The Education of the Misters

(See Cover)

A minor revelation took place last week. The end of the Moscow Conference provided it. At last even the dullest U.S. citizen was made to realize the exasperating difficulty and the aggravating exhaustion of dealing with the Soviet Government. The realization marked the end of another phase of U.S. foreign policy. Now the question became: "What does the U.S. do next?"

Secretary of State George Marshall had returned from Moscow reciting the story of the Soviet effort to seize the economy of Central Europe, of the Soviet Union's negation of every U.S. effort to make that economy selfsupporting. His references to Stalin's bland remarks about reaching ultimate agreements (TIME, May 5) were deadpan; Marshall himself reflected little optimism.

His adviser, John Foster Dulles, reflected even less. On his return he conferred in Washington with the man most responsible for the so-called bipartisan U.S. foreign policy--Michigan's Senator Arthur Vandenberg. Then Dulles made a frank report--more informative than Secretary Marshall's--to the U.S. people.

Under a Rock. With the air of a man peering underneath a lifted rock, he told what he had discovered at Moscow. He recalled how, at Potsdam, Britain and the U.S. had allowed the Soviet Union's claim to millions of dollars' worth of German factories--on the contention that this was the way to keep the peace.

But at the Moscow Conference Soviet policy had switched. Now the U.S.S.R. said she would take her reparations in German goods, which meant lifting the ceiling on German productive capacity. She would, in fact, let Germany turn out ten to twelve million tons of steel a year. Dulles recalled: "A little over a year ago, Marshal Sokolovsky said, 'To leave Germany an annual capacity of nine million tons of steel will mean war within a few years.'"

Why had the U.S.S.R. changed its mind? The reason seemed to be that the Russians, after feverishly dismantling the German factories and starting to carry them off, had not been able to put them together again. "Many parts of German factories," said Dulles, "are rusting on the railroad sidings between Berlin and Moscow." Soviet economic needs were so great that they were willing to take risks. Furthermore, with Communism now strong in most of Europe, the Kremlin has little fear of a regenerated Germany.

Said Dulles: "In the Soviet zone of Germany, the dominant political party and the labor unions are already subject to Soviet will, though they may not know it themselves. It is much the same in the French zone of Germany. In the British and U.S. zone, Soviet influence in the political parties and labor unions is growing rapidly."

Here were some of the reasons for the Moscow impasse. The Soviet leaders wanted the U.S. to quit Europe and go home. "Then they would automatically dominate the whole continent." Dulles did not believe that the Soviet leaders wanted war. "They are too smart to challenge us at a level where, temporarily at least, they are at a grave disadvantage. The present challenge is at a level where they are well equipped and where we are poorly equipped."

The speech struck home in Moscow. Marshall and Dulles could read those reactions in the words of Ilya Ehrenburg, Moscow journalist: "Don't these misters understand that if we stood up before the armies of Hitler we shall not shake before a dozen rattling speeches?"

Such a Miscalculation. Soviet spokesmen could rant & rave; they had plenty of time for it. The prolongation of Europe's plight played into Communist hands. This was the level where the Soviet Union was well equipped--the ideological level, where Communism feeds on misery and despair. So the inevitable question arose: "What does the U.S. do next?"

In Washington, Secretary Marshall got back to business. For many months the Soviet Union had disregarded a U.S. request to negotiate a settlement of the $1 i billion in Lend-Lease which the U.S. had given during the war. More than half that sum had been for military supplies. Last week Soviet Ambassador Nikolai Novikov finally consented to discuss it. State Department officials sat down with him to tabulate the long overdue bill.

In a busy week--he was moving his department from the old State building* on Pennsylvania Avenue to the new War Department Building on 21st Street --Secretary Marshall also found time to write Molotov a note about Korea. He would be glad to begin negotiations looking toward an independent Korean Government, but only on the basis of the U.S. definition of democratic procedure.

These were things to do next in the growing routine of the world diplomacy in which the U.S. found itself. The deeper the U.S. got in it, the more arduous the routines would be. But there was still an overall policy to be made. That policy had to be measured against the background of the nation's adventures in foreign affairs since the end of the war. One fact seemed to have emerged already: seldom in world history had there been such an earnest effort to plant peace and seldom had a policy been based on such a grave miscalculation.

The Martinis Era. The miscalculation had been the failure to recognize that the self-interest which had kept the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. together during the war would instantly divide them as soon as the war was won. So long as Franklin Roosevelt lived, all postwar planning was based on the assumption that the U.S.S.R. would acquiesce or even assist in the democratic recovery of the world. It was not until ex-Secretary of State Byrnes offered the Soviet Union a 25-year protective treaty against German militarism and was brusquely turned down that the Administration woke up.

Between what an Administration official called the "Four Martinis and Let's Have an Agreement" era of Franklin Roosevelt and what Marshall called the "Interminable Discussion of Disagreements" at Moscow lay two years of arduous education. Between those two eras was the San Francisco meeting of U.N., the period when Jimmy Byrnes conducted relations with Russia in the jovial tradition of parish-pump politics in South Carolina, when Byrnes sat back and told all who cared to listen that the great thing was to get the other fellow's point of view, when Byrnes saw the U.S. role as that of mediator--until he saw the unreality of that role, quit mediating and began to assert some U.S. ideas.

