Truman Foreign Policy: A Traditionalist View
Ferrell, Robert H.
Robert H. Ferrell Truman Foreign Policy: A Traditionalist View This is the conclusion of an article examining the Cold War revisionists and Truman foreign policy. The first part appeared in our...
...20 (1967-1968), 279-300...
...The cold war critics have averred, as mentioned, that the invitation Marshall extended to the Soviets was meant to be a ploy, and Charles E. Bohlen in recent lectures has confessed that both he and Kennan gave Marshall this advice...
...15-85...
...65 Leaving this pipe dream to the author or authors of a later edition of Richard S. Kirkendall's The Truman Period as a Research Field, it is more gratifying to make a second observation about cold war revisionism, namely, that the revisionists have not proved a single one of their points, no great achievement for a group of scholars who now have been working for several years and have not been bashful about revealing their 2onclusions...
...The first of the concerns of the revisionists that came to decision in 1946 was an American offer to limit atomic weapons, which to the revisionists has appeared not altogether sincere...
...The oratorical aspect of the first weeks of 1946 is undeniable...
...This document, the first full survey of national security, had asked for a tripling of the national defense budget or close to that...
...Molotov in his peculiar way - the Russian possessed a sardonic sense of humor, and liked the droll and sometimes the slightly macabre - asked Byrnes, rather out of the blue, if the Secretary had an atomic bomb in his side pocket...
...The German Problem, 1945-1950," World Politics, vol...
...Stalin on February 9 spoke of the antagonisms of communism and modern monopoly capitalism, George F. Kennan's 8,000-word cable from Moscow arrived in the State Department analyzing the historic and ideological and psychological roots of Russian intransigence, Churchill in March spoke at Fulton, Missouri, and Stalin riposted with a newspaper interview comparing Churchill and Hitler...
...Present at the Creation: My Yean in the State Department (New York, 1969), pp...
...The revisionists, leaning heavily on a thirty-five-page account by Barnet, relate that at no time during the American decision to create the Truman Doctrine did the Department of State try to analyze the guerrilla situation in Greece to see if intervention really was necessary.56 To take the latter point first, until 1972 the revisionists did not know what the Department of State knew in 1947, because the American documents had not yet been published in Foreign Relations...
...Speaking Frankly (New York, 1947), p. 302...
...Still, talk of "sharing" got into the newspapers, and there was more interest at least in a cooperative approach to the Russians on international limitation of atomic energy than the Secretary of State thought desirable...
...Intervention and Revolution, pp...
...Still, it is difficult to conclude that the Truman Administration did its worst in regard to limitation of atomic weapons...
...to force an end to the civil war, after which the Greek Stalinists gained control of the guerrillas, went over from guerrilla to set-piece battles with the revived Greek army, and lost, giving up the fight in October, 1949...
...The closest that researchers can come to evidence of hard talking at London is some casual conversation that may not have meant anything...
...Second, it is an interesting and pertinent fact that after Tito's expulsion the Greek communists split on tactics, and the Stalinist faction got control...
...Consider the attitudes of British and Continental historians, for whom history ended with Napoleon...
...If you don't cut out all this stalling and let us get down to work, I am going to pull an atomic bomb out of my hip pocket and let you have it...
...Thomas G. Peterson, "The Abortive American Loan to Russia and the Origins of the Cold War, 1943-1946," Journal of American History, vol...
...Roosevelt asked that nothing be done until he could talk to Stalin...
...the UN was not a dispose-all for American negotiators who wanted to keep the bomb...
...The Truman Doctrine, they say, was first of all unnecessary because the Administration misread the situation in Greece...
...57 But what has bothered the cold war critics more than anything else about the Truman Doctrine is that they see it as an appalling piece of cold war rhetoric...
...As for Paterson's objection to unilateral American announcement of the Marshall Plan in 1947, or if not announcement then management of the aid program only by the US government and participating nations, the possibility in other words that the Marshall Plan could have been handled by an international organization unconnected with cold war rhetoric, such as the Economic Commission for Europe, it carries a surface plausibility today when so many individuals have so little comprehension of the problems of 1947 - the weakness of international organs, the need to prevent the turning of US funds against their donor, the need to prevent funds going down the drain (with or without Russian connivance), the unwillingness of Congress and the public to give money without strings, the fact that no banker in his right mind will lend (it was of course a gift, but the analogy holds) money on a house he has not seen and without a financial statement.62 A third allegation against the Truman Administration's policies in 1947 deserves little discussion in detail, namely, that the officials of 1945-1949 helped bring on the cold war by dividing Germany, which thereby created the postwar result the Russians most feared, a rich, strong, rearmed, if somewhat fragmented German nation...
