Rapprochement With Realpolitik
Chapter 4 (Part 4 of 4) of the book
The Discovery of First Principles, Volume 3
Edward J. Dodson
Thanks to the dedication and generosity of industrialist John C.
Lincoln, the Henry George School in New York received sufficient
funding to mount a credible education program and attract hundreds of
students to classes and lectures each year. Although the School's
programs were designed to appeal to a broad cross-section of
thoughtful people, the School had no standing with the academic
community. Georgists carried the peculiar burden of being thought of
as cultist. As Rhoda Hellman - who attended many of the School's
lectures and seminars -- points out in her assessment of the School,
outside of Chodorov very few of the directors and instructors during
the 1940s and 1950s were college graduates. Almost none had formally
studied economics, political philosophy or political science before
undertaking the study of political economy as defined by Henry George.
This shortcoming made the instructors less effective than they
otherwise might have been in putting George's analysis in the proper
context and thereby becoming simultaneously informative and
persuasive. "
If one's chief motive for investigating other ideas is to compare
them with a theory already beloved," writes Rhoda Hellman, "it
is almost inevitable that they should not be given as objective
consideration as if they had been part of a prior education."[161]
Thus, although many students came through the School, only a small
minority emerged committed to societal adoption of Henry George's
proposals. Citizen education required a very long-term view and
commitment. Georgists had virtually no influence in the policy making
arena, had no constituency to speak of and were struggling to overcome
the new conventional wisdoms. Yet, so long as John C. Lincoln[162]
lived, the School carried on its work with adequate if not unlimited
resources. These struggles and others within the Remnant went
virtually unnoticed outside the small circle of people directly
involved.
Even Robert Hutchins, the nation's most determined advocate for a
return to the classical liberal education, seemed helpless to stem the
rising tide of intolerance and political orthodoxy being spread under
the banner of anti-communism. One thing he had managed to accomplish
was to bring Mortimer Adler in to the Ford Foundation during the
summer of 1951 to conduct a seminar on civil liberties and the
meanings of freedom. Out of this came the idea of creating the Fund
for the Republic to investigate the state of liberty in the United
States, and a year later the Fund's trustees were selected and initial
funding from the Ford Foundation provided. When Hoffman's resignation
from Ford was announced in January of 1953, the Fund's trustees almost
immediately invited him to become chairman. Republican Congressman
Clifford P. Case of New Jersey, who had decided to step down and run
for governor, was recruited to become the Fund's President. When his
gubernatorial campaign failed to generate sufficient support, he left
the Congress at the end of August and eased into his new position at
the Fund. Case understood well the political environment in which the
Fund was about to plunge. "When we present facts,"
he warned his fellow directors, "the public must believe we
are giving it the true story and the whole story."[163] Case
realized, of course, that the standards of objectivity imposed on
those who sought to defend liberty from erosion were -- in the present
climate of distrust of intellectuals -- one-sided. "It would
be unrealistic not to recognize that some suspicion exists that the
primary concern of the Fund itself is not the preservation of our
freedoms as such," he added, "but the special
interests of the liberal and intellectual groups whose freedoms are
currently under particular attack."[164] Henry Steele
Commager advised Case to bring the debate over civil liberties as far
down to the level of the average citizen as possible by means of the
mass media. However, before Case could do much more than evaluate
options Eisenhower called on him to run for a seat in the U.S. Senate,
and he left the Fund in March of 1954. A month later, Robert Hutchins
took over as president.
Hutchins and the Fund for the Republic now operated under a
heightened sense of urgency. Despite Truman's efforts to find and
purge the Federal government of any communists or
communist-sympathizers, Adlai Stevenson was defeated by Dwight D.
Eisenhower in the Presidential election of 1952. For almost the entire
postwar period, Eisenhower had been courted by the conservative
and liberal establishment elites in the expectation that his
broad popularity could be converted into political power. They learned
that Eisenhower held strong opinions not merely on how to deal with
the Soviets and Chinese communists but on the relationship between the
individual citizen and government as well. Unlike many within the
traditional conservative ranks, Eisenhower feared the rising
concentration of political power and the economic imbalances inherent
in wealth concentration. To the extent he could, he was determined to
use the powers of the Presidency to reduce taxation and government
spending, encourage private enterprise, advance the cause of equality
of opportunity (although not the integration of African-Americans with
European-Americans) and tame inflation. He described himself as a
progressive who believed that "liberty is not possible for
one except as it is defined and limited by equal liberties for others."[165]
Despite the nobility of his expressed sentiments, however, Eisenhower
demonstrated he had joined the ranks of, had become one with, the
Republican Party mainstream -- the architects of interventionism on
behalf of the propertied and of the national security state. Their
selection of Eisenhower was opportunistic, to be sure, but also
indicated a grudging acceptance of the basic social welfare contract
hammered out by Roosevelt and Truman. By recapturing the Presidency
and a larger share of the Congress, they were also determined to make
sure their interests as agrarian and industrial landlords were
aggressively defended.
