MY RACKET
BY JACK FROST
INTRODUCTION
Chapter 1 THE COLD WAR
Chapter 2 THE MONTEREY PENINSULA
Chapter 3 YOUTHFUL IMPRESSIONS
Chapter 4 TENNIS
Chapter 5 THE TRUMAN YEARS
CHAPTER 1
THE COLD WAR
My wife and I had been married in Prague a few days earlier and then had taken the old wooden train to Marienbad for a couple of nights before making our way to the Austrian border. She was a Czech girl, fluent in Russian, and as a teen-ager had taken tourist groups into the Soviet Union. She was now without a passport or identity of any kind, and we waited at the iron Curtain hoping to make it to the other side. It was 1964, the height of the Cold War that existed between the Soviet Union and her satellites and the “Free World.” We were at the eye of the tornado.
Forward forty-some years to a posh cruise liner sailing between Singapore and Sydney, affording the super-rich of the Free World” the opportunity to laze in exotic places. Only here a dozen of the best suites had been occupied by Russians, benefiting from the post-Cold War opportunity to consume conspicuously---as their ex-enemies in the West had been doing all along. They were actually Tatars from near Kazan, older people, and the son of one of them had become a very rich man, one of the richest in the world; done so not by plundering the ruins of the failed Communist state, but by shrewdly developing his own business empire. He had started by making and selling vodka, and then he branched into banking and insurance.
Their interpreter was a striking Russian woman, who in the old days might have made you want to cross over. We sought each other out and had several dinners together. Her English was impeccable, and so was my wife’s Russian, and we spoke with joy and haste about each other’s cultures, like college kids. We asked her about singers we knew from youtube---Grebenchikov and Bichevskaya---and she sang a few bars of the haunting “Ivushka.” We discussed Stalin and Communism, you could do that now, and the West and the Cold War. But through the passionate conversations my wife and I---and I suspect that Elena, too----kept a place of reserve in our thinking that intelligence was being gathered and hearts and minds were being won or lost. Decades of Cold War exposure had that effect.
The term “Cold War” was first used publicly in April of 1947 by the financier and presidential adviser Bernard Baruch in a speech he delivered in the South Carolina House of Representatives. He warned: “Let us not be deceived, we are today in the midst of a cold war” and added as a foretaste of a spirit that was to pervade the country a few years later during the McCarthy era: “Our enemies are to be found abroad and at home.”
The term was not of Baruch’s own inspiration but came to him through his speechwriter, Herbert Bayard Swope, who in 1917 had been the first recipient of a Pulitzer Prize for reporting and was to win three more for the New York World as executive editor during the 1920’s. It is not known whether Swope himself took it from George Orwell, who had used it in a theoretical sense in an essay of October, 1945 entitled “You and the Atomic Bomb.” At any rate, “Cold War” became the lexical coinage to describe the nuclear arms race, propaganda barrages and brinksmanship that were to define the relationship that endured between the world’s two super-powers for over 40 years.
Baruch’s expression gained traction through a series of articles written later in 1947 for the New York Herald Tribune by Walter Lippmann. They were in response to an essay that had appeared in the July edition of the influential publication Foreign Affairs, a piece entitled “The Sources of Soviet Conduct” by “Mr. X.”
Lippmann had been the founding editor of the journal The New Repbulic and was an advisor to President Wilson during the First World War. Later in his career, in l958 and 1962, he was to win Pulitzer Prizes. Following World War ll he became the leading
proponent of the need to respect a Soviet sphere of
influence in eastern Europe, that which had been outlined at Yalta in 1945. He felt that diplomatic efforts should be spent toward removing all military occupation of Europe, and peace treaties should be designed and agreed upon with that end in mind. It was an approach that assumed cooperation from Joseph Stalin.
The essay by “Mr. X” which Lippmann was challenging set forth the ideas and argumentation for a “containment ” policy in relation to the Soviet Union. It was the one which President Truman was to follow and was to remain the foreign policy touchstone for the United States throughout the conduct of the Cold War.
As astute observers at the time knew, and what was revealed to the public soon after, was that “Mr. X” was George F. Kennan, Director of the State Department’s Policy Planning staff. The idea of “containment” was his, and it had grown out of his years of intense observation of and contact with Stalin’s Soviet Union.
An older relative of Kennan’s had been a recognized authority on Czarist Russia, and when the younger Kennan was graduated from Princeton in 1925 he joined the Department of State with a keen interest in the new Soviet state. He had early postings in the Baltic states---Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania---and training in Russian language, history and politics at Berlin’s Oriental Institute, and when formal diplomatic relations between the United States and the Soviet Union were established in 1933 Kennan was dispatched to Moscow.