...As is now known, this was an exaggeration...
...60 As the revisionists have nitpicked the Truman Doctrine, they have likewise attempted to do a job on the Marshall Plan, and they say that it divided Europe, as Marshall expected it to do...
...Atomic Bomb...
...Syngman Rhee, the American satrap in Seoul, was in trouble with his Assembly, the members of which wanted to consider unification with the North, facing Rhee with the total loss of his position...
...America, Russia, and the Cold War, p. 30...
...The Herring article shows what a privileged position Russian lend lease enjoyed, how the Soviet-American "protocols" or treaties were never the detailed, binding instruments the United States demanded and obtained from the other allies, and that the Soviets anyway were asking, by May, for many items that were not really usable in the war against Japan.47 The episode bothered American leaders, sensitive to Russian sensitivity, and Truman's memoirs relate that Stalin at Potsdam was full of talk about the cutting off of lend lease, although the Potsdam records do not so indicate...
...In 1952 they said they would allow "elections" in East Germany so long as there was neutralization...
...Nixon this year (1972) has instructed the Department of State and other government departments to assist the scholars in the Department's Historical Office in bringing Foreign Relations rapidly up to a twenty-year line, meaning that the archives then might well be open not merely through the Truman period but into the Eisenhower period...
...Reviewed in The New York Times, Jan...
...Early in June the North Koreans pro(continued on page 31) 61.CoM War Critics, p. 132...
...President," said Smith, "you have an atomic bomb up your sleeve...
...His mind is full of his problems with the coming meeting of foreign ministers and he looks to having the presence of the bomb in his pocket, so to speak, as a great weapon to get through the thing...
...What bothers the revisionists about the issue of atomic diplomacy is that within a month Truman changed his mind about conferring initially with the Russians on atomic matters and began to talk about going directly to the United Nations...
...But then perhaps if the Americans had done everything the Russians wanted on economic issues it would have changed nothing...
...Mr...
...The truth was, they aver, and in this single observation they are probably correct, that the Greek guerrillas were not receiving help from Stalin, that the dictator later told Milovan Djilas that the guerrillas were not getting support, that instead they were receiving it from Marshal Tito's Yugoslavia, and that it was only a year or so after the American intervention in the Greek civil war that Tito for his own good reason, his split with the Russians, closed his country's border with Greece and began49...
...There was indeed a threat to Turkey, but the United States government in 1945 and 1946 had said little about it publicly...
...The Rivals...
...Meanwhile the United States was awaiting the loss of Formosa to the Red Chinese...
...The New York Times, March 12,1947...
...The epoch of isolation and occasional intervention is ended...
...Here one has to remark that the accords were remarkably loose, the figure of $20,000,000,000 in German reparations with half to go to Russia being only tentative...
...And it is necessary to add that while Byrnes was in London the Truman Administration, contrary to his desire, was considering a proposal by Stimson to open conversations with the 42...
...If it failed, the failure is no proof that the Administration planned it that way - so as to be able to continue to threaten the Soviets with atomic bombs...
...In the next few years both doubters and believers will have an opportunity to see for themselves...
...Acheson knew what might happen, but to get the Administration's measures through Congress and to win the approbation of the public he willingly gave the American people injections of anticommunism.59 The allegation is so large that it is difficult to put down...
...Four nights later Byrnes was making a lyrical speech about harmony and cooperation, perhaps a bit on the Irish side, and Molotov paid him a tribute by saying that he really was gifted and, in addition, Byrnes had an atomic bomb.43 If the above badinage, not in the best of taste considering that it occurred only a few weeks after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, amounted to atomic diplomacy it was deft to the point of being difficult to recognize...
...66 In final conclusion, becoming somewhat philosophical, it is worth saying that whatever the occasional results, whether the past has been used or not, it is a good thing that American historians have taken so much interest in recent American foreign policy...
...54.Foreign Relations of the United States: 1946, VII (Washington, 1969), 348-349...