John Foster Dulles finally realized his ambition by becoming
Eisenhower's Secretary of State, an assignment made increasingly
difficult because of ongoing attacks on the reputations of career
foreign service officers. George Humphrey, a firm fiscal conservative,
joined the administration as Secretary of the Treasury. Eisenhower's
close advisers included banker Robert Cutler and economist Gabriel
Hauge.[166] Arthur Burns took time away from Columbia University to
head the Council of Economic Advisers. Key cabinet officers and others
formed Eisenhower's National Security Council (NSC), a group the
President charged with looking after the nation's economic as well as
military interests. Nelson Rockefeller was appointed chairman of an
Advisory Committee on Government Organization and periodically
attended Cabinet meetings and those of the NSC. In order to achieve
the objectives identified by Eisenhower, the NSC instituted a policy
of funding covert operations under the control of the CIA --
ostensibly directed against international communism but which took on
an increasingly perverse character. One perspective on the real
motives and consequences of this policy is offered by Eisenhower
biographer Blanche Cooke:
NSC ... ended all pretensions about territorial
integrity, national sovereignty, and international law. Covert
operatives were everywhere, and they were active. From bribery to
assassination, no activity was unacceptable short of nuclear war.
Named a moral crusade against communist tyranny, America's
commitment to lead the free world was a life-and-death contest for
access and control of the earth's resources.[167]
A highly-visible test of U.S. respect for the right of
self-determination among emerging nations came in 1951, when the
Iranian Prime Minister, Mohammed Mossadegh, announced his government
was nationalizing the assets of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company.
Eisenhower dispatched Averell Harriman to Iran in an effort to obtain
concessions from Mossadegh. When this effort failed, Iran became the
subject of a CIA covert operation to overthrow Mossadegh and install a
more docile regime.[168] Eisenhower later acknowledged that he "conferred
daily with officials of ... the Central Intelligence Agency and saw
reports from our representatives on the spot who were working actively
with the Shah's supporters."[169] Allen Dulles assigned to
Kermit Roosevelt (head of the CIA's Middle East Department) the task
of rescuing the Shah, whose full name was Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, and
watching over him until circumstances permitted his return to power.
Leonard Mosley explains how CIA money was used inside Iran:
The Iranian army was thoroughly bribed. The police force
was fixed. Some of Mossadeg[h]'s more powerful supporters were
quietly spirited away, their throats slit, their bodies buried in
the Elburz Mountains. Demonstrators were hired. A revolt was then
organized and orchestrated by the CIA, and, with hardly a shot
fired, the amiable and torpid Mossadeg[h], who had simply wanted to
get the international oil cartel off his country's back, was easily
toppled.[170]
Elsewhere in the Middle East, the U.S. State Department had been
instrumental in pressuring Aramco to yield to Saudi demands for what
Daniel Yergin describes (in the language of political economy) as "a
renegotiation of the original concession so that the governments
'take', its share of the rents, would be much increased."[171]
In a major concession to vested interests, virtually all of the
increase came not from Aramco revenues but from what previously had
gone to the U.S. Treasury. A similar agreement soon followed in
Kuwait. In Iran, the Shah had also pressed the British for substantive
concessions and increased royalties. Although a new agreement was
reached in mid-1949, the Iranian Parliament refused to sanction the
agreement and called for nationalization of Anglo-Iranian holdings.
The Iranian Prime Minister, who opposed nationalization, was
assassinated. Mossadegh became Prime Minister, and the Iranians
attempted to take control of the oil industry and end Old World
imperial intervention. Negotiations continued for a settlement of some
sort, with Averell Harriman sent by Truman to broker a deal. This
proved impossible, Mossadegh fearful that any compromise on his part
would bring his own assassination by radical Moslem nationalists. "Meanwhile,
in the oil fields and at the refinery," writes Daniel Yergin,
"operations were grinding to a stop. The British managed to
mount an embargo ... and the Bank of England suspended financial and
trade facilities that had been available to Iran."[172] By
the end of September, 1951, all British citizens were gone from Iran.
Oil exports ceased and production fell to less than five percent of
peak capacity. Without oil revenues, Iranian society became
ungovernable. Mossadegh was forced to declare martial law and
attempted to establish a dictatorship. All but his most ardent
supporters turned against him. In the face of evidence suggesting
Mossadegh was looking to the Soviets for support, Winston Churchill
(returned to power in Britain at the head of a Conservative
government) initiated a plan for his overthrow. Eisenhower was
convinced as well by John Foster Dulles that Mossedegh had to go, and
Roosevelt was charged with working out the details. After initial
failure, CIA involvement helped to gather enough support for the Shah
to drive Mossadegh from power. The U.S. then channeled around $110
million in economic and military assistance to the Shah, who dutifully
de-nationalized Iranian oil. Under heavy pressure from the U.S. and
British governments, a consortium of companies active in Middle East
oil production was formed and a new revenue-sharing agreement with
Iran negotiated. One of the great ironies, of course, is that the U.S.
government became a key agent in the prevention of populist and
nationalist factions from taking power after throwing off Old World
colonialism. Under the Shah, as in virtually all similar post-colonial
power grabs, neither participatory government nor broad distribution
of revenue generated by sale of natural resources were adopted as
governing principles. As under state socialism, these societies
operated almost entirely under elitist dictates and coercive
application of morally relativistic laws.