In Outline. Thereafter "patience and firmness" became the U.S. line. And then the interminable discussions began, while the Soviet Union conspired to communize the governments of Poland, Rumania, Bulgaria and Yugoslavia, and keep the governments of Greece and France in turmoil. But there were stiff U.S. assertions and reassertions and in one instance, in the case of Iran, the U.S.S.R. backed down. Here & there, a visible pattern of U.S. policy began to emerge--the determination to stick it out in Europe, the refusal to make concessions just for expediency's sake.

It was true that the pattern was still in bits & pieces; while the U.S. education in Europe was going on, studies in the rest of the world were neglected. In China, U.S. policymakers flunked out. In Latin America they got just a passing mark. But in United Nations councils and in Europe, out of miscalculations and expedients, came the makings of a policy which at least did not yield, which was hard, even though no one could yet forecast its final shape.

All the Levels. The policy-in-progress had been given a name: the Truman Doctrine. What, exactly, did the Truman Doctrine involve? And who in the U.S. was competent to answer?

In the democratic U.S. many people "make" foreign policy. Its general design might be the work of a few. A new State Department planning staff, headed by George F. Kennan, the department's best-informed expert on the Soviet Union, is preparing a global plan. The staff of experts will try to analyze Soviet intent. They will examine the resources which Congress and the people can reasonably be expected to commit, over the period of the next half-dozen years, to hold the present balance between Communism and the assorted political economies of the rest of the world. Policy will be made on that high and expert level.

But on many other levels other people also make it: General MacArthur in Japan; General Clay in Germany; U.S. manufacturers, wool growers with axes to grind and sheep to shear; special pleaders, columnists, pressure groups. And last, but by no means least, Arthur Vandenberg, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

213 Days with Molotov. In the caucus room of the Senate Office Building last week, Senator Vandenberg's committee brooded over one of the fruits of miscalculation and compromise--the Italian treaty.

Critics of the treaty said that it put a ruinous reparations burden on Italy: $360 million, which the U.S. itself would have to pay in the end and which would largely flow to the U.S.S.R. and Soviet-dominated countries. It would make Trieste an even greater threat to peace than Danzig after World War I. It would reduce Italy, threatened by Communism within and by Soviet satellites without, to impotence.

Vandenberg did not think it was as bad as that. Britain and the U.S. had wrung from the U.S.S.R. the concession that reparations would not be taken from current production. But he was not happy about the treaty, which he had helped to write at the Paris Conference. He hoped that the Senate would ratify it (although a powerful move to delay action was developing). To a decrier, Vandenberg retorted: "You and I could agree in 20 minutes on the terms. But having sat for 213 days across the table from Mr. Molotov, I can assure you that is quite a different thing."

Like the U.S., Vandenberg had been getting an education. One tough course had been that Paris meeting, where he came to regard his chair at the conference table with revulsion and paced around the Luxembourg Gardens seething with frustration. He carried in his pocket a picture of Molotov and Hitler beaming at each other in the fall of 1940. When Molotov refused to give Italy any credit for finally joining the Allied cause, on the grounds that no one could dissolve a marriage with Hitler that easily, Vandenberg had wanted to thrust the picture under Molotov's nose. But he refrained.

Arthur Vandenberg, the ex-newspaperman from Grand Rapids, Mich., had learned fast.

The Big Michigander. He had traveled a fairly comfortable road in U.S. politics. By his own definition, he was "one of the luckiest men alive." The son of a bankrupt harnessmaker, he had worked hard. He had almost ruined his health trying to put himself through the University of Michigan, and gave up after one year. He became a cub reporter on the Grand Rapids Herald, wrote short stories, which were mostly rejected, and studied and admired the sonorous style of Michigan's Senator William Alden Smith, who bought the Herald and made a surprised young Vandenberg editor.

He worked there for 21 years. In 1928 he filed for the U.S. Senate. Before the election, the incumbent died and the governor appointed Vandenberg to fill the vacancy. Ever since then he has been consistently re-elected by an electorate which, in New Deal years, liked his middle-of-- the-road stand on domestic matters and which, more recently, was proud of his rising eminence. Last year, absent in Europe for the campaign, he won every county.

Big, pink and lumbering, he is a man to inspire the instinctive confidence of all good Republicans. He is almost symbolic --elephantine, big-chested, looking a little top-heavy. Making his orotund (and frequently eloquent) speeches, he waves one trunklike arm. Like an elephant, he has a steady driving power once he has made up his mind, is quick on the uptake. He is a Son of the American Revolution, a 33rd Degree Mason, a Woodman, an Elk.