...and then in the 1960s the rhetoric took us into Vietnam...
...None of that nonsense for them...
...The latter said nothing about a loan during the Yalta Conference, nor did the dictator mention the loan proposal during the talks with Hopkins in Moscow in May, 1945, nor during the Potsdam Conference...
...If in subsequent months and years there was a lot of talk about anticommunism, the talk had something to do with such non-Truman occurrences as the collapse of China, the invasion of Korea, Whittaker Chambers' production of the pumpkin papers, the confession of Klaus Fuchs, Senator McCarthy's rare gifts for invention and invective...
...One really must raise several doubts, and there is no proof on the other side...
...Revisionist critics of American foreign policy during the cold war era have found three problems or issues or aspects of policy that came to decision in the year 1946 which bother them in varying degree...
...21, 1972 59...
...The revisionists have also repeated with approval the judgment of Byrnes' Speaking Frankly, that "We did not have to decide that the Turkish Government and the Greek monarchy were outstanding examples of free and democratic governments...
...According to Schlesinger, it "is not clear . . . that satisfying Moscow on any of these financial scores would have made much essential difference...
...Suffice to say that it shows more faith in the efficacy of a single speech than one ordinarily would expect...
...On two occasions, early in 1947 and then much later, in 1952, the Soviets gave some sign of willingness to unify Germany...
...John Gimbel, "Cold War: German Front...
...Gardner, looking for some earlier evidence of American stupidity in Germany, claims that the creation of Bizonia occurred in part because General Clay was worried stiff about socialism...
...Once more they fail to show the enormous need for a program, the hectic pressure of events, the unattractive prospect of aiding Russia when the Soviets were opposing American policy in Europe, and they do not stress the program's economic success...
...As with many other conflicts with the Soviets, the United States hoped it could be quietly resolved...
...The revisionists think the United States should have taken a bite out of these apples, and their opponents will agree with Acheson...
...Early in 1946, well before Baruch made his speech to the UN General Assembly, and before the Soviet loan proposal and reparations had reached their dead ends, everything began to harden into what the revisionists like to describe as cold war rhetoric...
...the U.S...
...Most of all, the Americans had to establish themselves on the mainland before the white man was driven out of Asia and its islands forever...
...Was he too shy?48 Not until early 1946 was anything done about a loan, at which point the proposal of Molotov for $6,000,000,000 was cut to $2,000,000,000 and conditions put on it which the Russians refused...
...After all, was the factionalism of the Greek communists - their willingness to defy Stalin and take aid from Tito - very important...
...Much later, in the 1950s and early 1960s, Khrushchev had been adept at scaring other nations, and had some reason to complain of similar ungentle-manly - niikulturni - behavior by American leaders...
...Arthur Vandenberg is alleged to have said to Truman, a few days before the President gave the Truman Doctrine address of March 12, that it was necessary to scare hell out of the country...
...A recently issued volume of Foreign Relations contains an editorial note to the effect that records in the State Department and in the Department of Defense contain absolutely no sign of an ultimatum, and that several former high officers of State who were queried about this issue had no memory of an ultimatum.54 The State Department's records are now open to researchers, who can check the Department's veracity on this interesting point, and perhaps uncover some real skulduggery in regard to the Iranian crisis, maybe some Anglo-American cooperation concerning the Churchillian half of "the appropriate declarations of Cold War...
...blackmail is always received...
...Foreign and Military Policies/' in The Truman Doctrine as a Research Period (Columbia, Mo., 1967), pp...
...It was clear that in any fair election East Germany would vote for the West...
...The Failure of a Policy Rooted in Fear...
...which says that whatever the faction on top in earlier years one could hardly have depended on its staying on top...
...The President came to see that he would have an enormously difficult time getting congressional and popular and perhaps even London-Ottawa approval for any sort of atomic pourparlers with the Russians.44 The revisionists believe that the wartime effort to keep a secret from the Russians was itself almost enough to ensure the postwar breakup of the grand alliance, and that only an immediate postwar offer to discuss the problem a deux could have atoned for it, whatever the domestic political results, and that when in addition to the wartime mistake and the immediate postwar refusal to discuss problems of limitation with the Soviets there followed an American plan, the Baruch Plan, which was so full of American safeguards that it was impossible for the Russians to accept, the entire chapter of policy was impossible to view with any other feeling than that, as the Russians put it, the Americans were scheming to maintain their atomic monopoly...
