The Wise Men

Walter Isaacson & Evan Thomas, “The Wise Men, Simon & Schuster,” 1986, 744 pp plus 64 pgs of notes.

This is a must-read book for anyone wanting to understand and engage in intelligent discussion of our past foreign policy; it should be required reading for anyone working in our State Dept. This book documents how this small group of six men, more than most, made the U.S. assume the responsibility of a world power—the Marshall Plan remains their greatest achievement—Vietnam their greatest failure. In any event, Watergate and Vietnam had given a bad name to the private exercise of power. No longer could a small group of like-mined men sit down and quietly decide for the country; now TV cameras and congressional committees follow decision makers everywhere, and thus freeze them. For these six, they had, by that time, outlived their usefulness; they had no understanding of the “third world” and did not try to learn.

My Notes:
Pg. 25: The six wise-men: Averell Harriman, Robert Lovett, Dean Acheson, John McCloy, George Kennan, Charles Bohlen: two bankers, two lawyers, two diplomats. These men represent a cross section of the postwar policy Establishment. The values they embodied were nurtured in prep schools, at college clubs, in the boardrooms of Wall Street, and at dinner parties in Washington. They shared a vision of public service as a lofty calling and an aversion to the pressures of partisan politics. They had a pragmatic and businesslike preference for realpolitik over ideology. As internationalists who respected the manners and traditions of Europe, they waged a common struggle against the pervasive isolationism of their time. Their world view was shaped by a fascination with the emergence of the Soviet Union as a world power and an unabashed belief in America’s sacred destiny to take the lead in protecting freedom around the globe. Regarding service as an honor and imbued with a sense of noblesse oblige, they glided easily between private and public careers. As individuals, and even more so as a group, they embody what has been called the American Establishment.

Pg. 29: All these men were internationalists, and more specifically Atlanticists (they had little interest in what is termed today “third world” countries unless it involved competition with the Soviets). These same men all agreed on the policy of containing the spread of Soviet Communism by force and diplomacy.

Pg. 164: In December 1934, Sergei Kirov, the party boss in Leningrad, was shot. Although it later became apparent that Stalin had ordered the assassination, he used the incident to embark on a series of show trials and purges that terrorized the Russian populace.

Pg. 177: Keenan’s contact in the German chancery informed Keenan of the secret agreement in the 1939 Ribbentrop pact with Russia which defined how Poland would be divided between them.

Pg. 181: Stimson had declared in 1929 that “Gentlemen do not read other people’s mail,” when a proposal was made to set up a State Department intelligence service.

Pg. 208: How effective in reducing the military capacity of Germany was the intensive bombing? All in all, German production in 1944 was three times what it was at the beginning of the war. Especially fruitless had been the attempt to destroy German morale by the bombings. The same ineffective effect on morale of bombing civilian targets was observed in London and later in Hanoi. (I suppose you could add Stalingrad, firebombing in Japan, etc…)

Pg. 237: Treasury Secretary Morgenthau (1944) presented a plan to FDR to turn Germany into a country primarily agricultural and pastoral after the war. At first FDR & Churchill went along with this; FDR retreated when faced with the incensed Stimson and McCloy when they heard of it.

Pg. 242: Churchill met with Stalin and suggested settling their differences in the Balkans. Blatantly carving out spheres, Churchill wrote the amount of influence London and Moscow would have in each country: 90 percent predominance in Rumania for Russia, 90 percent in Greece for Britain, 75 percent in Bulgaria for Russia, and a 50 – 50 split in Yugoslavia and Hungary. Harriman discovered what was going on but it was unclear what Stalin would conclude.

Pg. 270: In February of 1945, most Americans polled said that they foresaw postwar problems with Britain as being more serious than those with Russia. By May of 1945, that situation had reversed.

Pg. 294: At a meeting at the end of May, the idea of offering to allow the Japanese to keep their emperor had been pressed on Stimson and McCloy by Under Secretary of State Grew, who had served as ambassador to Japan. McCloy and Marshall discussed how the atomic bomb might be used. Marshall suggested that the first target should be a naval installation. If no complete result was derived from the effect of that, Marshall thought we ought to designate a number of large manufacturing areas from which people would be warned to leave. (Even the scientists were not fully aware of the effects of the radioactivity the device would release; most thought use of the bomb was not any more abhorrent than the massive fire-bombing raids that General LeMay was using to cremate much of Tokyo.) Instead of viewing Soviet entry into the war as a way to avoid the need to use the atomic bomb, American leaders seemed to view the bomb as a way to avoid the need for such Soviet assistance.

Pg. 352: Kennan (February 1946) dictated a 5,540 word analysis of our relation to Russia that became known as “the Long Telegram.” Kennan’s analysis was to become the most influential cable in the history of the American Foreign Service. What actually motivated Russia’s rulers, Kennan argued, was a centuries-old outlook: “At the bottom of the Kremlin’s neurotic view of world affairs is traditional and instinctive Russian sense of insecurity.” What role, then, did ideology play? Marxism was mainly a “fig leaf” for Russia’s current rulers, one that served to justify police-state tactics, a closed society, and expansionist ambitions. “In this dogma, with its basic altruism of purpose, they found justification for their instinctive fear of the outside world, for the dictatorship without which they did not know how to rule,” Kennan explained. “This is why Soviet purposes must always be solemnly cloaked in trappings of Marxism, and why no one should underrate the importance of dogma in Soviet affairs.” Communism was not the real enemy, Russia was.

Pg. 398: Truman Doctrine. March 12, 1947 Truman made the most enduringly controversial speech that has been made by a president in the twentieth century. He announced that the U.S was undertaking the role of world defender of democracy. In later years the Truman Doctrine would be described as a prescription for tragedy and blamed ultimately for the Vietnam War. At the time, the speech with all its’ hyperbole was made to squeeze support from Congress in aiding Turkey and Greece.