The French, meanwhile, had already received from Truman some $30
million to assist them in subduing Ho Chi Minh and the communist
nationalists in Indochina. By 1952, the French had spent $3.5 billion
and lost 50,000 men killed. Eisenhower, Dulles and others in the U.S.
government now worried that the whole of Asia would begin to fall --
like dominoes - to communist rule. "We as a nation could not
stand aloof," Eisenhower later recorded, "unless we
were ready to allow free nations to crumble, one by one, under
Communist pressure."[173] Despite a very clear assessment by
the U.S. State Department of continued French imperial designs and
policies, Eisenhower obtained nearly $400 million from the U.S.
Congress to allow them to continue the war in Southeast Asia. The
average American could have cared less. Even the Korean conflict, in
which "a few men chosen at random sacrificed their lives,"[174]
was of little interest to Americans absorbed by their newfound
prosperity. They had no room for communists at home but this in no way
meant Americans accepted the interventionist foreign policy being
advanced by their government.
Eisenhower, for his part, was determined to bring U.S. losses and
expenditures in one arena - Korea -- to an end. He was less than
anxious to again commit conventional forces to another conflict in
which the opposing force could retreat at will to "a
sanctuary from which he could operate without danger to himself."[175]
Eisenhower decided to give the North Koreans (and Chinese) a clear
demonstration that unless they moved quickly toward peace he was
prepared to destroy the Chinese bases in Manchuria. Although this
threat generated a resumption of negotiations for an armistice,
Syngman Rhee denounced the process as condemning millions of Koreans
to permanent communist subjugation and did his best to sabotage the
process. After long consultations with U.S. representatives, Rhee
finally issued a public announcement that he would adhere to the terms
of an armistice. At the end of July, 1953, the armies disengaged.
Relieved that war had not spread to Chinese territory, Eisenhower now
contemplated the beginning of detente with the new Soviet leadership.
Dulles and the ultra-nationalist anti-communists also reluctantly
accepted that China was, indeed, lost. What they now feared was
Chinese support of other communist-led uprisings in Southeast Asia.
Even before the Korean armistice, Eisenhower demonstrated he was
anxious to set the stage for rapprochement with the Soviets. On April
16, 1953, he delivered a speech to the American Society of Newspaper
Editors containing a broad statement of support for peace and world
reconstruction initiatives that called for Soviet participation.
Winston Churchill followed with a recommendation that the Soviets be
invited to a summit meeting with the social democracies.
Dulles, strongly influenced by Konrad Adenauer's anti-Soviet stance
and his own view that Soviet power in Europe could be broken with time
and the help of covert CIA actions, prevented the summit from
developing. Dulles also saw to it that Paul Nitze (brought to the
State Department by Dean Acheson, and the person responsible for
Eisenhower's speech, was sent packing. Nitze moved on to take a
position at the School for Advanced International Studies in
Washington, D.C., while Dulles -- ignoring the change in Soviet
leadership and the end to the U.S. nuclear monopoly - "gave a
speech at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York proclaiming the
doctrine of massive retaliation."[176] That was in January of
1954, a year in which Eisenhower's defense budget was being cut by $5
billion -- with even more cuts scheduled.
Despite Eisenhower's wariness of the corporate vested interests in
U.S. foreign policy, he unwittingly pulled the United States
government along a path that sanctioned moral relativism as a
necessary price for preserving and expanding the American System
(absent, it must be said, most of what the Democracy ostensibly stood
for). Keeping Iran out of the Soviet or Islamic nationalist orbits was
accomplished only by the use of the same kind of treachery for which
Stalinism was justly condemned. Multi-national business interests were
encouraged to form cartels under the guise of becoming economic agents
in the anti-communist crusade. With John Foster Dulles as Secretary of
State and his brother Allen as head of the CIA, U.S. embassies,
military outposts and other offices became centers of intelligence
gathering, espionage and covert operations. A tunnel was dug into East
Berlin to tap into East German telephones. The U-2 spy planes were
constructed and pilots (U.S. and British) were trained to fly over
Soviet territory. The CIA planned an invasion of Guatemala to
overthrow the government of Jacobo Arbenz Guzman, who they viewed as a
communist and a threat to anti-communist stability in Latin America.
Peace-threatening events now seemed to erupt in rapid-fire
succession. Even the Old World social democracies were still
struggling for financial stability, their citizens impatient with
attempts to resuscitate costly imperial adventures. Even the French
had finally faced reality and agreed to a withdrawal from North
Vietnam.
An entirely new dynamic was added to global tensions after the
Israelis launched a pre-emptive strike into Egypt on October 29, 1956
(only days after Hungarian students and workers began an open
resistance to Soviet occupation). Anthony Eden, who succeeded the
retiring Churchill in April of 1955 as Britain's Prime Minister, had
been waiting for an opportunity to overthrow Nasser and retake control
of the nationalized Suez Canal Company. For Eden, loss of Suez was a
blow to British prestige he was loathe to accept, particularly from
someone he considered to be a dictator with territorial aspirations
achieved at British expense. The French (angry that Nasser was
agitating against them in Algeria) joined in on the crusade, after
first arming the Israelis with modern fighter jets and other weapons.