...They wanted a no-strings loan, which made no sense to Americans at the time...
...For American scholars in recent years it has been saddening to see the nation get into trouble in Vietnam, but most of them have continued to believe that by and large the national record of foreign policy has been a good one, and at no time more so than during the Truman Administration...
...Book-length manuscript on this origi s of the cold war by Liste Rase, to be published in 1973 by Charles Scribne.'s Sons...
...66...
...the Democrats had to prove that they could get tough with the Communists...
...Could this have been so...
...New York Times, Jan...
...To begin with, it is of course certain that the revisionists have not reached the end of their investigations...
...Gim-bel says this theory is a big piece of imagination.64 5 In conclusion, what is there to be said about cold war revisionists and revisionism...
...This is a remarkable accusation, and it has been ventilated not merely in the random assertions of revisionists books and articles but in two recent volumes devoted to the point, one of which, by Richard M. Freeland, suggested to its New York Times reviewer, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, the simile of an airplane ride, whereby foreign policy looks different from the air (where Freeland is, with his documents, quotations, and theories) than from the ground (where Lehmann-Haupt himself could remember the occasions and purposes of 1947).58 It should be impossible to believe that Harry S. Truman was the inventor or, if not that, the chief distributor of anti-communism, although it is true that anyone can believe anything he wants, like the White Queen in Alice in Wonderland who made it her business to believe three impossible things every morning before breakfast, Ronald Steel believes that Dean Acheson was the real villain in the anticommunization of his fellow citizens...
...When in subsequent months the British discovered that their large dollar loan of 1946 was going in fair part to feed, as Chancellor of the Exchequer Hugh Dalton put it, "these bloody Germans," when the Americans discovered that the Germans in the US occupation zone were likewise on the American taxpayer's back - when it became evident in 1946 that JCS 1067 would insure that the Germans and maybe the rest of the Continent would be on welfare for years, nothing remained but to halt reparations.51 The Baruch Plan, the failure of the United States to improve relations with the USSR through economic means - a third concern of the revisionists in re-examining American diplomacy in 1946 has seemed to be that the Truman Administration suddenly found itself in the midst of public assertions by Churchill and Stalin early in the year (in February and March 1946, La Feber writes, "Stalin and Churchill issued the appropriate declarations of Cold War")" and in a spirit of simultaneous cooperation raised up a crisis over Russian presence in Iran, taking the issue to the United Nations and forcing the Russians out...
...The prime responsibility for the present state of affairs in Germany, as Klaus Epstein wrote some years ago, must rest with the late Adolf Hitler...
...Molotov in January, 1945, had mentioned a large postwar credit, $6,000,000,000, and said the Soviets would be willing to use the money to buy American goods because this would help prevent a postwar depression in the United States...
...In the months immediately after Hiroshima and Nagasaki did they not in fact try to use the atomic monopoly to persuade the Russians to be more reasonable...
...The effort to limit atomic weapons was an unprecedented proposition...
...They have enjoyed showing how the regime in Ankara also did not exactly represent the apotheosis of democracy, likewise a commonplace of the time...
...Clay was of course concerned about communism born of desperation...
...At a cocktail party Molotov, who according to Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin was drinking "rather much, even for him," raised his glass and said: "Here's to the Atom Bomb," and added, "We've got it...
...The first part appeared in our April issue...
...The Germans because of a long anti-Russian heritage, anticommunism, the appalling behavior of the occupying Red Army, the expulsion of twelve million East Germans, and impossible reparations - the Germans hated the Russians...
...The West turned down these opportunities because, as Acheson described the offer of 1952, the timing was so suspicious that it looked like a golden apple of discord tossed over the iron curtain...
...Russian encouragement of Azerbaijani separatism followed a pattern in Eastern Europe where the Red Army had dominated politics in the areas it occupied...
...It does not follow, as the University of Connecticut critic, Paterson, has written, that "In short, the Marshall Plan was a weapon against Russia rather than 56...
...forcing the Turks to maintain an army that the impoverished country could not afford...
...Steel entitles his chapter on Acheson, a reprinted review of Present at the Creation...
...Yes," was the reply, "but I am not sure it can ever be used...
...Chiang could not hold on, nor could Rhee, without an American commitment...