His arrival in the Soviet Union coincided with Stalin’s collectivization of agriculture in the Ukraine, which was resulting in
widespread famine and was costing the lives of millions of peasants. Then, within a couple of years came the Great Purge, a series of campaigns of political repression and persecution lasting until 1938, and again millions of lives were lost, this time Communist Party members and Red Army leaders as well as peasants. Kennan was deeply affected by these frightening years.
Following a stint in Prague and later a five-month internment under the Nazis at Bad Nauheim, Kennan returned to Moscow in July, 1944 to serve as deputy head of the United States mission to Moscow. In 1946, at the end of his term, he sent his now-famous, often-cited “long telegram” to Secretary of State James Byrne outlining a proposed strategy on how to handle diplomatic relations with the post-war Soviet Union.
Having the memory of the Great Purge fresh in mind and drawing upon Stalin’s own declarations, Kennan expressed the certainty in his telegram that in the collective mind of the Soviet leadership there could be no enduring, peaceful coexistence with the United States. The Soviets would do whatever possible to disrupt the “internal harmony” of our society, he warned, and he advised that in this respect the Soviets “are more dangerous than ever before.” Under their control, he explained, was “an inner central core” of Communist parties in other countries working closely together as “an underground directorate of world Communism, a concealed Comintern tightly coordinated and directed by Moscow.” Their purpose was to infiltrate and dominate wherever a foothold could be gained among the disaffected: labor unions, youth leagues, racial societies, women’s organizations, and so on.
As far as official Soviet power and influence was concerned, he went on to write, they would do whatever possible to advance their reach. In the immediate sense this would mean into Northern Iran, with an ultimate eye to the Persian Gulf, and into Turkey, with its access to the warm waters of the Mediterranean. Eventually, if Spain were to fall to the Communists, a Soviet base at Gibralter would become a possibility.
Having thus cautioned concerning the Soviet urge to disruption and expansion Kennan’s counsel to the United States was to avoid panic. The problem “is within our power to solve,” he wrote, and we can do so “without recourse to any general military conflict.” After all, he encouraged, the Soviets were still considerably weaker than the West, hence disinclined to take unnecessary risks, and they could be expected to withdraw when encountering strong resistance. What will be critical in our response, he concluded, will be the promotion and maintenance of healthy, vigorous and harmonious Western societies, making them impenetrable to Soviet subversion.
In July of the following year, 1947, Kennan published “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” an elaboration of his telegram. In it he gave to the American reading public the term “containment,” which became a touchstone, in whatever distorted form, for American foreign policy throughout the Cold War and beyond. He wrote: “the main element of any U.S. policy toward the Soviet Union must be that of long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies,” and “It must be an adroit application of counterforce at a series of constantly shifting, geographical and political points, corresponding to the shifts and maneuvers of Soviet policy.”
He insisted that this was not to be taken as a strictly defensive posture: “The United States has in its power to increase enormously the strains under which Soviet Policy must operate . . . and . . . to promote tendencies which must eventually find their outlet in either
the breakup or the gradual mellowing of Soviet power. He finished with this challenge: “The issue of Soviet-American relations is in essence a test of the overall worth of the United States.”
The roots of the oncoming ideological struggle between the two post-war super-powers lay in the 19th century, when Marx and Engels issued the call in Europe for workers of the world to unite against Capitalism. The First International was formed in 1864, volume 1 of Das Kapital appeared in 1867, and the Paris Commune, a working class seizure of government took place in March of 1871.
In the United States communist organizations began to develop in the 1850’s and gained impetus following the Civil War and through much of the 1970’s. An economic depression that had hit in 1973 was followed by violence in the coal mines of western Pennsylvania and by railroad strikes, and the period between 1873 and 1878 was a precursor to the “Red Scares” of the following century. The derogatory label “communist” came to be used against labor agitators and their sympathizers” and often against immigrants. But the organization of labor continued, and the Industrial Workers of the World was founded in 1905 in Chicago with clear Marxist underpinnings. “Big Bill” Hayden thundered in his opening speech: “We are here to confederate the workers of this country into a working class movement that shall have for its purpose the emancipation of the working-class from the slave bondage of capitalism.”
Hayden had himself lived out the inequities and injustices of being on the working-class side of the industrial revolution. Born into poor circumstances to a Pony-Express riding father whom he never really knew, he grew up with little formal education and went underground to work in a Nevada mine when he was still a boy. Later he was involved in several important labor battles and was acquitted of a murder charge along the way. In 1918 he and some 100 others were arrested for violating federal espionage and sedition acts by calling a strike during wartime. Hayden was convicted, served a year at Leavenworth, and jumped bail after he had been freed pending an appeal. He fled to Soviet Russia and became a labor advisor to the Bolshevik government, but his influence ended with Lenin’s death in 1923. Five years later he died of diabetes and alcoholism, and part of his ashes are buried at the Kremlin Wall.
