FOREIGN RELATIONS: The Year of Decision

No man knows his destiny, nor does any nation. The destiny that lay beyond Yorktown and Appomattox and Manila Bay, that lay mockingly behind a slogan (“Make the World Safe for Democracy”) at Belleau Wood, took a new and decisive turn last year. It was in 1947 that the U.S. people, not quite realizing the full import of their act, perhaps not yet mature enough to accept all its responsibilities, took upon their shoulders the leadership of the world.

Some Americans were still unaware of the step their nation had taken. Some knew that it had to be taken; some, either through fear or lack of imagination or lack of knowledge, were unwilling to follow. But the central fact remained: if the soth Century world was to secure its freedoms, the U.S. would have to supply leadership; doing less might even jeopardize its own freedom.

No one man was responsible for 1947’s great step. Like many fateful decisions, it sprang only partly from the brain. It was an act brought about by events, and their steady, unending hammering on the U.S. sense of justice. But one man symbolized the U.S. action. He was Secretary of State George Marshall. As the man who offered hope to those who desperately needed it, he was the Man of the Year.

On history’s calendar, the story of 1947 could be told through three events in the official life of George Marshall. On Jan. 7, a disillusioned man, he returned from his unsuccessful mission to China to take over the job of formulating and guiding the nation’s foreign policy. Near the year’s end, on Dec. 15, in London’s Lancaster House, he angrily and coldly ended the Foreign Ministers’ conference. These two events bracketed the year; the second ended an era of false hopes and hopeful judgments.

But it was the event of midyear that was the most significant. On June 5, standing under the elms in the Harvard Yard, George Marshall, in almost casual terms, announced the beginning of the program that was to become the Marshall Plan. Then & there the U.S. at last set out to seize the initiative from Russia in the cold war.

Simple Concept. Looking back over the year, U.S.-citizens might wonder how their enlightenment had come about. Looking back, Old Soldier Marshall might wonder himself. It was a kaleidoscopic story of surprise, improvisation and counterattack. When he took over as Secretary of State, George Marshall, despite his attendance at wartime conferences, was no skilled diplomat. He had been sent to China as a special presidential envoy to bring peace between Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government and the Chinese Communists. He failed in his mission. He came back denouncing the Chinese Communists as “irreconcilable,” the Nationalists as “reactionary.”

Unquestionably, Marshall had inherited some of his suspicion of the Nationalists from his great friend, War Secretary Stimson (see Historical Notes). But for years Chiang Kai-shek had stood implacably in Asia against the Chinese Communists. George Marshall had caught a glimpse of the same enemy that Chiang had long faced, but he still did not recognize him as such.

In February, the Greek crisis exploded. The new Secretary of State was taken by surprise. He and the President had to meet the emergency with an emergency measure: $400 million for Greece and neighboring Turkey. With the sudden full sight of the enemy, with, at last, an intimation of his aims and strength, Marshall alerted his whole front. Harry Truman made the speech (written by Marshall and his aides) which became known as the Truman Doctrine.

To a growing sense of realism in U.S. foreign policy, the speech added a much-needed note of resolution: “One of the primary objectives of the foreign policy of the United States is the creation of conditions in which we and other nations will be able to work out a way of life free from coercion. . . . We shall not realize our objectives, however, unless we are willing to help free peoples . . . against aggressive movements that seek to impose on them totalitarian regimes.”

The Roadblocks. But basically the Truman Doctrine was a defensive move. George Marshall still hoped that peace by agreement was possible, that patience, firmness and common honesty would be enough to bring to the world council table. He flew off to Moscow for the conference of Foreign Ministers on peace terms for Austria and Germany.

The conference lasted more than a month, through 44 sterile sessions. For Marshall, it became no more than a series of sorties down the valleys of world peace, sorties which ended always at the same roadblock: Soviet intransigence. He came back with this intelligence report: “At Moscow, propaganda appeals to passion and prejudice appeared to take the place of appeals to reason and understanding.”

