Authors: Ira Katznelson
A mere five years later, these expectations were in tatters. When the Brookings Institution considered America’s position in global affairs in 1951 at the request of the Bureau of the Budget and the Executive Office of the President, it could only wistfully recall how, at war’s end, almost no one had foreseen the impending collapse of security coordination with the Soviet Union, the rapid intensification of East-West suspicions, or the severity of the Cold War.
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By contrast, the report recorded how the problems confronting the United States in foreign affairs had become more difficult than those that the country had confronted during the economic emergency of the 1930s. Global developments, it drily noted, if with a sense of wonder, entailed “a violation of traditional expectations, requiring a departure from historical principles of action.”
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Most of the national security agencies the Brookings document discussed did not exist when the UN was being formed or when atomic weapons were first used. Put in place during the Truman administration, these institutions adjusted the structure and strategy of U.S. foreign policy. The Department of War was refashioned into a substantially different Department of Defense, a conglomerate that was “unique in its basic structure, differing from any other executive department.”
36
The era also witnessed the creation of the National Security Council (NSC), the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the National Security Resources Board (NSRB), the National Science Foundation (NSF), and a good many other new agencies that managed postwar relief, foreign aid, and overseas information. The Department of State dramatically expanded. The Foreign Service grew from 4,000 overseas diplomats and support staff in 1940 to 24,000 by 1950, and the department’s Washington workforce likewise jumped from 1,000 to 8,000.
37
Shaped simultaneously to restrict Soviet power and to advance the West’s political and economic models, the country’s new organizational, fiscal, and military instruments made insistent global action possible. Acting with wide discretion, these specialized, often insular agencies built military might, oversaw the multiplication of atomic weapons, pursued intelligence, and practiced covert action, all in the name of liberal democracy. Premised on the assumption that the United States was freedom’s indispensable guardian, these organizations extended American power as if the country were still engaged in total warfare.
This national security state—a state premised on the idea that the largest threats to American democracy were located outside the country’s boundaries—offered a mirror image of the state of public procedures and private interests that had rejected economic planning and a national corporatist role for labor. Combining the activist impulses of the early New Deal with features of wartime mobilization and technology, it advanced scientific and military planning; built corporatist relationships among business, labor, and the national state; insisted on rigorous demands for secrecy; and was premised on the understanding that all loyal citizens should subscribe to a singular public interest. American citizens were summoned once again “to wage a war against the emergency,” but an emergency dissimilar both from the kind Franklin Roosevelt had announced on his first Inauguration Day and from the time-bound emergency of World War II.
It did not take long for anxiety about the bomb to supplant the festive mood that dominated the late summer of 1945. Nor did it take long for a new climate of fear, with the bomb as the original impetus, to engender a crusading national security state. “The tragic truth,” William Laurence wrote, “is that at present we really cannot be sure that the war is over. Twenty-five years from now, or even sooner, we may find out that what we thought was the end of the war was no more than merely another prolonged armistice, a period in which we took time out to stock up with bigger and better atomic bombs.” Having seen the bomb firsthand, he shuddered at the prospect. “If that happens the end cannot be far away.”
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With palpable fear not only seizing the mass public but also the decision-making elite, the bomb informed every aspect of postwar military organization and strategy. It created suspicions about loyalty and promoted a zone of policymaking that valued secrecy and, at the same time, insulated the coercive capacity of the federal government from ordinary democratic processes and scrutiny. Both the Great Depression and World War II had promised a solution. Prosperity could be made to return. Enemies would be forced to surrender. But with the permanent existence of atomic weapons linked to a turbulent and global ideological conflict of uncertain duration, fear itself projected a meaning qualitatively different from that when Roosevelt first spoke the words in March 1933.
II.