The two years following the 1918 trial of “Big Bill” Hayden are sometimes referred to as “the First Red Scare,” a reaction not only to the public exposure of Hayden and the others, but to a depressed economy and the consequent domestic turmoil. President Wilson, preoccupied with the post-war Paris Peace Conference, had failed to prepare for the reintegration of close to four million American troops into civilian life. Also, the war-time price bubble in agricultural produce had burst leaving many farmers destitute, there were several major industrial strikes throughout the country, and in Chicago, Omaha, and in other cities there were race riots. Wilson turned to Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer to bring order. Palmer did so, with the assistance of a young J. Edgar Hoover, through a series of raids. Thousands of suspected radicals and anarchists were rounded up and held without trial, and over 200 were eventually deported to Soviet Russia. Prior to the raids there had been anarchist bomb-scares, two of them directed against Palmer himself, and a fearful American public generally supported the raids and deportations.
During President Wilson’s second term of office, 1916-1920, the United States became a major participant in a cataclysmic European war, and there was a successful revolution that turned Tsarist Russia into the Soviet Union. Wilson had resisted going to war and would not recognize the new Bolshevik government that was avowedly atheistic. His response to these, two of the most influential events of the 20th century, must be seen with reference to his own background.
Wilson’s father, who held family prayer meetings five times a day, had been a Presbyterian minister in Georgia and for a time was a professor at a theological seminary in South Carolina, and the President’s first wife had been the daughter of a southern minister. Protected by his family, his religion and by his church, he was also the product of private education. His undergraduate degree was from New Jersey College, which formally became Princeton University in l896, and he earned his Ph.D. in History and Political Science from Johns Hopkins. He taught at Princeton and became its President from 1902 until 1910.
In a commemorative address that he gave at the University in 1896 Woodrow Wilson articulated a vision that had evolved within him of the individual and the School and that he was later to apply to the country in a world context. He titled it: “Princeton in the Nation’s Service,” and it was to become the School’s motto. In it he dwelt on the ideals and wisdom of its founding fathers, a small group of Presbytyerians, who established the School with church affiliation, and expectation of the Princetonian was to be high: “your thorough Presbyterian is not subject to the ordinary laws of life,” he challenged.
Wilson’s vision for his country and the world, “Wilson Idealism” it has come to be called, is most evident in his second term as President of the United States, from 1916 through 1920, and it has endured through the years of the Cold War and beyond as a raison d’etre of American foreign policy. He enunciated it in January of 1918 to a joint session of Congress ten months before the First World War was ended, and it became the basis of the German surrender as negotiated at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. His vision was of a lasting world peace with collective security, guaranteed by a League of Nations. He called for self-determination for ethnic groups, clearly with the components of the disintegrated German, Austrian and Ottoman empires in mind, and he urged interventionist foreign policy on behalf of the United States to promote the spread of peace and democracy in the future.
President Wilson was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1919, but many seasoned European diplomats were highly skeptical of the Vision. Indeed, the League of Nations was doomed from the outset, as Wilson was unable to persuade the Senate to ratify the Treaty, and the United States never became a contracting party with the collective organization that was supposed to guarantee world peace.
The Germans dropped out in 1933, and the Soviet Union joined a year later but without positive conviction.
Wilson’s address to the joint session of Congress responded to one delivered to the Second All-Russia Congress of Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies by Vladimir Lenin a couple of months before. Bolshevik forces, with the shed of very little blood and needing only a couple of hours on the dark and snowy Julian Calendar night of October 25, 1917, had taken the Winter Palace in Petrograd, seat of Kerensky’s provisional government. The following day, in his Decree on Peace, Lenin called on “the governments and peoples of all warring countries” to engage in a “just and democratic” peace, one “without annexations . . . and without indemnities.”
There was a basic similarity between Wilson’s vision of world peace and Lenin’s. Both professed to support the nationalist aspirations of ethnic minorities, but within a short time after he seized power Lenin had swallowed up the newly independent states of Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan. Their inclusion in the Soviet Empire, he explained, would save them from capitalism. At the same time Wilson refused to receive Eamon de Valera, President of the revolutionary Irish Republic, when he came to America in 1919.
Also, both leaders faced domestic difficulties, Wilson with economic disorder, industrial strikes, and the need to demobilize millions of servicemen. Part of his response involved the Palmer Raids and the abrogation of civil rights, a response which was publicly well received, reduced social agitation considerably, and was accomplished with very little bloodshed.