It was then, in the deceptively peaceful setting of the Harvard Yard, that the Secretary made his first clearly offensive move. His aides had brought him other intelligence reports. Europe was broke. Unless the U.S. acted, the whole front of Western democracy was about to collapse. Quietly, George Marshall said that if the countries of Europe would meet and agree on their economic needs, the U.S. would underwrite their recovery.

The Gigantic Suggestion. A politician —e.g., Franklin Roosevelt—would have launched the policy with full organ tones. Marshall was so matter-of-fact that at first his country did not even catch the import of his gigantic suggestion. It flew in the face of all the vows that Republican Congressmen made—and the public at election time had approved—to cut taxes, end Government controls, end Government spending. It was a promissory note for billions of U.S. dollars.

But the rest of the world caught it before the next day dawned. Ernest Bevin exulted: “I grabbed it with both hands.” Western Europe was galvanized with new hope. The Soviet Union was thrown into momentary confusion.

Moscow tried desperately to sabotage the conference which the European nations immediately called in Paris. Moscow tightened its grip on the satellite states, forced Poland and Czechoslovakia to decline to attend the conference after both had announced that they hoped to participate in the Marshall Plan. As a reconnaissance in force, Marshall’s speech was spectacularly successful.

End of a Campaign. Battleground and antagonist were now clear to all the world. George Marshall pursued the campaign. One day in September, while the hushed, nervous General Assembly of the United Nations listened, the grey-haired man with the lined face and the dry, unresonant voice placed directly on the Soviet Union the blame for the world’s woes: “In place of peace, liberty and economic security, we find menace, repression and dire want.”

He demanded that the nations of the world unite in a coalition against Soviet obstruction.

In the debate, no quarter was asked or given. From the Assembly rostrum, Soviet Delegate Andrei Vishinsky counterattacked with a 92-minute diatribe; the Soviet-controlled press rolled out its thunder of slander. The violence of their reaction attested to the effectiveness of Marshall’s blow. Three months later, in the cream-and-gold salon of Lancaster House in London, the Secretary delivered the coup de gráce to the last false postwar hopes. Barely suppressing his anger through Molotov’s interminable dialectics, he finally, impatiently, called for an adjournment. A campaign had ended.

A campaign had also begun, and the U.S. people were in the middle of it. They had not been put there by George Marshall alone. Their decision had been shaped, in part, by the pressure of events —starvation and despair in Europe, the cynical and ruthless policies of Joseph Stalin, the stubborn, mendacious methods of Molotov, the calculated rantings of Andrei Vishinsky.

George Marshall had had further help from such men at home as Robert Abercrombie Lovett, his able Under Secretary; Massachusetts’ Congressman Christian Herter, who had organized the congressional fact-finding trip to Europe; and, above all, from Michigan’s Senator Arthur Vandenberg, whose services have never been fully acknowledged by the Administration.

Vandenberg’s personal contribution was threefold. As a parliamentarian he guided the Greek-Turkish and interim aid bills through Congress almost singlehandedly. As a policymaker, he prodded and pushed the State Department into recognizing the hopelessness of dealing with the Russians.

As a politician, and as the Republican spokesman on foreign policy, he warded off sniping attacks from members of his own party and preserved the bipartisan foreign policy. Without him, indeed, there probably would not have been a bipartisan policy. And without such a policy, George Marshall could never have led his nation into its new world role.

Guests from Russia. Much had been written about George Marshall, but even to his own countrymen he was more a figure than an intimately known personality —a homely, reassuring man with compressed, unsmiling lips and deep-set, searching eyes, a man who was curiously unimpassioned and unimpressive when heard on the radio. As Chief of Staff of the Army, he had established a reputation for brilliance. Congressmen and others who dealt with him in Washington also knew him as a man of stubborn, unswerving honesty—a good man. His countrymen generally knew him as admirable and let it go at that.