U.S. interests were interlocked with the Cold War and fear of shocks
to the global economic system. When the fighting began, the British
and French demanded that Egypt pull its forces away from the Canal
Zone. Nasser refused, and the two European powers promptly destroyed
the Egyptian air force. Egyptian ground forces were smashed by the
Israelis and the Sinai occupied. The only Egyptian success was in
sinking enough ships in the Canal to close it down for months after
the fighting stopped.
With the attention of the Western leaders focused on the Middle East,
Khrushchev dispatched an army of some 200,000 ground troops, supported
by 2,500 tanks and other armored vehicles, into Hungary. At the
direction of Eisenhower, the CIA was forced to sit on the sidelines
while the Soviets destroyed Hungarian resistance. The Hungarians
sought assistance from the UN, but the Soviets vetoed a resolution
introduced by the United States. The best that Eisenhower could do was
to offer refuge to any Hungarians who managed to escape. The UN was
more effective in responding to the Middle Eastern crisis, where
neither U.S. nor Soviet interests were served by a return of French
and British power in conjunction with an expansion of Israeli
territory at Arab expense. On November 2, the UN General Assembly
adopted a cease fire resolution and proposed establishing a UN police
force to operate in the Canal Zone. The Soviets threatened
intervention on the side of Egypt, and Eisenhower declared the U.S.
would employ economic sanctions[177] against Britain and Israel. These
threats were strong enough to force British agreement to a withdrawal
in favor of a UN Emergency Force.
Another crisis had come and gone, leaving the root causes of conflict
unresolved. Arabs as a whole wanted neither Old nor New World imperial
prerogatives interfering with their claims to sovereignty. Within and
between their own very tribal societies, Arab factions continued to
struggle for power. Modernization threatened ancient traditions and
the Moslem-dominated hierarchical structure. Yet, the defeat of the
Egyptian military demonstrated to many Arabs the need for the
development of modern infrastructure. "Suez," writes
John Spanier, "thus resulted in the collapse of British power
in the Middle East, the strengthening of Arab nationalism, and the
consolidation of Egyptian-Russian links."[178] At the same
time, Israelis had demonstrated their ability and willingness to
defend their own claim to territorial sovereignty from surrounding
Arab states.
The United States walked away from its one opportunity to materially
influence future events in the Middle East when John Foster Dulles
withdrew U.S. financial support from the Aswan High Dam project.
Egypt's ambassador in the U.S. inadvertently lessened the pressure on
Dulles by suggesting the Soviets were standing in the wings ready to
provide financing and technical assistance. Without U.S. participation
in the project the World Bank also backed away. Nasser was left with
only one ready source of revenue to complete the dam --
nationalization of the Suez Canal Company. Once the British and French
finally withdrew from the Canal Zone, the waterway was cleared and
brought back into operation by April, 1957. Nasser was walking a fine
line of non-alignment. He arrested communists in Egypt and outlawed
the Communist party, yet accepted Soviet assistance in building Aswan.
Khrushchev was also uncomfortable with this relationship, angering
Nasser by suggesting the Egyptian leader failed to grasp the global
political situation or the inevitable ascendancy of communism. A
staunch nationalist, Nasser held no sympathy for the Soviet form of
state socialism and would stomach no attempts by communists to
undermine his power.
Elsewhere, the Arab world was in a state up upheaval. In April of
1957 King Hussein dissolved the Jordanian government and assumed full
control. Hussein faced broad opposition from Arab nationalists but
emerged solidly in control. Egypt and Syria were at the same time in
the process of creating the United Arab Republic. A coup in Iraq
brought General Kassem to power at the head of a regime determined to
challenge Nasser's self-proclaimed role as leader of the Arab
nationalist movement. The United States and Britain responded by
sending troops into Lebanon and Jordan, respectively, to help
stabilize these nominally pro-Western governments. In the midst of
this chaotic situation, John McCloy (a key figure attached to the
Rockefeller oil interests) was dispatched by Eisenhower and Dulles to
gain agreement from Saudi Arabia's King Ibn Saud to distance himself
from Kassem and Nasser. Kim Philby, now working as a correspondent for
The Economist and The Observer, as well as Soviet
intelligence, also arrived in Lebanon on September 6, 1956 to witness
the final loss of British influence in the area. A new era was
beginning, described by Philby's biographer as one in which "Pax
Britannica was replaced by Pax Americana and Pax Sovieticus, the SIS
by the CIA and the KGB."[179] Philby had done his best to
over the span of decades to contribute to that end.
DIGGING IN FOR THE LONG WAIT
On the evening of January 17, 1960, Dwight D. Eisenhower stepped
before the citizens of the United States to issue a stern warning,
letting them know the nation had been committed to a dangerous new
course, one that ran counter to the history and experience of
the Democracy:
Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United
States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares
could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we
can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we
have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast
proportions. ...
This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large
arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence
-- economic, political, even spiritual -- is felt in every city,
every state house, every office of the federal government. We
recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not
fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources, and
livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our
society.