B
ROADCASTING FIVE
days after the explosion at Nagasaki, America’s leading radio news commentator, H. V. Kaltenborn, urged his NBC listeners to “think of the mass murder which will come with World War III.” That week, two rather different voices warned that history had just experienced a great moment of fracture. First was Gen. Henry Harley “Hap” Arnold, chief of the Army’s Air Staff from March 1943 to February 1946, fourth in the army command behind Generals Marshall, MacArthur, and Eisenhower, and the person who had led the carpet-bombing campaigns of World War II. Arnold, who had advocated a post-Nagasaki “‘grand finale’ by a thousand fire-raising aircraft,”
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outlined a postwar program of research and development that would improve the bomb, produce planes faster than sound, and build guided missiles that could hit any target on the globe from anywhere on Earth.
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Second was the critic and noted author James Agee, whose
Time
article appeared under a picture of an atomic cloud in the first issue published since Nagasaki. Writing in “sorrow and doubt,” he remarked how “the greatest and most terrible of wars ended, this week, in the echoes of an enormous event—an event so much more enormous that, relative to it, the war itself shrank to minor significance.” The existence of “the bomb,” he continued, “rendered all decisions made so far at Yalta and Postdam mere trivial dams across tributary rivulets.” Fearful that even “the good uses of this power might easily bring disaster as prodigious as the evil,” Agee concluded that “with the controlled splitting of the atom, humanity, already profoundly perplexed and disunified, was brought inescapably into a new age in which all thoughts and things were split—and far from controlled.”
41
By mid-September, Gallup was reporting that fully 27 percent of Americans believed that one day there would be a chain of atomic “explosions which will destroy the entire world.”
42
Two months later, Leslie Groves was warning that the world “will be courting suicide if it permits the atomic bomb to get out of control,” and the secretary of state, addressing a “Jimmy Byrnes Homecoming Day” in Charleston, South Carolina, was pronouncing how, “from the day the first bomb fell on Hiroshima, one thing has been clear to us: the civilized world cannot survive an atomic war.”
43
In a startling photo-essay in November 1945, “The 36-Hour War,”
Life
chillingly portrayed a future global conflict as one that “begins with the atomic bombardment of key U.S. cities,” even as its ends with “the U.S. wins the atomic war.” Cautioning that attacks across the United States could not be stopped by defensive means, and projecting how “some 40,000,000 people have been killed and all cities of more than 50,000 populations have been leveled,” the article opened with a realistic image showing, as the caption put it, “a shower of white-hot enemy rockets [falling] on Washington, D.C.” Illustrated by vivid and credible drawings that depicted atomic bombs descending on the United States, and hidden radar centers tracking the fateful attack, it closed with a terrifying image that portrayed an utterly devastated Fifth Avenue under the description “By the Marble Lions of New York’s Public Library, U.S. Technicians Test the Rubble of the Shattered City for Radioactivity.”
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The only plausible enemy was the Soviet Union, but was it not still a collaborator, if not quite an ally? February 1946 stands out as the moment when the conditions that might actually produce
Life
’s imaginary rendering began to take rhetorical and practical form. On February 9, the eve of the USSR’s first single-party general election of candidates for the Supreme Soviet since 1937, Josef Stalin broadcast from the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow. With his power, credibility, and appeal at an all-time high, Stalin argued that “victory means, first of all, that our Soviet social system has won,” and that the war had demonstrated “that it is truly a popular system,” rather than one “imposed on the people by the organs of the Cheka.” Continuing, he underscored the “firmness and grit” of the Communist Party in breaking the “machinations of Trotskyites and Rightists, participating in the sabotage of the measures of our government,” and went on to stress the quality and quantity of the country’s munitions, and the pugnacious character of the Red Army. In a veiled but unmistakable reference to atomic weapons, he revealed that the USSR had adopted a plan to generate conditions for Soviet science “not only to overtake but also in the very near future to surpass the achievements of science outside the boundaries of our country.”