Lenin, on the other hand, had taken on the monumental task of creating a new, classless society and of promoting world revolution, while fending off counter-revolutionary armies at the same time.
Almost immediately he created a secret police, commonly known as the Cheka, with Felix Dzherzhinsky at its head, and in September of the following year, 1918, Dzherzhinsky was ordered to institute a Red Terror, to murder intellectuals, priests, capitalists, and anyone else suspected of anti-Bolshevik behavior. In Dzherzhinsky’s own words, “the terrorization involve(ed) arrests and extermination of enemies of the revolution on the basis of their class affiliation or their pre-revolutionary roles.”
Lenin certainly conceived of the mass murders and exiles to gulags as philosophical and political necessity. Yet there was also a good measure of vengeance, as well. When he was l7 years old his eldest brother, Alexander, had been hanged for his complicity in an assassination plot against the Tsar and a sister had been banished. As far as religious constraints on his behavior were concerned, Lenin had been baptized into the Russian Orthodox Church, but as he developed his Marxist beliefs at Kazan State University, at law school in St. Petersburg, and during a three-year exile in Siberia he came to regard atheism as an important part of a future revolutionary state.
In his Decree on Peace speech of October, 1917, while outlining his proposals for closing down what he regarded as an imperialist war, Lenin used the same forum to broadcast to the world the global revolutionary aims of the new Bolshevik government: “Russia appeals particularly to the class-conscious workers of . . . the largest states participating in the present war—England, France and Germany . . . that by their . . . efforts in various directions these workers will help us to bring to a successful end the cause of peace, and, together with this, the cause of the liberation of the toiling and exploited masses from all forms of slavery and all exploitation.”
In order to establish Soviet control over the various world-wide socialist movements the Third Communist International, or Comintern, was founded during the frigid Moscow days from March 2-6, 1919. Grigory Zinoviev, born in the Ukraine to a Jewish dairy farmer and who had little formal education but had plotted for years on behalf of the Revolution, was elected Chairman of the Executive Committee. It has been estimated that within ten years the organization could claim over 500,000 members from outside the Soviet Union.
Marxist agitation had been at work through labor movements in the United States since before the turn of the century but gained impetus with the success of the Revolution and the establishment of the Comintern. Simultaneous with the murderous Red Terror in Soviet Russia came the Red Scare in America, with its trials and deportations. “Big Bill” Hayden, who could have been a poster-boy for the new proletariat, fled his native country for the Bolshevik state where he was a labor adviser to Lenin for a time.
On the other side of the coin from Hayden was John Reed, born to privilege in Portland, Oregon. He attended private schools all the way through an undergraduate degree from Harvard (1910), but as hard as he tried to advance into the upper crust socially at the University, in the end he was left with the bitter taste of the snobbery and rejection of his aristocratic eastern school-fellows. One of his friends at Harvard was Walter Lippmann, who had founded the school’s Socialist Club, and who in 1947 was to oppose George Kennan’s policy of “containment” toward the Soviet Union.
In New York City, after his graduation, he worked as a journalist alongside “muckrakers” Lincoln Steffens and Ida Tarbell, coming under their influence, and soon surpassing them in his radicalism.
He wrote poems that were published, and in 1913 Metropolitan Magazine sent him to Mexico to report on the Mexican Revolution. After traveling with Pancho Villa’s army for four months, Reed came away with a deep sympathy with the plight of the peons and a strong feeling that the United States should not interfere in the Mexican Revolution.
In 1916 Reed was again living in New York in a ménage-a-trois with Louise Bryant, whom he was to marry later in the year, and playwright Eurgene O’Neill. Having been sent to Europe by Metropolitan Magazine to cover the outbreak of World War I, a war which he opposed as inspired by imperialist commercial rivalries, he and Bryant left for Russia in the autumn of 1917 to take part in the unfolding of revolutionary events there. Reed met Lenin and Trotsky and witnessed the Bolshevik takeover of power from the Provisional Government, and he wrote a book about it which he called Ten Days That Shook the World.
Reed returned to the United States, and while in Chicago for the National Socialist Convention in August of 1919, he helped to found the Communist Labor Party. However, in February he had been called before a United States Senate committee exploring Bolshevik propaganda activities and now faced indictment on charges of sedition. In October he boarded a Scandinavian frigate and escaped from the country using a forged passport.
Having made his way to Soviet Russia and already in ill health, Reed was directed, against his will, to make an arduous train journey to Baku to attend a conference. The following year he died of typhus in Russia with Louise Bryant at his side and was accorded a hero’s burial at the necropolis wall in the Kremlin in Moscow, where half of “Big Bill” Hayden’s ashes would also reside.