In the councils of government we must guard against the acquisition
of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the
military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise
of misplaced power exists and will persist.
We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our
liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for
granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the
proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of
defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and
liberty may prosper together.[180]
Eisenhower had, of course, contributed mightily to the very
military-industrial complex he now feared. Even more damaging was the
fact that during his administration the CIA became an instrument of
the national security state, exercising broad and virtually
uncontrollable powers previously justified only under wartime
conditions. One wonders how the same person, reflecting on his years
in office, could subsequently write -- and honestly believe -- that
U.S. "purposes abroad have been the establishment of
universal peace with justice, free choice for all peoples, rising
levels of human well-being, and the development and maintenance of
frank, friendly, and mutually helpful contacts with all nations
willing to work for parallel objectives."[181] He was
prepared to admit, however, that many mistakes had been made,
particularly with regard to the peoples of the south American nations,
where "the masses ... felt that we were supporting and
strengthening the prevailing social order, which in their view denied
them simple justice."[182] The truth was, that securing and
maintaining even a semblance of the just society in much of the world
proved well beyond the capacity or interests of U.S. political
leaders, Eisenhower included. And, in the anti-communist atmosphere of
the 1950s, far too many intellectuals and academicians succumbed to
moral relativism, abandoning principle in order to rationalize U.S.
interventionism.
In the heat of the battle, moral relativism spilled over into the
educational system, gradually displacing educators such as Robert
Hutchins who believed that formal education embodied the inculcation
of values and citizenship. In 1968, he observed that "it is
naive, or even disingenuous, to expect an educational system to
develop intelligent human beings if all the forces of the culture are
directed ... to developing producers and consumers," adding, "education
is often resorted to as a means of avoiding the thought, effort, and
risks of dislocation that a frontal attack on social problems would
require."[183] The downtrodden were somehow expected by the
defenders of the status quo to rise above their economic circumstances
and the inequality of opportunity imposed upon them by existing
socio-political arrangements and institutions. Some -- the
extraordinary, the very talented, the most disciplined and determined
-- succeeded. Most did not. Yet to acquire a formal education and a
degree from an institution of higher learning was accepted by almost
everyone as the key to a better life.
The architects of Liberalism also realized that the new
technological age demanded a work force with well-developed skills and
a societal value system that stressed cooperation over competition,
inclusion instead of segregation. Looking ahead to the second half of
the twentieth century, the planners and policy analysts argued that
the Democracy would have to undergo an enormous transformation
if workers, business owners and government agencies were to work
toward the same national objectives. Business owners, in particular,
would have to begin taking a longer-term view and look at their
workers as important contributors to the production process rather
than as interchangeable inputs. For many U.S. companies, top-down
management was so ingrained they would never awaken to the emerging
challenges. More than a few would lose their markets to more efficient
competitors and fail. Others would be acquired by more profitable
enterprises eager to expand into new areas of wealth production. For
others, the foreign policy interests of their government would provide
a prolonged (and often weakening) source of subsidy.
Leadership in the global arena demanded of the United States a
posture unfamiliar to the overwhelming majority of its citizens, only
a fraction of whom had ever traveled abroad. Of those who acquired
intimate knowledge of other societies and political systems, only a
small percentage came into government service or business. Within the
general population, the challenges of starting a family and earning a
living tended to divorce people from any deep interest in the
political process or world affairs. Interest in obtaining a college
education was mushrooming, and a growing number of college graduates
came from working-class families to taken on management positions
within corporate America. Others went on to graduate school to pursue
degrees in medicine, law, engineering and the sciences. Most were,
however, inwardly focused on careers and achieving financial
well-being rather than on societal improvement. And, as Robert
Hutchins warned, the curricula at far too many colleges and
universities shifted away from intellectual to professional
development. The younger generation saw what the status quo could
provide, and they wanted their share of the action. They were not
interested in making waves or challenging the right of the
Establishment to run things. Too few were listening when Dean
Acheson (accepting the annual Freedom Award from Freedom House) issued
a stern warning to his fellow citizens:
Foreign policy is not a disembodied thing. The outward
strength of a democracy can be no greater than its inward strength.
As we at home make progress in achieving the promise of our society
-- as we encourage the individual's opportunities -- as we
strengthen the foundations of justice and freedom -- so shall we
demonstrate that democracy is a vital, a progressive, a hopeful way
of life. The vitality of our free institutions at home, of our
individual and community life, will determine the influence we can
exert abroad in support of freedom.[184]
Four years later, the same award was presented to Edward R. Murrow
for his role in discrediting the tactics (and personal character) of
Senator Joe McCarthy. William F. Buckley, Jr., who defended McCarthy's
sincerity and nobility of purpose if not his theatrics, remarked that
Murrow's highly selective use of McCarthy on film presented an
entirely unbalanced picture of the Senator's behavior. "I
never knew anything McCarthy had said that could equal in vileness
some of the things that were said about him,"[185] Buckley
later wrote. If those close to Murrow are to be believed, he was also
troubled by the difficult task of fairly depicting the true nature of
McCarthy in a half hour television program. Already, the challenge of
containing the manipulative power of television struck Murrow as an
awesome responsibility. After the broadcast Murrow received notes of
congratulations from those who occupied the Center or
Left-of-Center -- including Chief Justice Earl Warren, Clark
Clifford and Albert Einstein. Thousands of ordinary citizens from all
across the United States also sent words of approval and appreciation.