Pg. 405: The Marshall Plan had many contributors: Harriman, Keenan, Forrestal, Acheson, Bohlen, McCloy, Stimson, Harriman, as well as Marshall himself.

Pg. 436: Significantly, Kennan understood that Communism was not monolithic. In his Policy Planning memos, he predicted that fissures would show in Stalin’s bloc (already Tito was showing independence in Yugoslavia), and he early on foretold that China and Russia would fall out, that Chinese Communism would be peculiarly adapted to China. (The problem is that, as with so many of Kennan’s accurate predictions, he was ignored).

Pg. 439: On February 25, 1948 all Pro-Western politicians in Czechoslovakia were purged and a Kremlin puppet, Prime Minister Klement Gottwald, installed. Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk, fell, or was pushed, from his office window on March 10.

Pg. 451: For reasons both political and humanitarian, Truman wanted to help create a new state of Israel. However, his most trusted foreign policy advisers were all dead set against it—Marshall, Lovett, Forrestal, Kennan, Bohlen, and Acheson. These advisers all felt it posed a real risk to U.S. national security. It was absolutely vital that the U.S. maintain its pipeline to Mideast oil. This support of Israel might drive the Arabs into the waiting arms of the Soviets and no one believed Israel could defend themselves from the attack sure to come and would need U.S. soldiers fighting alongside to survive. Truman almost invariably took the advice of his foreign policy advisers, but Israel was an exception. It is interesting to note that after the wise men’s advice was ignored, they all supported the President in carrying out the policy. (Here I paused and reflected: the Inchon landing was an unjustifiable risk, although it worked; recognizing was a terrible risk and I am not sure that worked, would it be so bad if more Jews lived in Europe and the U.S. rather than populating Palestine?).

Pg. 455: On June 23, 1948 the West announced new Deutsche marks for its sector of Berlin and West Germany. Lucky Strikes had reached an all-time high of $2,300 a carton at the official exchange rate; a German reporter asked a U.S. official if the West planned to stabilize the economy with a loan of 50 million cartons of Luckies. Anyway, within twenty-four hours the Soviets had cut all overland routes between West Germany and West Berlin and shut off electricity in the city. The two million citizens of West Berlin had enough food to last thirty-six days. (Forrestal asked Truman if we would use the bomb if the Soviet tanks rolled into Western Europe—Truman indicated he would).

Pg. 477: Acheson is often blamed for inviting the invasion of South Korea when he gave a speech in January 1950 that drew a “defensive perimeter” in the Pacific that excluded South Korea. Criticism of Acheson ignores the fact that the North Koreans got Stalin’s blessing for the invasion before Acheson’s speech and that General MacArthur had drawn the same defensive perimeter a year earlier, and that Acheson made clear that an attack on Korea would bne viewed as a violation of the U.S. Charter.

Pg. 480: On September 3, 1949 American weather reconnaissance recorded a higher than normal radioactive count over the northern Pacific. Russia now had the bomb.

Pg. 505: 6/24/1950 North Korea invades South Korea. On 6/30/1950 Truman gave the order to MacArthur to engage the North Koreans. The Wise Men found the invasion highly useful in getting approval of plan NSC-68, a large build up of the military that was in the works before the Korean invasion. The total budget for defense tripled—from $17.7 billion in fiscal year 1950 $53.4 billion in FY 1951.

Pg. 564: John Foster Dulles (Eisenhower’s appointee): poster child for worse Secretary of State I believe we have ever had. Dulles did not want just loyalty; as he told State Department employees in a memo on the day he took office, he wanted “positive loyalty.” He hires as his Assistant Secretary for Internal Security Scott McLeod, a former investigator for Senator Styles Bridges, an extreme right-winger. Vindictive and shrewd, McLeod hired 350 inexperienced but zealous investigators who quickly went to work ferreting out Foreign Service officers deemed drunkards, homosexual, incompetent, or incompatible. Dulles moved quickly to finish off the old China experts. He told journalists that Keenan was a very dangerous man because he advocated the admission of Red China to the U.S. and warned against crossing the 38th parallel in Korea.

Pg. 574: Foster Dulles’s brother, Allen, was in the 1950s head of the CIA in its freebooting heyday. It organized the overthrow of the governments deemed to be pro-Communist in Iran in 1953 and Guatemala in 1954; helped install supposedly pro-Western governments in Egypt in 1954 and Laos in 1959; tried and failed to overthrow the government of Indonesia in 1958; infiltrated refugees to disrupt Soviet-bloc governments in Eastern Europe and ran sabotage operations against China from Laos and Burma; plotted assassination attempts against Chou En-lai of China, Patrice Lumumba of the Congo, Fidel Castro of Cuba, and Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic.

Pg. 671: Charles de Gaulle in 1966 refused to participate in a multilateral nuclear force, vetoed Great Britain’s entry in the Common Market, and then walked out of NATO and demanded that U.S. forces be withdrawn from France.

Addenda:
Averell Harriman, diplomat and Roosevelt's special envoy to Churchill and Stalin;
Dean Acheson, the secretary of state who was more responsible for the Truman Doctrine than Truman and for the Marshall Plan than General Marshall;
George Kennan, self-cast outsider and intellectual seer of the Washington elite;
Robert Lovett, assistant secretary of war, undersecretary of state, and secretary of defense throughout the formative years of the Cold War;
John McCloy, one of the nation's most influential private citizens; and
Charles Bohlen, adroit diplomat and ambassador to the Soviet Union.