...Like the contentions discussed in preceding pages these also are worth careful notice in what by this juncture may be beginning to appear as an effort to knock down every theory that the revisionists have put up...
...It was understandable that the revisionists would look back into the American atomic past and ask how the United States government had behaved during the era when it was Mr...
...What happened, according to Acheson, was that the cabinet talk had been preceded by very little thought or preparation, and the press leak about the discussion threw Congress into an uproar and brought a proposal from Prime Minister Clement Attlee for a joint British-Canadian-American conference...
...Whereupon Molotov laughed, as did the interpreter...
...56 (1969-1970), 93-114...
...Offhand it did seem unlikely that so large and smart an outfit as the State Department would have failed to do its homework on the guerrilla problem, although the Department could not have read about Stalin's conversation with Djilas which took place in 1948 and was not published until 1962...
...The address was not all that scary, though the Administration sought to put the Greek-Turkish issue into the large framework it deserved...
...The result is beyond question, but no good historian should work back from the result to the cause unless he wants to go all the way, which the revisionists do not, for that would mess up their usable past...
...They have been able in fair part to present their interpretations because the American archives have not been open, but those archives presumably are now going to open soon...
...The needs were met on June 25, 1950...
...45 In seeking to find some way of dealing with the Russians the Administration, according to the revisionists, tried economic pressure, and botched the job...
...50 The revisionists also have cited the failure of the western allies to live up to the reparations agreements at Yalta and Potsdam as evidence of callousness toward Russian wartime suffering and postwar needs...
...No anticom-munistic horn of Roland sounds forth from revisionist books to echo through the valleys and across the mountains of civilization...
...the Berlin blockade ensured the carrying out of the London Recommendations of June, 1948, for a West German government...
...As another New York Times reviewer, William V. Shannon, has put it, "Truman was more often the victim than the progenitor of that time of troubles...
...Memories of the Vandenberg remark differ, and he may not have said just that...
...Stimson was accustomed to dictating into a machine some six, eight, even ten or twelve doublespaced pages of diary every morning while shaving, and the words poured forth without any large thought, and as shortly after the end of the Second World War his detailed diary would become a quarry for investigators of the Pearl Harbor disaster, so it is now becoming a place to find all sorts of things about the cold war...
...elusion than the following: "The evidence suggests (sic) that America's refusal to aid Russia through a loan similar to that granted to the British in early 1946, perhaps (sic) contributed (sic) to a continuation of a low standard of living for the Russian people with detrimental international effects (sic), to a less conciliatory and harsher Russian policy toward Germany and Eastern Europe, and to unsettled and inimical postwar Soviet-American relations...
...Diary of Chancellor of the Exchequer Hugh Dalton, quoted in Herbert Feis, From Trust to Terror, p. 98...
...FERRELL (continued from page 13) posed "elections," but Rhee refused to go along...
...Dolton diary quoted in George C. Marshall, p. 117...
...The choice of Baruch as the chief American negotiator may have been unwise, but the time put into the business of drawing up the Acheson-Lilienthal Report and then the Baruch Plan was so large as to suggest a serious American effort...
...If the American handling of lend lease in May, 1945, was no attempt at economic pressure, and perhaps the revisionists now would admit as much, there remains the business of the Russian loan and of American treatment of German reparations...
...195ff...
...In the year 1947, which Theodore H. White in Fire in the Ashes has described as the Year of Divergence, American foreign policy took an avowed turn against Soviet foreign policy that could either be accounted the beginning of the cold war or, as The New York Times put the situation in terms of US foreign relations since 1775, the end of an epoch of isolation and occasional intervention and the beginning of an epoch of American responsibility...
...60...
...Historians will have much to do, for in regard to the Truman Administration the judgment of David S. McLel-lan and John W. Reuss of 1966 still stands, that studies are needed for almost all of the administration's most basic policies and problems - Truman Doctrine, Marshall Plan, Berlin blockade, NATO, Korean War...
...So historic a situation has not escaped the cold war revisionists, and they have labored mightily to show how the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, and the decision to give the Western Germans independence were not the great signal chapters marking the beginning of a new epoch of American responsibility but only more evidences of the Truman Administration's depravity and stupidity...
...There is evidence that the President himself had little faith in the bomb as a diplomatic or even military weapon...
...First, no one in 1947 anticipated Tito's expulsion from the Cominform in 1948...