Public opinion now began to work against McCarthy, and in December his
colleagues in the U.S. Senate voted overwhelmingly to censure him.
Ironically, the fall of Joe McCarthy came as a welcomed relief even
to many ardent anti-communists. For, as McCarthy biographer David M.
Oshinsky concludes: "He had a devastating effect on
government morale, and he made America look ridiculous -- and
frightening -- in the eyes of much of the world."[186] Walter
Lippmann clarifies:
The heart of the damage is the fact that the government
has allowed itself to be intimidated by an ambitious and ruthless
demagogue. This damage, permitting ourselves to be intimidated, can
be repaired only when it has been proved to ourselves and to the
world abroad that nobody is afraid any longer.
...McCarthy's power is built not upon the Constitutional right of
Congress to investigate but upon a flagrant abuse of that right. The
abuse of that right is unchecked because the Senate is not observing
faithfully its Constitutional obligations and because of an
unnecessary acquiescence by the President in the abuse. ...
One of the contributing reasons is that the party bosses have
regarded McCarthy as a political asset. Another is that a large
number of the senators have been afraid of him, afraid of being
attacked personally or politically by him. Another contributing
reason is that many senators have not known how to meet the charge
that only Communists are opposed to McCarthy, and have reluctantly
had to admit to themselves that the cheapest and easiest way not to
look red or pink was to be yellow.[187]
No one really knew with any degree of certainty just how deeply the
communist menace penetrated the Democracy; that was one of the
things that kept McCarthyism going. A large enough number of former
communists had come forward with their stories and information about
others to perpetuate the atmosphere of fear. In response to this
challenge, the Fund for the Republic supported preparation of a
detailed study under the direction of Clinton L. Rossiter of Cornell
University on the influence of communism in the United States.
Rossiter was at the time working on a separate project, a history and
analysis of the meaning of conservatism,[188] yet found time
to oversee the project. The first volume of the study, written by
ex-communist Theodore Draper and titled The Roots of American
Communism, appeared early in 1958. Five more volumes were
published by 1960.
By 1954, McCarthy had become a liability to the Republican Party, a
fact even Richard Nixon acknowledged. Both parties campaigned as
staunchly anti-communist during the 1954 elections, with the Democrats
gaining control of the House of Representatives and the Senate. The
mood of the country was changing. Over the next few years, the U.S.
Supreme Court ruled against many state sedition acts and laws designed
to restrict free speech. In the aftermath of the McCarthy hearings,
Dean Acheson reminded Americans "that people who allow
themselves to be frightened into hysteria and general distrust make
fools of themselves, lose the respect of others, and usually
perpetrate grave injustice."[189] He accepted responsibility,
on behalf of the Truman administration, for failing to recognize the
grave dangers inherent in a broad loyalty program using "secret
evidence and secret informers"[190] to condemn individuals
without an opportunity to face their accusers. Another serious
consequence of McCarthyism on the course of U.S. policymaking is
identified by historian Adam B. Ulam:
Domestically, it set back what had been a growing
maturity and sophistication of both the intellectual community and
the public at large on the subject of Communism and radical
ideologies in general. By 1948, Communism was a most insignificant,
even picturesque, feature of the American scene. The broader
spectrum of ritualistic radicalism with its toleration and concealed
admiration for Communism had suffered what seemed like an
irretrievable collapse with the fiasco of the Progressive party that
same year. McCarthyism can be charged with restoring some the
respectability of the extreme Left by endowing it with a halo of
martyrdom. It is especially on the sensitive ego of the intellectual
community that McCarthyism left a scar. The criteria of loyalty and
adherence to the American form of government would for many never
lose the partly ridiculous and partly sinister connotations they had
acquired through the Senator's antics. The time would come when any
call for restraint or self-examination brought forth from the
academic and information-media community visceral reactions and
cries of "McCarthyism." Thus the lasting damage to the
thinking processes of a democracy.[191]
In the aftermath of these convulsions, Eisenhower emerged as the
clear and undisputed leader of mainstream America. Despite the
continued investigations of Attorney General Herbert Bronwell,
Eisenhower asserted he had no sympathy for McCarthy "and his
cult"[192] in their search for communists in every corner of
the United States. More importantly, with McCarthyism discredited,
Eisenhower could now safely proceed with his own agenda.
State Socialism: The Struggle for Legitimacy
After the death of Stalin in 1953, the Soviet Premiership was given
over with significantly reduced power to Georgy Malenkov (then a
deputy premier). The key Soviet leaders also reduced the size of the
Presidium of the Central Committee from thirty to ten members. In
addition to Malenkov, the Presidium included Beria, Molotov,
Khrushchev, Bulganin and five others. Khrushchev was also appointed
First Secretary of the Communist Party's Central Committee, a position
that would involve him in regional and local affairs -- and
particularly in the implementation of agricultural policy, where
reforms he introduced successfully yielded (in the short run)
increased output and some improvement in rural living conditions.
