Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974

by James T. Patterson

It was also because many Americans believed so fervently in the Tightness of their political institutions and the meaning of their history. America, as the Puritans had said, was a City on a Hill, a special place that God had set aside for the redemption of people.

The power of this messianic feeling lent a special urgency—indeed an apocalyptic tone—to American Cold War diplomacy as well as to repression of Communists at home.15

The division of Europe was yet another powerful legacy of the war, one which statesmen might deplore but which "realists" should have had the sense to live with.

Brutal to opponents at home, Stalin was more cautious, conservative, and defensive abroad.

Critics of American hard-line reactions stress finally that the policies of the United States magnified Stalin's already heightened sense of insecurity.

Whether the Cold War could have been managed much less dangerously, however, is doubtful given the often crude diplomacy of Stalin and his successors and given the refusal of American policy-makers to retreat from their grand expectations about the nature of the postwar world.19

Max Lerner, a liberal journalist, said in 1943, "The war cannot be won unless America and Russia win it together. The peace cannot be organized unless America and Russia organize it together."24

In seeking Soviet-American cooperation after the war he tended to think that Stalin was moved less by ideological passions than by considerations of national interest.

But he was surely correct about a major geopolitical reality: without cooperation between the world's strongest powers, much of the heroism of World War II might be wasted.

Truman was indeed in trouble, for contemporaries struggled to cope with the shock of change in presidential leadership. Millions of Americans had come to think that Roosevelt, inaugurated in January for an unprecedented fourth term as President, was the only leader for the country.

During World War II he impressed observers with his fair-minded leadership of a special Senate Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program.

In coping with his fears Truman had models from a lifetime of reading military history and biography.

His idea of decisive presidential leadership, "The buck stops here," which was displayed in a sign on his desk in the Oval Office, reflected his reading about the past.

President Jimmy Carter retrieved Truman's THE BUCK STOPS HERE sign from the archives and put it on his desk in the Oval Office.

Harry could not afford college and was to became the only modern American President without higher education.

He became a presiding judge—really an administrator—of Jackson County outside of the city, where he proved an honest and competent public official.

Critics have wondered even about Truman's most widely praised trait: decisiveness. Some have speculated that he celebrated his capacity for decision as compensation for a deeper insecurity, rooted perhaps in his childhood.

In his foreign policies Truman is best described not as a heroic man-of-decision-the-likes-of-whom-we-may-never-see-again-in-the-White-House, but as a patriotic, conscientious, and largely colorless man whose fate it was to cope, sometimes imaginatively and sometimes imprudently, with some of the most difficult foreign policy problems in American history.

Truman felt especially deeply about another thing in 1945: it was his duty to carry out the foreign (and domestic) policies of his predecessor. This made sense; Vice-Presidents generally do this, or think they are doing it.

Like any so-called Establishment, the elite had a varied cast of characters.44 One of its leading lights in 1945, Secretary of War Stimson, was aging but still a force to be reckoned with in government.

He picked Marshall as a special envoy to China in 1946, as Secretary of State in 1947, and as Secretary of Defense after the Korean War broke out in 1950.45

In 1947 Truman named him as America's first Secretary of Defense, whereupon the tensions involved in trying to curb interservice rivalries worsened his erratic behavior.

Most of these people, too, had gone to private schools and elite universities. (Roughly 75 percent of State Department recruits between 1914 and 1922—senior officials after 1945—had prep school backgrounds.)

A foreign policy run by knowledgeable elites who knew and trusted each other, the officials thought, could be protected from the dangerous explosions of popular opinion.

Still, there is merit in using the term "Establishment." Save some older men like Stimson, most of these key people formed their opinions during World War II, a hot forge of patriotism.

However these officials may have differed, in age, background, and political persuasion, they also shared a central faith in the capacity of well-educated, sophisticated "experts" like themselves to band together and conduct an "enlightened" foreign policy based on the essential goodness of American principles.52

Underlying their thinking were two other assumptions. The first was that the United States must maintain a strong economic and military posture.

The second was that the United States had the means—economic, industrial, and military—to control the behavior of other nations.

They could appear to be—and truly thought they were—disinterested, far-seeing, and patriotic public servants. Indeed, they thought of themselves as missionaries of a gospel that could save the world; Acheson later entitled his memoirs Present at the Creation.

The essential stance of the United States for the next forty years, the quest for containment entailed high expectations. It was the most important legacy of the Truman administration.

These actions demonstrated Truman's capacity, on occasion, for quick decision-making. They also exposed his lack of interest in the subtleties and ambiguities of diplomacy, which he never made much effort to practice.

Truman's toughness, moreover, had little effect on Soviet behavior.

With these thoughts in mind Truman went in July to Potsdam, in Germany, for his first (and only) face-to-face meeting with Stalin.

These decisions have naturally stimulated a vast amount of controversy and second-guessing, much of it many years after the fact. Some of Truman's critics deplore as immoral the use of such weapons at all.

Acheson, who was Undersecretary of State, meanwhile fretted at Byrnes's frequent absences from Washington and at his inattention to orderly administration. "The State Department fiddles while Byrnes roams," wags were saying.11

At this critical juncture there arrived in Washington one of the key documents of the early Cold War: the so-called Long Telegram of George F. Kennan, minister-counselor of the American embassy in Moscow.

The Soviet Union, Kennan wrote, was an "Oriental despotism" in which "extremism was the normal form of rule and foreigners were expected to be mortal enemies."

It would exaggerate the influence of the Long Telegram to say that it formulated American foreign policy for the future. But thanks in large part to Forrestal, who circulated it aggressively among American leaders, it received widespread attention.

In dealing with it the United States must be firm, thereby confronting the Soviets "with unalterable counter-force at every point where they show signs of encroaching upon the interests of a peaceful and stable world."18

By the end of 1946 passed the last hopes, small though they had been, for amelioration of the atomic arms race that thereafter frightened the world.

Many liberals, however, resisted a tougher policy.

Some liberals truly feared an anti-Soviet policy would bring war.

But Niebuhr was uncomfortable with what he considered to be excessively moralistic responses from Washington. In September 1946 he wrote in the Nation that the United States should end its "futile efforts to change what cannot be changed in Eastern Europe, regarded by Russia as its strategic security belt."

Our copybook versions of democracy are frequently as obtuse as Russian dogmatism.

Congress made sharp cuts in military expenditures of all kinds in 1945 and 1946. The navy had to sell 4,000 ships, mothball 2,000 more, and shut down eighty-four shipyards.

All these actions drained the military establishment, setting off round after round of fierce and unedifying interservice fighting for scarce resources.

Even the nation's atomic monopoly was of questionable military value in these years. Until mid-1950 the United States relied heavily on World War II-vintage B-29S, all of which were based in Louisiana, California, or Texas, too far to fly safely to the Soviet Union.

America's atomic shield was indeed thin in those years. By mid-1946 the United States had around seven atomic bombs of the Nagasaki type; by mid-1947 it had around thirteen.

It was also because the military-industrial complex, a villain of much revisionist history, lacked cohesion following World War II.

A progressive as well as a renowned scientist in the field of plant genetics, he became FDR's Secretary of Agriculture from 1933 to 1940, and then Vice-President in Roosevelt's third term.