There is some indication that John Reed spent his last days disillusioned with communism, and there is certainly irony in the fact that as he began to turn against America for social snubs during his Harvard years---one has to wonder how his life might have turned out had he gained admittance to the clubs of his desire-- he now perhaps ended his days embittered with the Soviet alternative due to the overbearing attitude of Grigory Zinoviev who sent him to Baku by train.
The legacy of John Reed, poet and idealist, was to carry forward the romantic essence of revolution through generations of artists and writers in America. By the height of the Great Depression there were John Reed Clubs in some 30 cities around the country. Renowned writer Richard Wright was a member of the Chicago branch. Over the subsequent years there have been numerous books and films covering Reed’s life, the most successful being the 1981 film “Reds” with Warren Beatty, Diane Keaton, and Jack Nicholson that won three Academy Awards.
In another touch of irony, poor, tough and uneducated “Big Bill” Hayden, who went into the mines as a child and died a communist, alcoholic and virtually alone in Moscow, is remembered in America only by students of the labor movement.
While trying to create a classless society at home and to export it, as well, Lenin and Trotsky and the rest of the Soviet leadership had to fight a civil war against counter-revolutionaries. The principal enemy was known as the White Army and was comprised of various bodies of ill-coordinated groups. In general, the Whites represented the overthrown Tsarist regime, and their numbers were bolstered by some 200,000 troops from Britain, France, the United States and Japan, nations which were hostile to the Bolsheviks. The fighting lasted a good three years before the Red Army, distinguished by Trotsky’s generalship, carried the day.
If the West had reason to fear the Bolsheviks for their announced war on capitalism, then the new Soviet government, failing to get diplomatic recognition from the Western powers and already having to face them militarily on Soviet soil, was developing its own justification for fearing and distrusting its future Cold War enemies. What they did share was a desire to trade, and this trumped ideological differences between the United States and the Soviet Union through the 1920’s and beyond. By 1930 American exports to Russia exceeded those in value of any other country, and Joseph Stalin’s first five-year economic plan (1929-1933) relied upon and received extensive American assistance. Between 1923 and 1933 there were 170 licensing agreements awarded to American companies to manufacture and to do business in the Soviet Union. One of the richest of these involved the Ford Motor Company, which in 1929 signed an agreement to sell the Soviets some 13 million dollars worth of automobiles and parts and to give technical assistance over a ten-year period for the construction of two automobile manufacturing plants. As a result many hundreds of American engineers and skilled auto workers moved to the Soviet Union to work, among them Walter Reuther, a Communist Party member, who was to mold the United Auto Workers into a major industrial and political force in post World War II America.
To act as a liaison between Ford and Autostroy, the Soviet body in charge of the construction project, Moscow used Amtorg, which it had established in 1924 in New York City as the official agency for the conduct of trade. Many years later, with the opening of Soviet archives, it was discovered that Amtorg was a front for Soviet espionage.
Throughout this two-decade period of Soviet-American trade relations lurks the enigmatic Armand Hammer, later to be head of Occidental Petroleum, art collector, philanthropist, and staunch Republican. His father, Julius Hammer, of Jewish-Ukrainian background, earned a medical degree in New York and became owner of a small chain of stores called Allied Drug and Chemical. A dedicated Socialist, in 1907 he had attended the Seventh Congress of the Second International in Stuttgart. He met Lenin there, and it has been suggested that he was recruited at that time to use Allied Drug and Chemical as a front for future revolutionary needs.
After the Bolshevik takeover in 1917 Julius Hammer toured America urging business leaders to enter into negotiations with the new Soviet government, and at the 1919 Convention of Socialists in Chicago he served on the steering committee that gave birth the the Communist Party of the U,S.A.
In 1920 Julius Hammer was convicted of manslaughter while attempting an abortion, and was sent to Sing Sing Prison. One of his sons, Armand, having just finished medical school, took over the business. Almost immediately federal agents began investigating Armand Hammer and Allied Chemical and Dye, the name he was using, amidst allegations that he had obtained a concession from the Soviets for the operation of asbestos mines in the Ural Mountains. J. Edgar Hoover, head of the General Intelligence Division of the Justice Department and in 1924 to become Director of the Bureau of Investigation (predecessor to the F.B.I.) had opened a dossier on the Hammer family in 1919 that was to remain act through the days of the Cold War. Armand Hammer moved to Soviet Russia in 1921 to work his mining concession and to engage in other commercial activities, and he remained there for nine years During this time he was instrumental in bringing big American corporations together with the bolsheviks and obtaining licenses and concessions to do business in the Soviet Union for such companies as Ford, Allis-Chalmers, and Underwood typewriter. He continued to deal with the Soviets, and, as it would seem to some, to promote their interests until he died, along with the Cold War, in 1990. Whether or not his conduct was ever treasonous is the subject of debate.