...They are turning to issues and problems of the Truman Administration in the Far East, and Stephen Ambrose already feels sure that in the spring of 1950 the Administration was in a peculiar crisis...
...As for the allegiance of the Greek communists, there seems little reason to dispute Barnet's analysis except its conclusions...
...p. 119...
...It is possible that, as Schlesinger has related, the Russians misinterpreted the abrupt cancellation of lend lease on May 12, 1945, as blackmail, the American handling of the USSR's request for a large postwar loan as deliberate sabotage, and the ending of reparations from the western zones of Germany as pro-Germanism...
...Three arguments say it was not...
...The revisionists hear only a few tumbles backstage as they quietly analyze the scene in Washington and Western Europe that spring of 1947, and though they concede some nobility to the Marshall Plan they on balance find American policy of that time to have been no great, successful rescue operation but a deplorable, uncalled-for movement into cold war confrontation...
...Gardner, who has an unerring eye for a good quotation, has noted the remark of a witness at one of the congressional hearings in 1947 that when "the new dish was being prepared for American consumption, Turkey was slipped into the oven with Greece because that seemed to be the surest way to cook a tough bird...
...The conclusion is almost inescapable that the Soviets despite their enormous losses and needs did not want the loan, except under impossibly lenient conditions...
...Peterson suggested use of ECE in his "The Quest for Peace and Prosperity: International Trade, Communism, and the Marshall Plan," an essay in Barton J. Bernstein, ed., Politics and Policies of tho Truman Administration (Chicago, 1970), p. 100...
...Why didn't Stalin, so fond of remarking the enormous damage the Germans had wreaked upon Russia, and the unhurt nature of the American economy, then ask the Americans for a loan...
...123-124...
...Frankly, and at risk of appearing to be a traditionalist, a defender of received truths and a victim of cold war rhetoric (after all, is there not some merit in any position...
...Some people at the time, however, thought that the Administration had gratuitously included Turkey in the Truman Doctrine...
...It is certain that the Truman Administration had no such intention before the speech, nor did it behave that way afterward...
...70-71...
...Politics and Policies of the Truman Administration, pp...
...These questions, one must say, are reasonable...
...As for any fear for the virus of socialism, an ideological concern, that surely is a dubious point...
...The revisionists are also concerned about what political scientists have described as atomic blackmail, which they properly consider indistinguishable from atomic diplomacy (everything depends on who gives and who receives...
...Whether the Americans were giving in to Churchill's anticommunism seems doubtful, and has not been proved...
...Should the United States have taken the initiative...
...By defying American desires in Eastern Europe the Russians were not exactly helping their own case...
...military buildup...
...Quoted in the Rose manuscript...
...Such revisionists as Alperovitz, Williams, and Gardner have interpreted the sudden cutting off of lend lease on May 12, 1945, as a sign of crude pressure by the Truman Administration, but a recent article by George C. Herring based on the Stettinius papers at the University of Virginia and unpublished State Department and other records proves that there was nothing but an administrative failure - the decision to cut off lend lease was an overly legal decision tanen by a few subordinate officials, it applied to all countries and not merely Russia, it was violently opposed by Harriman and Assistant Secretary of State Will Clayton and Stettinius, and new orders allowed ships at sea to turn around again and head for their foreign ports...
...I found that Byrnes was very much against any attempt to cooperate with Russia...
...The Administration had to pay attention to a very sensitive Congress and public...
...You don't know Southerners," was Jimmy's response...
...113-148...
...Lend-lease to Russia and the Origins of the Cold War, 1944-1945," Journal of American History, vol...
...whatever Stalin's desires in regard to the guerrillas' behavior, the Department of State had to proceed on the assumption that if (which it did not know, anyway) Stalin could not get to the guerrillas then he could get to Tito who could do the job...
...Origins of the Cold War," p. 45...
...the present writer may as well admit that he finds it difficult to believe any of their arguments...
...What prompted the Russians to get out is still unclear...
...46 Moreover, with exception of one admitted internal administrative confusion it is hard to see what alternative the Americans had, other than what in fact they did do...
...In the autumn of 1945 he was talking with Budget Director Harold D. Smith and, according to Smith, commented that "There are some people in the world who do not seem to understand anything except the number of divisions you have...