For a man in his position, he has been shot at very little. One exception has been the attacks of the Chicago Tribune, which reached a spectacular low on March 15. On that day the Tribune appeared with a cartoon called The New Temptation, which showed Senators Morse, Tobey, Aiken and Vandenberg standing beside a punch bowl labeled "Betrayal of Their Party." In another corner stood Benedict Arnold holding aloft a glass from another bowl labeled "Betrayal of Their Country." Traitor Arnold was exclaiming: "Come, gentlemen, this is stronger--won't you join me?" The Tribune's bitterness was understandable. Vandenberg, the new internationalist, had once been willing to be labeled an isolationist and therefore the Tribune's friend.

Old Convert. As an editor Vandenberg had supported Henry Cabot Lodge in his fight against the League of Nations. In 1925, in a book called The Trail of a Tradition, he wrote: "Nationalism--not 'Internationalism'--is the indispensable bulwark of American independence." The book, one of three he wrote, is now out of print and out of sight. ("Thank God," says Vandenberg.)

He led the fight against relaxing the Neutrality Act. He was a loyal supporter of all wartime measures after Dec. 7, 1941, but he was still an isolationist so far as postwar plans were concerned.

Then he began to change. He saw a world shrinking under the mechanized wonders of the war. He was the ranking minority member of the Foreign Relations Committee and as such assumed a burden of responsibility; he held earnest conversations with Cordell Hull. Then came the unprecedented policy meeting of Republican leaders held in September 1943, at Mackinac Island, Mich. At that conference Vandenberg produced the word "participation," which expressed the determination of the great majority of Republican Party leaders to stay in world affairs after the war.

A year and a half later, he stood up in the Senate and, in a speech that held the chamber spellbound, called for a postwar treaty with Great Britain and Russia to keep Germany and Japan forever disarmed. That was the day he challenged Franklin D. Roosevelt to seek not only peace but also peace with justice. That was the day the onetime isolationist assumed moral leadership of a new American internationalism.

It was one of the happiest conversions in U.S. politics. Without it, the unity which marked U.S. foreign policy might have been a long time coming. Vandenberg was an industrious Republican attendant at the San Francisco birth of U.N. He was a Republican bulwark at the London and Paris meetings in 1946. He is today the man on whom the unity of U.S. foreign policy largely depends.

In the not-too-distant future he may well be the man on whom U.S. foreign policy itself largely depends--either as a Republican President in 1948 or as a Republican President's Secretary of State. Despite his disavowal of any ambition to be President, and his age (he would be 64 on his inauguration),* no politician would count him out.

Selective Pattern. It was important then for the U.S. to know to what point Arthur Vandenberg's education had brought him.

It had brought him first to the bipartisanship now so generally applauded. But Senator Vandenberg has set definite limits to the bipartisan policy. "Bipartisanship," he says, covers all U.S. dealings to date with U.N., and U.S. dealings in the several peace conferences. But it stops, and should stop there. It does not extend to the vacillating and contradictory U.S. policy in China--which is now in a state of unanimated suspension--or to the policy in Latin America--now operating in a vacuum created by Assistant Secretary of State Spruille Braden.

Senator Vandenberg has wholeheartedly supported the bill to aid Greece and Turkey--aid which was pointed up this week by the arrival of the U.S. aircraft carrier Leyte off Istanbul. He led the fight for the bill's passage in the Senate. There he successfully warded off the waspish Left and the economy-minded Right. Thus, if the Truman Doctrine applies only to Greek-Turkish aid, Vandenberg supports it. But he does not think that the bipartisan policy extends to the Truman Doctrine. He does not consider it a doctrine at all, but merely a "selective pattern to fit a given circumstance."

Senator Vandenberg, the cautious Michigander, is no global do-gooder. "We are not suddenly resolved," he said, "to underwrite the earth. That would be fantastic, improvident, and impossible." But he also said, in his memorable speech supporting Greek-Turkish aid: "I believe that we either take or surrender leadership. ... No plan can guarantee peace. The most it can do is to take the better calculated risk. It is to be fervently hoped and prayed that we may have enough foresight hereafter so that we do not always have to react on a 'crisis basis.' "

In the pock-marked history of U.S. foreign relations since the war, Arthur Vandenberg has been one man responsible for the fact that the crises in U.S. policy have lessened. He has fought those who argued for an immediate "preventive" war with Russia, he has ridiculed the followers of Henry Wallace (whom he called an "itinerant saboteur"). Along with John Foster Dulles he has aided and prodded the State Department into laying down a set of principles for everyone to see. Such a beginning was made last month at Moscow; Secretary Marshall's passion for orderliness points in the same direction. But at present the State Department policy is still full of improvisation. The education of the misters is not yet finished.

*The old State building is an 1888 French neoclassic monstrosity bound together with 900 columns and topped with bulbous chimney pots. When General William T. Sherman was once told that it was fireproof, he replied: "What a pity!"

*He is only six weeks older than Harry Truman. Statistics are against them both. . Only three Presidents have taken the oath of office after 64; William Henry Harrison, who died a month after his inauguration; Taylor, who died a year later; Buchanan, who survived for twelve more years. Franklin Roosevelt was 62 when he began his fourth term.

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