The Soviet Union controlled its ideological war on capitalism through the Comintern, which organized seven world congresses between 1919 and 1935. Its subversive aims---propaganda, money laundering, the establishment of officially illegal trade connections, and espionage coordination--- were conducted through front operations in various countries. In the United States the Hammer families’ Allied Drug and Chemical/Dye Company was such a front, as was the Soviet Bureau, the “unofficial Soviet Embassy,” set up in New York City in 1919 by Ludwig Martens, the “first Soviet Ambassador.” Martens had grown up in Russia, lived in Germany and England, and then immigrated into the United States in 1916. After establishing his Soviet Bureau, he and Julius Hammer contacted some 1000 American companies which wanted to trade with the Bolsheviks. In 1921 Martens was deported, leaving the Bureau with sizeable debts, some of which were paid by the Hammer family. Back in Soviet Russia Martens was appointed a member of the Supreme Soviet of the National Economy and Chairman of Glavmetal, a state organization that controlled all Soviet metallurgical enterprises.
The New York office of Amtorg, set up in 1924 and used by the Soviets as a liason between their own Autostroy and the Ford Motor Company was another front, as was the Tass News Agency.
The recruitment of spies was done mainly through and by the Communist Party of the United States. Earl Browder, who became General Secretary of the Party in 1930 and Party Chairman two years later, had joined the United Communist Party in 1921 and attended the Founding Convention of the Red International of Labor Unions in Moscow in July of the same year. During the late 1930’s he traveled once, maybe twice, to the Soviet Union on a falsified passport and was jailed for doing so. Browder had run a spy network, and when he faced incarceration he turned it over to Jacob Golos, who operated still another Soviet front, the World Tourist Travel Agency. Golos was married and already had a mistress, but when he met Elizabeth Bentley, a highly intelligent but plain and disaffected Vassar graduate, he became her lover, taught her the work of espionage and turned the Browder contacts over to her. One of her sources was Mary Price, secretary to Walter Lippmann, who had been a fellow socialist with John Reed at Harvard and who was to popularize the term “Cold War,” when he wrote in opposition to Kennan’s proposed “containment” policy in 1947. When Golos died in 1943 Bentley could muster no enthusiasm for dealing with her new handlers, and as tireless a worker as she had been for Golos and the communists, in 1945 she walked into an F.B.I. office in Connecticut and told all. Bentley became an ardent anti-communist, and for years was an invaluable source for those concerned with rooting out spies in America. It has been aptly observed that Elizabeth Bentley “opened the door to the McCarthy era.”
Perhaps the best remembered of the spy-catching episodes was triggered in Canada, where in September of 1945 a cipher clerk for the Soviet Embassy in Ottawa, Igor Gouzenko, defected to the West. The information he provided resulted in the arrest of 39 suspected spies, including Fred Rose, the only Communist member of the Canadian House of Commons. More significantly, his further testimony was vital in the conviction of wartime atomic spy Klaus Fuchs and was probably useful in the convictions of David Greenglass and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, the latter two being put to death at Sing Sing in 1953 for smuggling information pertaining to the atomic bomb out of Los Alamos and turning it over to the Soviets.
During the two decades following the Bolshevik Revolution the Soviets planted “sleeper agents” in the West, ideologically motivated individuals who were able to rise to positions in their respective societies from which they could obtain information useful to Soviet Intelligence. The most notorious of these were the “Cambridge Five” in England; Donald MacLean, Kim Philby, Anthony Blunt, John Cairncross, and Guy Burgess, all who had been recruited while at University in the early 1930’s.
At the same time the Americans had no spies, “sleepers” or otherwise, transmitting intelligence out of the Soviet Union.
Until the United States formally recognized the Soviet Union at the end of 1933 and installed an embassy in Moscow practically the only intelligence on the Soviet Union that was available to Washington was picked up via anti-Bolshevik émigrés coming through the Baltic States. It was of distinct advantage, however, that the Department of State had attracted a handful of outstanding individuals for its Division of Eastern European Affairs. Robert Kelley, a Harvard graduate, headed the Division throughout its existence from 1926 to 1937, was an adamant anti-communist and was a strong influence on a generation of Soviet specialists. Three of his protégés who were to distinguish themselves during the later Cold War years served at the Baltic “listening posts” in Latvia and Estonia and at the new United States Embassy in Moscow.