...Moreover, if Acheson, as Steel says, showed a contempt for the American people by giving all those anticommunism shots, could one not turn this commentary around and say that the revisionists themselves show a contempt for the American people, to think that the public was so gullible that a little campaign from official Washington could have manipulated their minds...
...Athan G. Theoharis, Seeds of Repression, Richard M. Freeland, The Truman Doctrine and the Origins of McCarthyism: Foreign Policy, Domestic Politics, and Internal Security, 1946-1948 (New York, 1971...
...The whole business of the Greek guerrillas, to whom (Greece, Tito, or Stalin) they momentarily owed allegiance, strikes one as too volatile a situation for any prudent statesman at the time to have relied on...
...The oil aspect of the Iranian crisis is difficult to measure, may not have been serious, and in any event was secondary...
...the Korean War galvanized the US government into incorporating West Germany into NATO...
...What the historian has to add is that once Byrnes got to London for the meeting that began in September and ran into early October, 1945, he does not seem to have threatened anyone...
...There is an admirable tradition among political scientists and historians in this country that the present and the near-present is too important to be left to the journalists...
...Imperialists and Other Heroes, p. 23...
...97-131...
...In view of the developing troubles with the Russians, why would the Americans want to give away the atomic bomb...
...But over the years the Russians produced a mighty propaganda about their desire to unify Germany, and many people have begun to believe it, and in this manner the West divided Germany...
...Did that, Bevin wondered, mean that the Russians wanted uranium?42 Meanwhile, on the third day of the conference, Byrnes and Molotov had indulged in some kidding which took a form that might have been diplomatic but, as most Americans would admit upon reading what Byrnes said, probably was just kidding...
...It was in March that the United States government expelled the Russians from northern Iran, in which locality the Russians among other things had been trying to get an oil concession and also were encouraging Azerbaijani separatism...
...We carry our artillery in our hip pocket...
...56 (1969-1970), 77...
...Md., pp...
...Bevin admittedly had become nervous because during one conference session Molotov had proposed that if Britain would not agree to allot a former Italian colony in Africa to Russia, the USSR would be content to have the Belgian Congo...
...The work of Alperovitz, unbelievable in itself, called attention to the possible use of atomic diplomacy later...
...When at last the Truman Administration in June, 1946, went to the United Nations with the Baruch Plan the latter was no effort to dump the issue into the hands of an international body that could do nothing...
...Truman in a press conference in 1952 told of a presidential ultimatum to the Russians, and repeated this account in his memoirs, also in a book entitled Truman Speaks published in 1960, and in a conversation with Herbert Druks in 1962...
...Gradually on the American side the economic and military reasons for unifying the western zones began to become apparent, and Bizonia was created on January 1, 1947, and everything followed therefrom, albeit with skillful Russian assistance (the murder of Jan Masaryk ensured passage of the Marshall Plan and the plan included participation by West Germany...
...Architects of Illusion, p. 224...
...The National Security Council had produced NSC 68, a document that still is classified "Secret," even if more people seem to have seen it and written about it than is easily comprehensible...
...A third estimate of cold war revisionism is that while the revisionists doubtless will busy themselves with the Far East for two or three years they are now facing extinction as a breed...
...Readers of their books and articles will have no feeling at all for the alarm, the confusion, the sinking hopes of individuals, leaders and publics alike, in Washington and in Western Europe, when the rigorous winter of 1946-1947 almost brought Europe's economies to a standstill and when the early springtime gave every evidence of what the military analyst for The New York Times, Hanson W. Baldwin, (who to the revisionists is an impossible old hawk), reported as a crisis akin to the fall of the Roman Empire...
...Truman had to have a crisis to sell the NSC 68 program of a huge U.S...
...The Greek and Turkish foreign situations were different, in that the Russians were not employing guerrillas but putting direct diplomatic pressure on Turkey to get concessions along the Straits and on the Turkish-Soviet border...
...The revisionists have aptly pointed out, maybe with some exaggeration, the undemocratic nature of the regime in Athens, a fact that was well known in Washington in 1947...
...on Foreign Relations, Documents on Germany: 1944-1970(Washington, 1971), and for the 1952 proposal especially pp...
...Lloyd C. Gardner, "America and the German 'Problem,' 1945-1949," in Barton J. Bernstein, ed...
...The Soviets certainly had overstayed their leave in Iran...