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This strong rhetoric was embedded in an account of the origins of World War II that seemed to turn decisively from the spirit of Yalta and the peacemaking potential of the United Nations. War, Stalin contended, is an inherent feature of “world capitalism.” That system “proceeds through crises and the catastrophes of war.” The partnership between capitalist countries and the “progressive forces” led by the Soviet Union had merely been a situational convenience. In all, Stalin contended, the recent war had been “the inevitable result of the world economic and political forces on the basis of monopoly capitalism.”
46
Even though “no one familiar with Stalin’s thinking,” as John Lewis Gaddis has observed, “would have found much new in the speech,” as it “reflected what he had long believed and often said,” many in the West thought that his truculent talk—page-one news in all the major newspapers—represented a willful declaration that nothing was left of the wartime alliance.
47
This was how the Foreign Service officer Elbridge Durbrow (later the U.S. ambassador to South Vietnam from 1957 to 1961) saw things in Moscow. “It was just unbelievable how he threw it all out of the window.” The Bolshoi speech, Durbrow believed, seemed to say “to hell with the rest of the world.”
48
Unlike Durbrow, George Kennan, who had been recruited to Moscow as Ambassador Averell Harriman’s Russian expert, thought the talk had been a more routine reflection of Soviet distrust.
49
But it was Kennan’s eight-thousand-word telegram to Washington from Moscow on February 22—the longest ever written within the Foreign Service—that established both the terms of analysis and the framework for U.S. foreign policy that endured throughout the Cold War. Sent in response to a request by Secretary of State Byrnes for an interpretation of what Stalin had said, Kennan’s telegram analyzed the USSR as a regime that combined the traditional goals of Russian nationalism with a more “truculent and intolerant” ideological Bolshevism. This amalgam organized “a political force committed fanatically to the belief that with US there can be no permanent
modus vivendi.
” Kennan further projected that the USSR would make strenuous efforts to undermine the West, weaken its hold on colonized peoples, and “work toward destruction of all forms of personal independence, economic, political, or moral.”
He advised that, faced with this kind of enemy, American diplomacy be conducted with firmness, “calmly and with good heart,” on the basis of an analytical assessment of the USSR and its goals. As the Soviet Union was “neither schematic not adventuristic,” he predicted that its leaders would not gamble excessively. To the contrary, they would prudently retreat should the West build effective means to inhibit their policy choices. American leaders, he counseled, should educate the public, build “the health and vigor of our own society,” and have “the courage and self confidence to cling to our own methods and conceptions of human society. After all,” he concluded, “the greatest danger that can befall us in coping with this problem of Soviet communism, is that we shall allow ourselves to become like those with whom we are coping.”
50
Together with his anonymous “Mr. X” July 1947
Foreign Affairs
essay, “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” the “Long Telegram” combined caution with contention. “The main element of any United States policy toward the Soviet Union,” Kennan advised, “must be that of a long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment.” This policy, he argued, could ultimately help produce the “gradual mellowing” or even “the break-up” of Soviet power.
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Kennan’s telegraphed report from Moscow was immediately influential. “It came right at a moment,” as the State Department officer Louis Halle recalled, “when the . . . Department was floundering about, looking for new intellectual moorings.”
52
On February 28, 1946, soon after receiving the telegram, Secretary Byrnes delivered a policy speech to the Overseas Press Club in New York. Targeting Stalin’s words, he denounced “loose talk about the inevitability of war.” Calling for “patience and firmness,” he appealed for military readiness so that America could effectively “act as a great power.”
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Winston Churchill, too, had seen the Long Telegram. Famously declaring that “an iron curtain has descended across the Continent,” his March 5 speech in Harry Truman’s home state called for a stance of stern resistance.
54
Stalin quickly responded in a
Pravda
interview headlined, “On Churchill’s Speech at Fulton.” Appraising the talk “as a dangerous act,” Stalin compared Churchill and his “friends in the United States” to “Hitler and his friends.” There is nothing “surprising,” he added “that in her desire to safeguard her future, Russia was trying to secure in neighboring countries governments loyal to the Soviet Union.” Any person “who believes this orientation to be expansionist,” he concluded, “has gone mad.”
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