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NORTH COAST TIMES EAGLE, A U G T E M B E R 2006
Meanwhile, the exposure of Alger Hiss as a Soviet
agent followed, in relatively rapid succession, by the fall of
Czechoslovakia’s coalition government to a Soviet-backed
coup, the Soviet attainment of an atomic bomb and the victory
of Mao's Communists over Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang
regime in China, cast the entire policy of containment into doubt.
Never mind that the right’s own feckless or muddled proposals
for fighting the Cold War would not have ameliorated any of
these situations. The right swept them into the memory hole and
offered a new answer to Americans bewildered by how suddenly
their nation's global preeminence had been diminished: Yalta
A growing chorus of rightwing voices now began to
excoriate our wartime diplomacy. Their most powerful charge,
one that would firmly establish the Yalta myth in the American
political psyche, was the accusation that our delegation had
given over Eastern Europe to the Soviets. According to “How
We Won the War & Lost the Peace,” an essay written for Life
magazine shortly before the 1948 election by William Bullitt —
a former diplomat who had been dismissed by Roosevelt for
outing a gay rival in the State Department —FDR and his chief
adviser, Harry Hopkins, were guilty of “wishful appeasement”
of Stalin at Yalta, handing the peoples of Poland, Hungary,
Romania, Bulgaria, and the Baltic states over to the Soviet
dictator.
The rightwing’s dolchstosslegende was a small but
fateful conspiracy, engineered through “secret diplomacy” at
Yalta. Its linchpin was Hiss, a junior State Department aide at
Yalta who was now described as a major architect of the pact.
Hiss was a perfect villain for the right’s purposes. He was not
only a communist and a spy; he was also an effete Eastern
intellectual right down to his name — and, by implication,
possibly a homosexual. He had been publicly exposed by
that relentlessly regular guy, Dick Nixon, as an unnatural,
un-American element who had used his wiles to sway all
of his superiors in the Crimea.
Just how he had accomplished this was never detailed,
but it didn’t matter; specificity is anathema to any myth. Bullitt
and an equally flamboyant opportunist of the period, Congress-
woman Clare Boothe Luce, offered a more general explanation.
The Democrats, Mrs. Luce had already charged, “will not, or
dare not, tell us the commitments that were overtly or secretly
made in moments of war’s extermination by a mortally ill
President, and perhaps morally scared State Department
advisers."
The idea of the “dying President” at Yalta was plausible
to much of the public, who had seen photographs of Roosevelt
looking suddenly, shockingly gaunt and exhausted throughout
much of the last year of his life. To the rightwing — which had
conducted a whispering campaign against Roosevelt throughout
his term in office, claiming that his real affliction was not polio but
syphilis, and that he, his wife, and various advisers, including
Hopkins, were “secret Jews” and Soviet agents — it all made
perfect sense. To the many Americans who still loved Roosevelt
and whose votes the Republicans needed, FDR himself could
now become the Siegfried figure, a dying hero betrayed by the
shady, unnatural Hiss.
All of this, of course, falls apart under the most cursory
examination. Hiss was a “technician” at Yalta, relied upon mostly
for his expertise regarding the planned United Nations, and —
already suspected of espionage — he had played no policy
making role in a large, bipartisan delegation that included most
of the nation’s military and diplomatic leadership. Roosevelt was
in severe physical decline and would die from a massive stroke
two months later, but his mind was still active and engaged.
Chip Bohlen — who actually was at Yalta and who went on to
become a leading Cold War statesman under both Republican
and Democratic administrations — would echo many other
observers in reporting that while Roosevelt's “physical state was
certainly not up to normal, his mental and psychological state
was certainly not affected. He was lethargic but when important
moments arose, he was mentally sharp.”
Far from handing over anything to anyone, Roosevelt
had actually persuaded Stalin to sign onto a “Declaration on
Liberated Europe” that affirmed “the right of all peoples to
choose the form of government under which they will live" and
committed the Big Three “to the earliest possible establishment
trough free elections of governments responsive to the will
3f the people.” More was not possible The salient fact about
Eastern Europe at the end of World War 2 was that the Red
Xrmy enjoyed an immense numerical advantage there. To
Jislodge it, the United States would have had to embark
mmediately upon another epic struggle, a vast new war for
which the American people, already clamoring for demobil-
zation, showed absolutely no enthusiasm. It is likely that the
Jnited States would have eventually prevailed in such a
itruggle, but only at a cost of American lives that would have
‘ varied the total cost of World War 2 itself, and the further
Jevastation of the very European countries we had sought
:o liberate.
As Bohlen told a Senate committee in 1953, “I believe
hat the map of Europe would look much the same if there had
lever been a Yalta conference at all." Why this should have
een surprising, and how it possibly reflected a failure of
\merican foreign policy, is a mystery in any rational analysis of
he situation. But any such analysis could never be made by the
leroic state. Instead, Roosevelt and the nation he represented
lad to have been betrayed. The previous, disastrous policies
idvocated by the Republican right — ignoring the growing Axis
hreat, then leaving Western Europe defenseless while plunging
nto war in China — could be safely forgotten.
Republicans now began an almost continuous campaign
igainst alleged Democratic conspiracies. Following Chiang’s
lefeat, conservatives in Congress demanded to know “Who lost
‘ hina?’ and Robert Taft, discarding his much vaunted integrity,
iged on Joe McCarthy's witch-hunt against the Truman admin-
ration, urging him to “keep talking and if one case doesn't work
DANIEL BISHOP (ST. LOUIS STAR-TIMES)
out, he should proceed with another." Yet it would take another
hot war — and another expansion of the dolchstosslegende —
to permanently enthrone the idea of a vast, treasonous leftwing
conspiracy in the American psyche.
