19.
The second response to Stalin’s acquisition of the atomic bomb was a policy reassessment that was to reinforce, like the domino theory, the oversimplification and distortion of American thinking during the Cold War. Known as NSC-68 after its designation as a National Security Council memorandum, the paper’s patron was Dean Acheson and its principal author was a man in the Acheson mold, Paul Nitze. An Easterner and 1928 graduate of Harvard, Nitze was a clever financier who had made a fortune as an investment banker with the tony New York firm of Dillon Read & Co. at a time when others were reaping bankruptcy. He had first been recruited for government service as a high-level economic administrator during the Second World War by James Forrestal, one of his associates at Dillon Read. As he had no need to return to New York and make more money, he decided that he liked the life of a Washington insider and stayed. Nitze was a polished, articulate man with a knack for convincing himself and others that he had knowledge of a subject when he, in fact, had little or none. He also had a talent for sensing and projecting fear of Communism and the Soviet Union, which was to serve him well in a long and distinguished career as a senior Washington official and public figure.
By 1949, George Kennan and Acheson, who had succeeded Marshall as secretary of state, had had a falling out. Kennan had been having second thoughts about the image of a relentlessly militant Soviet Union that he had portrayed in his Long Telegram and was disturbed about the hardening of the attitudes that his famous missive had sanctioned. He had come to believe that Russia did not constitute a military threat to Western Europe. He thought that containment ought to rely on political and economic means rather than a larger military establishment and the increasing militarization of foreign policy that he was seeing. Acheson had in turn come to regard him as naive. “There were times when I felt like a court jester,” Kennan said in his memoirs. In January 1950, Acheson replaced him as head of the department’s Policy Planning Staff with Nitze, who was of Acheson’s way of thinking. Nitze, Acheson said in his memoirs, was “a joy to work with because of his clear, incisive mind.”
“The Soviet Union, unlike previous aspirants to hegemony,” Nitze’s policy paper said, “is animated by a new fanatic faith antithetical to our own, and seeks to impose its absolute authority over the rest of the world.” Russia was “inescapably militant because it possesses and is possessed by a world-wide revolutionary movement” and thus this goal of world conquest was inherent in the “fundamental design of the Kremlin.” Its “assault on free institutions is worldwide now, and in the context of the present polarization of power a defeat of free institutions anywhere is a defeat everywhere.” The United States was being “mortally challenged.” The year of maximum danger, Nitze predicted, would be 1954, when the Soviet Union could possess an arsenal of 200 atomic bombs, sufficient for a surprise attack “of such weight that the United States must have substantially increased … air, ground and sea strength, atomic capabilities, and air and civil defenses” if it was to survive. The buildup he called for would add about $50 billion to the military budgets that Truman, relying on the U.S. monopoly of the bomb, had been holding to a minimum to keep inflation reined in, just $13 billion in fiscal 1949. Acheson admitted in his memoirs that Nitze had been encouraged to employ scary language in order to spook the administration into action, but there is no indication in his memoirs or elsewhere that he and others at the top doubted the basic positions stated in the paper. Truman signed off on it and the NSC adopted it as national policy in April 1950. The president postponed its costly military buildup, however, again out of concern for inflation and fear that a Republican-controlled Congress would not approve the additional funds.
The two figures in the administration who did not agree with Nitze’s masterwork were its two specialists on the Soviet Union, Kennan and Chip Bohlen. Both now believed that Stalin was generally guided by caution in his foreign policy calculations and was sometimes just reacting to Western moves. Their dissent was of no consequence. The men of power were not interested in what the men of knowledge had to say. Their ears were attuned to the skirl of a different piper.
The statesmen of the United States were permitting their exaggerated estimate of the military threat from Stalin’s Russia, their preconceived notions of falling dominoes, and a Soviet Union bent on world conquest through an international Communist movement, which it directed, to deprive them of a realistic view of the postwar world they were seeking to manage. The world they created in their minds, and enshrined in dogma through policy pronouncements like NSC-68, was a Manichaean place divided into opposing camps of light and darkness. That world was an illusion. To comprehend the real postwar world, one had to understand that while it was bipolar in terms of the two major powers, within the Communist sphere, as within the non-Communist one, there were national leaders with their own agendas who were prepared to act on those agendas regardless of what Moscow or Washington thought. The clue that the Communist sphere was also a complicated world, a world of varying shades of gray rather than black, was the phenomenon of national Communism, which appeared as early as 1948 when Tito of Yugoslavia openly broke with Stalin and went his own way. He was regarded as an aberration, not as evidence that there might be other Communist leaders like him, authoritarian and socialist in their domestic politics but independent in foreign policy and thus capable of being weaned from Moscow.
The statesmen of one administration after another, from Truman down through Dwight Eisenhower and John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, clung to this delusion that they faced an international Communist conspiracy, despite increasingly blatant evidence to the contrary. Acheson departed from the norm in only one sortie in 1949 when he thought he might be able to entice Mao Tse-tung away from Moscow because the Chinese revolutionaries had won their war entirely on their own, without any help from the Red Army. Acheson also tended to regard Mao differently because the United States had wasted so many hundreds of millions of dollars in economic and military aid on the venal regime of the reactionary Chinese dictator, Chiang Kai-shek. The attempt was halfhearted and ended quickly, however, as the right-wing Republicans in Congress brought Acheson under ferocious attack for allegedly “losing China” and Mao turned increasingly anti-American.
Otherwise, the delusion ruled. Years later, after Mao had quarreled openly and bitterly with Stalin’s successor, Nikita Khrushchev, and the Chinese and the Russians were close to hostilities in the so-called Sino-Soviet split, American statesmen continued to act as if they faced a Communist monolith. In 1961, as John Kennedy took the United States to war in Vietnam by dispatching military advisers, helicopter companies, and pilots and fighter-bombers to stiffen the regime of Washington’s man in Saigon, the South Vietnamese dictator, Ngo Dinh Diem, against the Communist-led guerrillas who were threatening to overthrow him, the U.S. Army security clearance form caught the enduring perspective of American statesmen. The form referred to all the Communist nations as the “Sino-Soviet bloc.”
Given these American delusions, Ho Chi Minh, the Vietnamese national leader in Hanoi, had no chance of being recognized in Washington for what he was, an Asian version of Tito. Ho, in particular, held a sad belief that American statesmen were perspicacious enough to distinguish between different Communist regimes. In the fall of 1963, when American deaths in Vietnam were still well under 200, he predicted to a Polish diplomat in Hanoi that the United States was too wise and pragmatic a nation to lavish lives and treasure on a war in his country. “Neither you nor I,” he said to his Polish visitor, “know the Americans well, but what we do know of them, what we have read and heard about them, suggests that they are more practical and clear-sighted than other capitalist nations. They will not pour their resources into Vietnam endlessly. One day they will take pencil in hand and begin figuring. Once they really begin to analyze our ideas seriously, they will come to the conclusion that it is possible and even worthwhile to live in peace with us.” No American leader with the power to decide ever did take pencil in hand and begin figuring. It would finally take the disillusionment of the tragic and unnecessary war and the lives of the 58,229 whose names would be inscribed on the black granite wall of the Vietnam Memorial in Washington to bring American statesmen up against reality. In retrospect, one wonders why they clung so long to their delusion.