Loy Henderson, a Northwestern graduate, had entered the Consular Service in 1922 and had been assigned the task of investigating the connection between the Soviet Comintern and left-wing organizations in the United States. Then, following a Baltic stint, he was sent to Moscow in 1934 as Second Secretary at the new Embassy.
Another was Charles “Chip” Bohlen, Harvard class of 1927, who became a Soviet specialist working first in Riga before joining the United States Embassy staff in Moscow in 1934. He learned Russian to such fluency that he acted as President Roosevelt’s interpreter at the Teheran Conference in 1943 and again at Yalta two years later.
A third of Robert Kelley’s protégés was George Kennan, who was graduated from Princeton, class of 1927, and who 20 years later was to set down the post-war policy of “containment.” In 1928 he was assigned to the Division of Eastern European Affairs and the following year was enrolled at the University of Berlin’s Oriental Institute to specialize in Russian language, history, and politics. After postings in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania he was sent to Moscow in 1933 to assist with the opening of the Embassy.
William Christian Bullitt, Jr., Yale 1913, Phi Beta Kappa, brilliant, temperamental and vengeful, was not a State Department man but in 1933 was appointed to be the first United States Ambassador to the Soviet Union. He had been born to privilege in Philadelphia to an Anglo father and Jewish mother and as a child traveled extensively in Europe and gained fluency in both French and German. Upon the outbreak of the First World War Bullitt found employment as a foreign correspondent. The subsequent contacts that he made led to his appointment as Assistant Secretary of State in late 1917, and at the conclusion of hostilities he was made a member of the Staff of the American Commission to Negotiate Peace that was sent to Paris.
At the time Bullitt was a political radical and had been advocating recognition of the Bolshevik government, and while he was in Paris he was able, most remarkably, to acquire from the anti-communist President Wilson authorization for himself and two others to travel to Moscow in great secrecy to discuss the possibility of recognition.
The two others were Swedish communist Karl Kilbom and the American muck-raking journalist Lincoln Steffens, he who had some years earlier befriended poet-communist John Reed in New York.
The delegation arrived in Moscow in March of 1919 and had talks with Georgi Chicherin, the Foreign Minister, and a few days later met with Lenin, but nothing came of the meetings. Upon their return to Paris Bullitt found President Wilson dismissive, and when word of the clandestine effort was leaked to an angry American public, the President found reason to repudiate it. An indignant Bullitt resigned from government service and later testified before the United States Senate Foreign Relations Commission, doing his best to help scuttle the proposed Versailles Treaty and Wilson’s vision involving United States participation in a League of Nations.
In 1924 Bullitt married radical activist and feminist Louise Bryant, widow of John Reed. They lived together in Paris, had a child, and were eventually bitterly divorced over Bryant’s lesbian affair with a French sculptress. During part of this time Bullitt was seeing Sigmund Freud for psychoanalysis, the sessions taking place at the Schloss Tegel clinic on the outskirts of Berlin. The two became close personal friends---Bullitt helped Freud get out of Vienna in 1938---and they co-authored a “disastrously bad” book, a psychological study of President Wilson.
With Franklin Roosevelt’s election to the Presidency in 1932 Bullitt returned to public life as special assistant to Secretary of State Cordell Hull. His task was to study the problem-issues that existed between the United States and the Soviet Union and then to engage in the negotiations leading to recognition. One of the matters of great concern on the American side was the persistent tampering of the Comintern in the internal affairs of the United States. Having been assured in his conversations with Maxim Litvinov, the Soviet Commissar for Foreign Affairs, that this would not be a future problem, Bullitt recommended to President Roosevelt that formal diplomatic recognition be accorded. This occurred in November of 1933, and Bullitt became the first Ambassador.
He came to the position with high expectations that relations could be greatly improved between America and his Soviet host, but almost immediately he began experiencing disenchantment with the communist government. His assumption of responsibilities coincided with a catastrophic famine in the Ukraine that was to claim at least six million lives, and while perhaps not genocidally inspired on the part of the central government in Moscow, it was at least caused by its terribly misguided and cruel policy of commandeering the bulk of the Ukrainian wheat harvests in order to break opposition to collectivization, while at the same time using the grain to trade abroad for state industrial and military needs.
Also, as time passed Bullitt observed an increasing prevalence of mass arrests and a growth in the size and number of gulag camps. It became clear to him, too, that there was to be no cessation of Comintern-supported agitation within the United States, and by 1936 he had become openly hostile to the Soviet government. During the war years he was to write extensively about the dangers of communism, predicting a post-war “flow of red amoeba into Europe.”