George Marshall’s admirable career began in Uniontown, Pa. 67 years ago. He was the son of a coal operator, and a collateral descendant of Chief Justice John Marshall. He grew up to go to Virginia Military Institute and become a soldier. He served in the Philippines, fought in France in World War I; as operations chief of the First Army, he won the commendations of his superiors for the way he moved half a million men into the Argonne offensive. General John J. Pershing called him the best officer in the U.S. Army.

Elizabeth Coles, his wife, to whom he had been married for 25 years, died in 1927, leaving him childless. He married a widow with three children—Katherine Boyce Tupper, the daughter of a minister. He performed a soldier’s between-wars chores, teaching in officers’ schools, doing routine military housekeeping, and, wherever he happened to be, cultivating the vegetable gardens which were his hobby. In 1937 he was in command of the sth Infantry Brigade at desolate Vancouver Barracks, Wash., when three Russian aviators startled the world by flying from Europe to America over the North Pole. They landed at his field.

Katherine Tupper Marshall, who wrote a book (Together; Annals of an Army Wife) about life with George Marshall, recalled that the flyers had nothing but their thick fur parkas to wear at receptions. Marshall ordered civilian suits for them and “they appeared, immaculate in dark business suits . . . delighted by the double-breasted cut of the coats.”

Time for the General. During those years, when Marshall also cultivated the unfashionable art of war, he fought for universal military training and an adequate defense establishment. But the weeds of complacency overran his efforts until, in 1939, when the nation became genuinely apprehensive, he was given the job of shaping an army. Two years before Pearl Harbor, he was made the Army’s Chief of Staff.

He fought the war’s first year in the nation’s unprepared factories. Mrs. Marshall prayed: “Give him time, 0 Lord.” When he talked to her, “I had the feeling that he was really talking to himself,” she wrote. “It was as though he lived outside of himself and George Marshall was someone he was constantly appraising. … He would say, ‘I cannot afford the luxury of sentiment. … It is not easy to tell men they have failed. … I cannot allow myself to get angry. . . .'” But Mrs. Marshall also wrote: ” [They] have never seen him when he is aroused. It is like a bolt of lightning out of the blue. His withering vocabulary and the cold steel of his eyes would sear the soul of any man deserving censure.”

The public saw him as a reserved, almost gentle man who quietly repelled intimacy; even first-naming Franklin Roosevelt invariably called him “General.” One day in 1944, he had to tell his wife that her son had been killed in Italy.

Ordeal of a General. No one knew better than George Marshall what World War II had cost the nation; he still has the bill, in men and dollars, at the tip of his tongue. At the end of the war, he wrote in his last report to the Secretary of War: “We must, if we are to realize the hopes we may now dare have for lasting peace, enforce our will for peace with strength. We must make it clear to the potential gangsters of the world that if they dare break our peace, they will do so at their great peril. . . . We have tried since the birth of our nation to promote our love of peace by a display of weakness. This course has failed us utterly.”

It was an old soldier’s valedictory. He did not expect that he himself would be recalled to help implement that advice. He went to China and he came back as Secretary of State only because, in his soldier’s view, he was at the command of the President. “What I wanted most,” he observed, “was to go home and fix things up at Leesburg.”

The Risk. The course which George Marshall had plotted as Secretary of State was one of calculated risk. It was based on the premise that Italy and France could maintain anti-Communist governments, and on the hope that Europe could start production in earnest. One of the big imponderable elements in the risk was the intention of the U.S. people. Were they ready to “enforce [the] will for peace with strength?” If they were not, then the Secretary of State would have to default on his commitments to the world.

How did the U.S. look in 1947? By the most extreme of understatements, it looked healthier than any other nation in the world. India was free, but the blood bath of partition and the uprooting of the population had left irremovable scars. Palestine was partitioned—by U.N. and with the sanction of the U.S.—but none believed that she would soon be free of strife. Western Europe was wracked by Communist violence. England’s economy was still in the first stage of convalescence. One of the few bright spots in the year’s news from across the Atlantic was the marriage in London of Philip and Elizabeth, when, for a brief moment, the world was reminded of the things it cherished most.