The outbreak of hostilities in Korea in 1950 was disturb
ing enough, but the defeat of General Douglas MacArthur that
winter by invading Chinese forces sent shockwaves throughout
the United States. More than anyone else, MacArthur brought
about his own defeat, launching his troops up the Korean penin
sula in separate columns, divided by mountain ranges, ignoring
both orders from the White House to halt and plentiful signs that
a massive Chinese force had already infiltrated the Korean
peninsula. But while his subordinates scrambled to rally their
reeling men, MacArthur moved swiftly to salvage his military
reputation and his hopes for the Presidency.
What the general proposed was a massive escalation of
the war. UN troops would not only “blockade the coast of China"
and “destroy through naval gunfire and air bombardment China’s
industrial capacity to wage war" but would also “release existing
restrictions upon the Formosan garrison" of Chiang Kai-shek,
which might lead to counter-invasion against “vulnerable areas of
the Chinese mainland." Above all, MacArthur urged that no fewer
than 34 atomic bombs be dropped on what he characterized as
“retardation targets” in Manchuria, including critical concentrat
ions of troops and planes. Even this soon seemed insufficient.
MacArthur later added that had he been permitted, he not only
would have launched as many as 50 atomic bombs but also
would have used “wagons, carts, trucks, and planes" to create
“a belt of radioactive cobalt" that would neatly slice the Korean
thumb from China. “For at lest 60 years,” he said, “there could
have been no land invasion of Korea from the north.”
MacArthur insisted that the “only way to prevent World
War 3 is to end the Korean conflict rapidly and decisively”—as if
a massive, atomic attack upon the world’s most populous nation
would not, in itself, constitute World War 3. When the Truman
administration rejected his proposals, the general announced
that he was not being allowed to win — “An enormous handicap
without precedent in military history." The UN had to “depart from
its tolerant effort to contain the war to the area of Korea” and
accept his strategy to “doom Red China,” an opponent “of such
exaggerated and vaunted military power."
MacArthur conveyed similar sentiments to his conser
vative allies in Congress, writing House Minority Leader Joseph
Martin that he was only trying to “follow the conventional pattern
of meeting force with maximum counter-force, as we have never
failed to do in the past,” and concluding: “There is no substitute
for victory.” Martin gleefully aired the great man's views in a
speech in Brooklyn, thundering, “If we are not in Korea to win,
this administration should be indicted for the murder of
thousands of American boys.” He added that “the same State
Department crowd that cut off aid” to Chiang in 1946 now
opposed invading China because this would show up their earlier
mistakes. The only way to “save Europe and save Asia at the
same time" was “to clear out the State Department from top to
bottom." After Martin repeated MacArthur's views on the House
floor, Truman finally removed the general from his command.
But the move seemed only to confirm that something was very
wrong.
The right seized the opportunity to renew — and expand
— its charges of dolchstoss. Republican Senator William Jenner
of Indiana bellowed from the floor of the Senate that “this country
today is in the hands of a secret inner coterie which is directed
by agents of the Soviet Union. We must cut this whole cancerous
conspiracy out of our government at once. Our own choice is to
impeach President Truman and find out who is the secret invisi
ble government which has so cleverly led our country down the
road to destruction." Nixon, his new colleague, agreed in barely
coded language, attacking “the whining, whimpering, groveling
attitude of our diplomatic representatives who talk of America's
fear rather than of America's strength and America’s courage.”
He claimed that “top administration officials have refused time
and time again to recognize the existence of this fifth column"
Or “to take effective action to clear subversives out" of the
government.
Douglas MacArthur now became the martyred Siegfried,
stabbed in the back by weaklings at home who were for some
reason afraid of victory. It was the fault of these “whimpering,"
“soft," “cowardly,” “lavender” “appeasers,” so unnatural they
were willing to “murder” American boys to cover up their own
misjudgments. Communist treachery and appeasement were
blended seamlessly with an emerging, postwar sex panic.
An entire, seemingly plausible narrative of treason
was now firmly established. The conspiracy of spies, or sexual
deviants, or both, had now expanded beyond Alger Hiss to
include pretty much the entire State Department and maybe
the rest of the executive branch. Taft, launching his third run
for the Republican nomination, offered to name MacArthur as
his Vice President, and the general, while still harboring hopes
of winning the nomination himself, agreed on the condition that
he would have a voice in foreign policy and be put in charge of
national security.
In their desire for power, Republican centrists soon
joined this rightwing chorus. John Foster Dulles, now Eisen
hower's Secretary-of-State designate, denounced the very
strategy of containment that he had helped to formulate and
promised to “roll back" Communism everywhere, including
in Eastern Europe. Eisenhower himself refused to disown
McCarthy, even after the senator had impugned the patriotism
of his long-time friend and mentor, George Marshall.
The Republican platform that Ike ran on in the fall
of 1952 was a freefall into fantasy, a fatal compact by party
moderates with a rightwing that would eventually push them
into extinction. For the first time since the Civil War era, one
major American political party charged another one with treason.
Democrats were accused of having "shielded traitors to the
Nation in high places" and creating “enemies abroad where
we should have friends.” Democrats were responsible for all
“110,000 American casualties” in Korea, where they had
“produced stalemates and ignominious bartering with our
enemies” that “offer no hope of victory." Republicans promised
to “repudiate all commitments contained in secret understand
ings such as those of Yalta which aid Communist enslavements."
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