Amin used to attend) the occasional cannibal...
...It is a competent digest of secondary sources...
...Hamby's exchange with Senator Malcolm Wallop in the June Correspondence...
...Even the brashest conser- even the most dauntless politicians, vatives today acknowledge this: Newt businessmen, and other people in the Gingrich, who spawns new ideas like a public eye dread...
...There were those, in and out of government, who longed for madder music...
...Jenkins is more or less one...
...Rarely does ment, in other words, for real...
...Truman asked Congress in March for $400 million in aid to Greece and Turkey...
...Whenever the political right did look beyond the three-mile limit, its proposals were inchoate and contradictory...
...Nowadays, hardly anyone at America could have played its hand the higher reaches of government or differently than Truman played it...
...Sometimes it wanted the boys home from Europe...
...How did he manage it...
...But postwar Britain lacked the will and the means to continue...
...implicit message, at least of the arguments addressed to readers of The American Spectator, is that you right-wingers can go back to Burke or Bastiat, or whatever it is that amuses you...
...The Brits then set about sup-pressing rebellious Greek Communists with vigor...
...in its true colors...
...Reagan did lit- to bring tidings of comfort and joy...
...haps even a legislative committee or With this difference—that conser- two...
...When the Richard Brookhiser, managing editor of National Review, is the author of The Outside Story (Doubleday...
...Among his holiday visitors was the Only the edges, though...
...Apart from specific defeats, Points One and Four have taken a beating...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1986 39 S`10e Student/Military Offer **************************************************1******************* 0 was...
...But in 1948, as the Progressive party presidential candidate, he was the stooge of the American Communist party, and thus, of Stalin...
...In February 1947—one day after Clement Attlee gave Parliament the timetable for withdrawal from India—Ernest Bevin informed Washington that Britain could not shore up Greece for more than a month...
...then abandoned it when their children bitched about the draft...
...The Marshall Plan offered economic props to Europe...
...Jenkins rises above the ho-hum because of his style...
...A public relations executive, long associated with Ronald Reagan, Hannaford offers a heartening message to those who must deal with the unwelcome scrutiny of the media: With proper preparation, technique, and resolve, one can not only talk back but also be heard...
...Turkey and Greece (Papandreou aside) remain allies of the West...
...he repented of the political course he took, and ended his days as a subscriber to National Review...
...more recently, the campaign against the Pershings and the cruises failed...
...255 JEFFERSON AVE...
...far as the Soviets' Eurorussian empire This is the sort of encounter that is concerned...
...If Israel invades Lebanon, or Politicians (and their aides) have apartheid crumbles, these are matters learned to use it to their advantage, of interest to America: they do not re- as have self-styled "public interest" quire our on-the-spot stewardship...
...Henry Wallace was not a man of ill-will...
...Truman was a heavy reader, and a lonely one: he fell into a lifelong habit of mispronouncing words he knew only from the page...
...is a boon to us all...
...For all their talk of roll-back, they sat back, immobile, when Hungary rose in revolt...
...Sometimes it wanted to save China...
...But containment's failures have also been spectacular...
...Eds...
...All in vain...
...This structure of ideas, which might be called liberal anti-Communism, still has its advocates...
...In the summer of 1948, the Soviets blockaded the western sectors of Berlin...
...America, under the aegis of the U.N., hit back (losing more lives than it had in World War I...
...Jenkins never mentions MacArthur's role in the reconstruction of Japan, an achievement that equaled Adenauer's...
...whenever they were separated, he wrote her daily...
...From the point of view of democratic politics, however, it had a fatal flaw: It had no political support, and no prospect of getting any...
...There has been a good deal of tussling over the Reagan Doctrine recently—what it means, whether it exists, whose ox gets gored...
...Vernon Walters, and Jeane Kirkpatrick before him, knew that most of their colleagues at Turtle Bay were neutral or hostile, and that it was necessary to bend ears and twist 'T arms...
...Third World aid continues in pretty much the same spirit (though there has been a disposition, thanks to the pressure of domestic groups, to ease up on international birth control pro-grams...
...So does South Korea...
...TRUMAN Roy Jenkins/Harper & Row/$17.95 Richard Brookhiser Roy Jenkins was for many years a stalwart of the British Labour party, until its increasing radicalism, primarily on foreign policy, led him and other disenchanted Labourites to form the Social Democratic party...
...America, thing about investigative reporting too...
...Drawing on examples from both business and politics, he provides a series of recommendations that anyone who is in public life today should heed—and I wish I had...
...By way of comparison, Jenkins hides Acheson's boo-boo, in omitting South Korea from a speech defining the perimeters of American interest six months before the Communist attack, in a footnote...
...I can still remember having to read, in eighth grade, a social studies textbook (introduction by Hubert Humphrey) about what a wonderful thing the U.N...
...The Truman Doctrine was thus the seed of containment...
...Two years later, the Communists of North Korea swept into the South...
...When the Democrats, including some of the original containers, came back to power in 1961, they let Cuba go down the chute...
...In 1944, Churchill had asked Stalin, in ex-change for British acquiescence in his control of Eastern Europe, to lay off Greece...
...In the end, Burnham predicted, the containers would be the ones to change course...
...groups...
...3) containment...
Vol. 19 • October 1986 • No. 10