Yet the rich and powerful U.S., untouched by violence and unhurt by want, had had an uneasy year, full of vague fears and a lack of confidence. The U.S. people produced more than ever before and had more money to buy things than ever before, yet the country still did not have the happiness its boom seemed to offer. Ten years ago, many an American thought that if he ever earned the salary he actually received in 1947, he would be on easy street. Now 1947 was past, and the road was still full of potholes and sharp turns.

In the arts, only old, limp banners were unfurled. Uncertainty and lack of confidence came out in nostalgia. Beyond a small epic in frustration called A Streetcar Named Desire, the only important Broadway plays were revivals of Shakespeare and Shaw, a rewrite (Medea) of Euripides. Novelists had little or nothing to say; the most widely read fiction was escapist. The U.S. never had contributed much to music. In 1947, even Tin Pan Alley failed to produce a great hit. Many of the most popular airs were revivals.

Uneasy people saw flying saucers in the air. Women, prodded by the dress manufacturers, draped their figures in the New Look which, like all new fashions, was becoming only to the stylish. Race prejudice still showed its ugly head. Senator Bilbo .was stopped at the door of Congress and went back to the South to die, but Willie Earle was lynched in Greenville, S.C., and 31 men who were tried for the crime were freed.

Weight of a Bomb. Beneath its ruffled and fretful surface, however, the U.S. nation was stronger than it had ever been before in peacetime. Aside from its wheat crop, its not-too-good corn crop, and its $231 billion of produced wealth, it had a technology unsurpassed in history. In the atomic bomb—uneasily held—it held title, hopefully exclusive title, to the decisive military weapon. The U.S. had scaled down its once great military establishment, but it had merged its armed services, which promised better military preparation. How long it would take Russian technology to redress the power balance with its own bomb, no U.S. observer could say; estimates ran from two to ten years. But for 1947, at least, the bomb, in the hands of free men, was perhaps the one great deterrent to the authoritarians who only understand force.

The Spirit of a Nation. In the end, U.S. aid to the world would depend on two things. One was the purely selfish consideration set forth last spring by Dean Acheson, then Under Secretary of State. “Measures of relief and reconstruction have been only in part suggested by humanitarianism . . . [it] is chiefly a matter of self-interest.” The other consideration: humanitarianism.

Writing in a little British magazine, The Cornhill, Author Geoffrey Gorer, a British anthropologist, said: “If Americans are placed in a situation where they feel they are not loved, their natural tendency is to withdraw. . . . This is one component making for isolationism … a reproduction on an international scale of the response, ‘Let’s get the hell out of here.’ ”

But Americans, if they were not exactly loved the world over, had, in 1947, at least gained a greater measure of respect than they had enjoyed before. They had helped this feeling along by their own actions. They were presenting a different face to the peoples of the world from the inquisitive, patronizing face of the pre-World War II tourist. Most of the Congressmen who had traveled to Europe last summer for a look at things were conscientious and sympathetic men, who had shown Europe a more mature U.S., even as they reflected the spirit of hardheaded humanitarianism which was abroad in their land.

Would the U.S. people stick to their course? The opinion of a visitor may be more pertinent than the guess of a native. This week, in the New York Times maga zine, Barbara Ward, foreign editor of London’s Economist, who had made two trips to the U.S. in 1947, wrote: “I believe that the American people—the only people in the world who thought of an ideal first and then built a state around it—will prove in the long run happier, freer, and more creative when they carry that ideal of a free society out into the world, than if they sit at home to hug it to themselves. … I suspect that Americans will find initiative and action so much more to their taste than any panic-stricken waiting on what destiny may bring.”

Whatever rewards world leadership might return in the long run, they would not be reaped until the hold of want and oppression on the world’s throat was broken. The country’s decision to break it was the vastest gamble in peacetime history. George Marshall’s estimate—”calculated risk”—meant in soldier’s language that it could be won, if all went well, if the most powerful nation in the world threw all its physical and moral strength into the fight.