Beria, as head of Stalin's secret police, was too dangerous to be
permitted to survive. Despite his friendship with Malenkov, he was
arrested in June, put on trial and then executed.
The Soviet leaders now faced the difficult task of institutionalizing
their own positions, acquired directly or indirectly as a result of
Stalin's many purges. The Soviet public was demanding the release of
millions of political prisoners and accountability for the brutality.
By the end of 1955, something like 20,000 former party and government
officials were released and
rehabilitated. Between 7 and 8 million others were released
over the next two years. Their return promised to have a dramatic
impact on the Soviet socio-political hierarchy, as described by two
Soviet dissidents in 1976:
[T]he millions of people who had survived but not
forgotten the camps and who had now rejoined the mainstream of
ordinary life, as well as the millions of others whose fathers,
brothers, or husbands had been rehabilitated, became a major source
of ferment in Soviet society and began to demand ironclad guarantees
of due process of law and absolute safeguards against any
possibility of a return to repression and terror.[193]
This, the Soviet leadership was not yet prepared to do. What we know
as the KGB[194] was subsequently created to replace Beria's secret
police organization. The KGB (through retirement or demotion of senior
officers) was purged of Stalinists and its powers severely curtailed.
Soviet courts were given the responsibility for all trials and
sentencing of those convicted of crimes, and the prison system was
transferred to the Ministry of Internal Affairs. These measures
removed the fear of arbitrary arrest and punishment by the central
government and restored considerable power and autonomy to regional
and local committees. Many of these changes tended to bring national
attention and prominence to Khrushchev.
The process of de-Stalinization reached its climax in 1956 at the
Twentieth Party Congress, where Khrushchev seized the opportunity to
deliver a stinging denunciation of the Stalinist regime. This speech
shook the communist world and contributed to the uprisings against
Stalinist leaders in Poland and Hungary. Khrushchev was also
instrumental in getting the Soviet leadership to think and act
pragmatically. His travels outside the Soviet Union exposed him to the
technological accomplishments taking place within the social
democracies. Returning, he strongly encouraged innovation and funding
of scientific research. He advanced a plan to significantly expand the
amount of land under cultivation, with Kazakhstan targeted for
large-scale settlement. Vast numbers of tractors and other types of
farm equipment were shipped to the East during 1954 and 1955. Yet,
that first year turned out to be disastrous because of an absence of
rainfall, with the result that Khrushchev's position was jeopardized.
The weather saved him in 1956, the rains falling in the East rather
than the West. The Soviet Union actually experienced its largest grain
harvest ever. Unfortunately for Soviet farmers, however, decisions
over what crops to grow and what agricultural methods to employ
remained the province of the Central Committee. Khrushchev, extremely
anxious to expand the nation's supply of corn, had the Central
Committee order farmers to plant corn (without regard to soil and
weather conditions).
The forces unleashed by Khrushchev were impossible to control. People
already lived at the edge of subsistence under state socialism. Their
hopes were temporarily raised by Khrushchev's populist initiatives,
but they were demanding too much, too soon, and the Soviet leadership
turned conservative. Hardliners joined forces in an attempt to remove
Khrushchev as First Secretary, but failed. Khrushchev's supporters
responded en masse to what they saw as an effort to once again subvert
the Soviet constitution and re-establish an elitist hierarchy.
Malenkov, Molotov and six others were removed from the Presidium and
assigned to obscure positions without influence. Even Zhukov, loyal to
Khrushchev but feared as a potential rival to civilian authority, lost
his position as Minister of Defense. Fedor Burlatsky recalls that
Zhukov's declaration against the old guard - "The army is
against this decision, and not one tank will move without my orders."[195]
-- was enough to seal his fate. In doing so, however, Khrushchev
revealed a serious flaw in his character that eventually brought about
his own loss of power:
Khrushchev always preferred to associate with flatterers
than with those who genuinely supported his reforms. This is why he
surrounded himself with men ... who looked starry-eyed at him and
[were] willing to carry out any assignment. This is also why he was
not impressed by independent and strong-minded people. Khrushchev
was too self-confident to rely on others. ...Those people who deep
down did not share his reformist views and thought them incompetent
and even eccentric got rid of him at the first convenient moment,
and he had no allies to fall back on.[196]
For the time being, however, Khrushchev's power and stature continued
to grow. In 1958 he added the Council of Ministers chairmanship to his
position as First Secretary. And then, his hasty decisions on
agriculture returned to threaten him once again. In an effort to make
the state farms more self-sufficient, Khrushchev ordered the wholesale
transfer of all equipment to the farms. Many state farms were
unprepared to absorb the costs of purchasing, housing and maintaining
tractors and other equipment. Prices the farmers were required to pay
were double what the government equipment agency had paid, leaving
little funds for other projects or wages to farm workers. Many
technically-trained workers migrated to the cities rather than work on
the farms, creating a serious shortage of equipment operators and
repairmen. Almost immediately, equipment fell into disrepair and new
equipment coming off production lines sat waiting for buyers. Over and
over, Khrushchev displayed his inability to think decisions through.
