Truman(40)

Did Truman employ overkill? A surprisingly large proportion of those intimately involved thought that he did. George Kennan, the most important State Department adviser on policy towards the Soviet union  , did. Acheson did not: it sprang directly from his powerful and spontaneous presentation of two weeks previously. In the White House, George Elsey did, but Clark Clifford did not. More importantly, Marshall, who had left Washington for the Moscow meeting of foreign ministers several days beforehand, was somewhat unhappy. Acheson thought that he had got him to clear the draft on his way through Paris, but the Russian expert, Charles E. Bohlen who was with him, recorded that they both found ‘the rhetoric too flamboyantly anti-Communist.’ So too did Bevin who had just reached Moscow after an endless train journey across the snowbound plains of northern Europe. He and Marshall may both have been somewhat influenced by their knowledge that they were to be shut up in the drabness of an end of winter Moscow for over six weeks,4 and a feeling that the President’s speech, wholly desirable in substance, nevertheless condemned them to the certainty of an unproductive sojourn. Lord Bullock recorded that Bevin said in his final report on the Conference that ‘Truman’s announcement removed any chance of agreement on the general principles of a German settlement and changed the whole scene.’ Bullock added however that without access to Russian sources Bevin could not really know.5

Truman himself was as usual unrepentant about his language. But he had found the decision peculiarly taxing, more so apparently than that to drop the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs, nineteen months previously. With the speech out of the way he went again to the familiar submarine base at Key West, Florida for a short holiday. From there on March 13th he wrote a typical and revealing letter to his daughter:

‘We had a pleasant flight from Washington.

Your old Dad slept for 750 or 800 miles—three hours, and we were travelling from 250 to 300 miles an hour. No one, not even me (your mother would say) knew how very tired and worn to a frazzle the Chief Executive had become. This terrible decision I had to make had been over my head for about six weeks. Although I knew at Potsdam that there is no difference in totalitarian or police states, call them what you will, Nazi, Fascist, Communist or Argentine Republics. You know there was but one idealistic example of Communism. That is described in the Acts of the Apostles.

The attempt of Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, et.al. to fool the world and the American Crackpots Association, represented by Jos. Davies,5 Henry Wallace, Claude Pepper6 and the actors and artists in immoral Greenwich Village, is just like Hitler’s and Mussolini’s so-called socialist states.

Your Pop had to tell the world just that in polite language.’6

Between the proclamation of the Truman Doctrine and Marshall’s Harvard Commencement speech, which is generally regarded as the launching date of the Marshall Plan, there was an interval of only 85 days. It was a period of major policy making at a formidable rate. In fact, the ideas of the Marshall Plan were ready well before June 5th. There was indeed some thought that it might have been launched in tandem with the Truman Doctrine, and proposals for economic aid to Western Europe submitted at the same time as those for military sustenance to the Eastern Mediterranean.

It was decided however that this might be too heavy and rushed a meal for the Congress to digest. More preparation was required. Furthermore Truman wisely and modestly thought it undesirable that his name should be memorialized by attachment to a major programme for spending American taxpayers’ money on economic aid which in principle was to be offered to any state in Europe, non-Communist or Communist. The Truman Doctrine was one thing. It was military aid presented in a specifically anti-Communist context. It would be accepted by a Republican Congress even under Truman’s name. For the European Recovery Programme, as it subsequently became, a less partisan label was required. Marshall provided it. Truman shrewdly saw the tactical advantage of this. He also thought that the General deserved the accolade and had no jealousy about letting him have it.

Nonetheless the broad policy behind the Plan was essentially Truman’s policy and the detailed ideas were essentially worked out by Acheson, supported by a trenchant series of memoranda written by Will Clayton, then State Department assistant under-Secretary in charge of economic affairs. Acheson also commissioned and skilfully used a report from a body known as the State/War/Navy Co-ordinating Committee. This committee reported on April 21st and, strangely for a body composed of three middle-rank military gentlemen (even the State Department representative was a colonel) deployed with limpid logic the far-sighted economic self-interest case for generosity. It pointed out that in 1947 the United States was likely to export $7.5 billion more goods and services than it imported. But resources to pay for this export surplus were running down. ‘The conclusion is inescapable that under present programmes and policies the world will not be able to continue to buy United States exports at the 1946-7 rate beyond another 12-18 months … A substantial decline in the United States export surplus would have a depressing effect on business activity and employment … if the export decline happened to coincide with weakness in the domestic economy, [the effect on] employment might be most serious.’7