...and that even in its largess it was an American policy instead of an international policy...
...by agreement with the Americans and British they had committed themselves to depart by March 2, 1946...
...and in sum it was not a good policy...
...Could not the Baruch Plan of 1946 have been itself a ploy, for instead of making an outright effort to share the atomic secret with the Soviets the American government passed the whole issue to the United Nations and proposed an impossibly hedged program, which only affronted the Russians...
...Air Force and Navy needed a justification to retain their bases in Japan...
...An American student in London apparently was told some years ago, by an official at one of the offices set up to help visiting American scholars, that history ended in 1815, and if the student wished to know about events of recent times he perhaps could inquire at the London School of Economics where some strange people were at work...
...Adam Ulam recently advanced the piquant theory that the Russians scampered out of Iran because Churchill had just accused them of imperialism and they did not want to provide an obvious proof of his accusation.53 There is some indication that the Iranian premier of the moment was a wily old operator and held a diplomatic card or two under the table for dickering with the Soviets when his American partner was not looking...
...16,1972...
...Such a point of view would be incomprehensible in this country, and it is even becoming less accepted in England...
...Commissar of the Cold War...
...They believe that it gave an enormous push to the anticommunism of American public opinion, and that it eventually turned upon its authors when Senator Joseph R. McCarthy accused the Truman Administration of being itself soft on communism...
...It is being replaced by an epoch of American responsibility...
...63 An award for the Division of Germany, Second Class, must go to the Russians, who in their German policy found themselves with a serious problem at the end of the Second World War...
...The third point is that if it had not been for the outbreak of the Korean War, Stalin might have wiped out Tito, in which case where would have been the Titoist, national Greek communists...
...But while the diary accounting of the Byrnes conversation may be a little stark it probably is close to the gist of the conversation...
...By June, 1950, a series of desperate needs had come together...
...a magnanimous, no-strings-attached undertaking to relieve destitute Europeans...
...See also 92d Cong., 1st sess...
...Still, the arguments are worth looking into, if only to point out places in which future scholars who will have full benefit of at least the American diplomatic archives should attempt to concentrate their researches...
...Now it is undeniable that Secretary Byrnes, who has never proved amusing to the revisionists, told Assistant Secretary of War McCloy in August, 1945, that he intended to go to the forthcoming London Foreign Ministers Conference with the implied threat of the bomb in his pocket, and Secretary of War Stimson on September 4 recorded in his diary a similar conversation with Byrnes: "I took up the question . . . how to handle Russia with the big bomb...
...they believe also that the rhetoric (they are fond of the word) lasted into the 1950s with bad results, for the Secretary of State for most of that decade believed in anticommunism as fervently as he did in presby-terianism...
...Russian offers to unify Germany, as Epstein has contended, could have been nothing other than propaganda, for the Soviets would not have gained control of the other zones and would have lost their own...
...I am indebted to Rose and his publisher for access to the manuscript Russians on atomic matters, with prior approval by the British, before taking a plan for control of atomic energy to the United Nations...
...A report within the US government estimated that the Soviet economy could recover without American aid, that the Russians could regain their prewar level of capital investment by 1948, and that a loan of $2,000,000,000 would only speed up reconstruction by three to four months.49 It is quite true that during the war the Soviets had fought two-thirds of the German army, that Russian deaths had reached from fifteen to twenty million, compared to perhaps one million for the western allies, that the output of Russian industry was halved by the German invasion and transfer of factories to the east...
...Years later, George Kennan remarked his personal sadness that the Truman Doctrine had become a worldwide program - though it is not clear that it ever did, even under John Foster Dulles, not to mention Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon...
...In an often misunderstood letter accompanying his proposition, as the then Acting Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, explained years later in Present at the Creation, the Secretary of War had spoken loosely of "sharing the atomic bomb with Russia," but that was not really the issue...
...Soviet unwillingness in 1945 to follow up the Molotov proposal produced an impossible situation for the Americans...
...Although largely a Russian-British argument, with the Soviets attacking the Americans' British ally in the person of it former leader, the contentions on both sides were surely for the benefit of the United States...
...As for whether a freely granted loan - what good Methodists sometimes refer io as a free-will offering - might have influenced the Soviets, the revisionist expert on the loan question, Thomas G. Paterson, can come to no more of a con44...
Vol. 6 • May 1973 • No. 8