Farmers were committed to achieving impossible increases in output,
which resulted in serious misallocation of manpower and resources.
Large tracts of land, ravaged by wind and inappropriate methods of
cultivation, succumbed to soil erosion. The stage was set for
wholesale disaster. Then, after visiting the United States in 1959,
Khrushchev embarked on another departure from traditional Soviet
planning. He moved the Ministry of Agriculture out of Moscow and
directed its staff to create a model farm to test new agricultural
methods. Once again, Khrushchev paid no attention to detail and
ordered the decentralization of agricultural planning almost without
advance preparation; more than half of the senior ministry officers
and staff resigned.
Despite his poor decision-making, Khrushchev recognized that only by
virtue of materially improving the standard of well-being of Soviet
citizens would his nation's experiment in state socialism be measured
a success. Soviet progress would ultimately be measured against that
of the United States. Relations between the two countries was bound to
remain competitive -- a competition that encompassed nationalistic
pride, ideological struggle and positioning for dominance within the
global hegemony of nation-states. Stalin was gone, the conflict in
Korea suspended and the United States Presidency occupied by a man
respected as a primary architect of the Allied victory against the
German Reich. With all the problems facing them at home and within
their satellite states, the Soviet leadership needed and welcomed a
reprieve from direct confrontation. Solzhenitsyn, writing in 1980,
described U.S. diplomats, policy analysts and scholars as
extraordinarily naive, disingenuous, or both in their assessment of
Soviet aspirations. Men such as Averell Harriman and George Kennan, in
suggesting that U.S. policy ought to be designed to strengthen Kremlin
moderates, asked the West to believe the impossible. Appeasement, he
argued, had allowed Soviet leaders to tighten their grip on a wholly
oppressed population. "It is not the average Russian who
feels compelled to hold other nations captive, to keep Eastern Europe
encaged, to seize and arm far-off lands," wrote Solzhenitsyn;
"this answers only the malignant needs of the Politboro."[197]
The Soviet leadership had done all it could to stamp out Russian
nationalism, the resurrection of which Solzhenitsyn prayed for as the
only force powerful enough to bring down communism. Having suffered so
many years in the gulag archipelago where millions had perished,
Solzhenitsyn was as ignorant of the mentality of Americans as they
were of the many Soviet peoples. Eisenhower knew that the people
Americans cared most about were themselves. Unless the security and
the sovereignty of the United States was threatened, Americans would
not long stand for the sacrifice of the nation's sons and daughters to
fight on behalf of others. Two decades later, with more than four
million U.S. troops committed to battle in Southeast Asia, and the
Democracy in crisis, Lyndon Johnson still had not learned this lesson.
The day after Johnson announced his decision not to stand for
re-election, Eisenhower wrote this in his private journal:
To me it seems obvious that the President is at war with
himself and while trying vigorously to defend the actions and
decisions he has made in the past, and urging the nation to pursue
these purposes regardless of cost, he wants to be excused from the
burden of the office to which he was elected.[198]
Examining his own Southeast Asia decisions and actions from the
perspective of 1965 and rapid escalation of U.S. involvement,
Eisenhower stuck to the same argument he had made over Korea. The
nation should never commit its manpower and financial resources to a
conflict unless prepared to do whatever was necessary to win both the
war and the peace. To do otherwise was to jeopardize the Democracy:
The Communists know, as we do, that the security of a
nation depends upon a balanced strength comprised of morale,
economic productivity, and military power. The delicately balanced
and complex problem constantly posed to us of the United States was,
and still is, this: to sustain a national determination to defend
freedom with all we have, to devise and maintain indefinitely a
military posture of such effectiveness that the Communists will
abandon any thought of all-out military attack against us or our
allies, and to support this military capacity so prudently as to
avoid undermining our economic soundness. We need an adequate
defense, but every arms dollar we spend above adequacy has a
long-term weakening effect upon the nation and its security.[199]
Fortunately for the United States and the world's other social
democracies, totalitarian state socialism proved to be an extremely
flawed societal framework. Centralized economic planning could not
produce anything close to an adequate supply of housing, food,
education, medical care, transportation systems or other goods and
services rapidly becoming associated with modern, industrialized
societies. The ability of Soviet leaders to mobilize the population
declined in direct proportion to their condemnation of the Stalinist
regime's reliance on force. They bought stability by asking little of
most citizens and, as Solzhenitsyn observed, making sure the cities
received a disproportionate share of whatever was produced.
Agrarian and industrial landlordism, softened by participatory
government and the spirit of community, proved to be far more
resilient than state socialism. Social democracy has had the virtues
of an investigative press and media, an expanding transnational view
of the earth as one ecosystem and independent challenges to government
policy analysts. As the great powers settled in to wait out the end of
the Cold War, a parallel struggle also began over what set of values
would govern control over the natural environment. To suggest,
however, that the status quo was aggressively attacked from positions
developed from objectively derived moral principles would be to
suggest too much. Ideology and moral relativism dominated the thinking
of even the most radical anti-establishment factions.
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