Truman(59)

The creation of NATO was essential to this new stability in Europe. Looked at from any perspective it was one of the most remarkable feats of international political engineering of modern history. It was all put together in little more than a year, and that year was bisected by the election of November 1948, which the incumbent President, as we have seen, was almost unanimously expected to lose. Twelve founder members signed. But the United States was not just one of a dozen. In the late 1940s and for most of the next two decades, but not in the 1970s, its power was not merely pre-eminent: it was qualitatively different and overwhelming. And the United States, from this solar position, had to make by far the greatest contribution in terms both of resources and of sacrifice of tradition.

The fact that a major political act, which is normally slow and messy, was performed with the speed and precision of a surgeon is a tribute to the leadership which the Western world then enjoyed. Bevin was the impresario, but Truman had to provide the commitment, and he did so with an unfussy resolution which practically no other president could have rivalled.

Although twelve countries signed the treaty (another four have since joined), it was effectively made by five: the United States, Britain, Canada, Belgium and the Netherlands. France had not then developed Gaullist detachment, but was more interested in immediate American military supplies than in wider or longer-term aims. The French Government did however perform the considerable service of insisting on having Italy in. There had been considerable doubts about this. The objection was not that she was an ex-enemy but that she was Mediterranean rather than Atlantic. These doubts had been seriously felt by Truman himself. However the French convinced Acheson, and Acheson convinced Truman. Exclusion would have been a disaster for Italy and a major misfortune for the Alliance.

The Treaty was signed in Washington on April 4th, 1949. The celebratory dinner had to be held in the Carlton Hotel. The White House was still closed, and Blair House was not big enough. But the value of the Treaty was not diminished by the substitute nature of the surroundings. It contained the Soviet threat to Western Europe. The position never again looked as menacing as it had done in 1947-8 when Berlin was beleaguered and the Communist parties in France and Italy seemed poised for a takeover. It maintained peace for a generation on the central front, which was the most dangerous for it was there that the armies and influence of the super-powers were in immediate juxtaposition. If Truman had created nothing else in his second term, NATO would have justified his re-election.

It can of course be argued that with Dewey we would have got just as effective a NATO, and a less sour Republican Party, because they were not completing twenty years of exclusion from office, and consequently a greater immunity to McCarthyism. Maybe. Maybe Seward would have waged the Civil War more effectively than Lincoln. Maybe if Roosevelt had not broken convention and gone for a third term and James A. Farley or one of the other aspirants had seized the crown, the war would have been at least as quickly won and the alternative president would have been more skilled and less tired in dealing with Stalin at Yalta. Maybe if Halifax had become Prime Minister instead of Churchill in 1940 (as he so nearly did) Hitler would have been still more resolutely opposed and Britain’s resources less exhausted at the end. No hypothesis which was not put to the test can be retrospectively proved to be wrong. They do not however carry great plausibility. Perhaps the Dewey one has a little more than the others. But the fact remains that under Truman’s presidency NATO was created with remarkable speed, vision and determination, and that he deserves full credit for it.

The Senate ratified the Treaty by 82 votes to 13 (with Taft at the head of the minority) in July. Together with the ending of the Berlin blockade on May 12th and the creation of the Federal Republic of Germany (the Basic Law was passed on May 8th and the first elections were held in August) and satisfactory progress within OEEC for the implementation of the Marshall Plan, it was a summer of considerable achievement in Europe. On the other side of the world United States troops, apart from a few advisory specialists, were withdrawn in late June and without much attention from the southern part of the little-known Korean peninsula. At Potsdam this protuberance had been rather casually and arbitrarily divided for post-Japanese occupation between the Soviet union   and the United States. Russian troops, surprisingly, had gone earlier.

These assuagements were soon to be balanced by less favourable developments. On August 5th the State Department published a long and unsuccessfully defensive ‘China White Paper’, setting out over a thousand pages its own perfectly reasonable account of events since 1944. It was badly received by, for example, Senator Vandenberg, John Foster Dulles and the New York Times. It failed to create a climate of calm resignation in America for the proclamation of the People’s Republic of China on October 1st.