It was the kind of verbiage reminiscent of the bitterness he had expressed in the past toward Woodrow Wilson and Louise Bryant.
Loy Henderson, Charles Bohlen and George Kennan had been trained by an anti-communist at the Department of State and had put in time in the Baltic countries, so came prepared for what they were to see in the Soviet Union. William Bullitt, on the other hand, had been a political radical, who had once traveled with a delegation to Moscow to lay the groundwork for formal recognition of the Soviet Union by the United States. His anguish, then, was the greater for the illusions that he had held. What they all saw they could surely only interpret in terms of criminal behavior and perversion of justice; millions dying through state-sanctioned starvation, mass murders, torture, deportations to labor camps and mock trials.
The leadership that perpetrated these outrages saw it differently. To them it was the playing out of historical inevitability, the seizure and exercise of power by the working-class. What was going on was the process of the creation of a classless society through the destruction of all ownership of private property. This was not going to be accomplished through changes in government but only through revolution, and such times did not call for sophisticated education or moral constraints.
Marx and Engels had issued the call, and over a half-century later Vladimir Lenin brought it to fruition in Russia. He began the atrocities associated with the destruction of property ownership, and the process was expanded and made more brutal by Lenin’s successor, Joseph Stalin. Born in Gori, Georgia, in 1878 to a poor bootmaker and a devoutly religious mother who took in laundry, Stalin attended school until he was expelled from the Tiflis Theological Seminary. His limited education left him permanently intimidated by people of academic accomplishment, and he disliked and distrusted them. Shortly after the turn of the century he became a Bolshevik and was active in organizing and arming revolutionary militias across Georgia. The financing for his activities came by robbing banks and by laundering money through western Europe. He was in and out of jail during the years leading up to the October Revolution of 1917, and he was twice exiled to Siberia.
When William Bullitt was in Moscow in 1933 discussing formal recognition with the Soviets on behalf of the United States, the man with whom he dealt was Maxim Litvinov. Attention to the event in America was such that Litvinov appeared on the cover of Time magazine on April 24. Born as Meir Henoch Mojzewicz Wallach-Finkelstein in 1876 into a prosperous Jewish family in Bialystock, Litvinov left school at 17 and joined the Russian army. Afterward he was incarcerated for leftist politics but escaped and fled to Switzerland. In 1905 after Stalin had held up a truck of the Russian Imperial Bank in Tiflis it was Litvinov who attempted to launder the stolen rubles at Credit Lyonnais in Paris. Then a dozen years later it was Litvinov who was a principal representative for the new Bolshevik Government at the post World War I peace talks. He became Foreign Commissar from 1930 to 1939 and Ambassador to the United States from 1941 to 1943.
Neither Litvinov nor Stalin pursued an advanced education, substituting an all-consuming ideology in its place, and early in their lives they both engaged in criminal and revolutionary activities. The four top Americans facing them at the new Embassy in Moscow in 1933: Bullitt, Kennan, Bohlen, and Henderson, were graduates of outstanding private schools in America: Yale, Princeton, Harvard and Northwestern. The gulf was enormous.
Stalin’s direct counterpart in the United States from 1933 into 1945 provides an even more dramatic contrast. Born into one of the wealthiest and oldest families in New York State, Franklin Roosevelt was frequently taken to Europe as a child and was taught French and German. He was at Groton preparatory school prior to matriculating at Harvard and then did his Law degree at Columbia.
When he was elected President in 1932 Roosevelt inherited a country to run that was wracked by economic depression and was isolationist in its feeling toward foreign policy. He saw the need to relieve unemployment, which was widespread, and to reform the banking system, as well as to see to the recovery of the general economy. His answer to the domestic crisis was the New Deal with its various components: the Works Project Administration, the National Recovery Administration, the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, and so on.
With all of this on his plate and an inward looking population, Roosevelt tended to bypass diplomatic channels in his foreign policy and to engage in personal diplomacy. It resulted in the United States failing to come away with firm agreements during the “recognition” discussions with the Soviet Union in 1933, and when Ambassador Bullitt was reassigned from Moscow to Paris in 1936, the man appointed to replace him, Joseph Davies, brought absolutely no critical faculties to the job. Disregarding the basic tenets of Marxism and what was actually transpiring in the Soviet Union he concluded in one of his memo’s to Washington; “Communism holds no serious threat to the United States.” The frustration over Roosevelt’s indifference toward Russia and naivete when it came to Stalin was such among several career diplomats that they were on the verge of resignation. Charles Bohlen was later to write that he did not think that Roosevelt “had any real comprehension of the great gulf that separated a Bolshevik from a non-Bolshevik, and particularly from an American . . . what he did not understand was that Stalin’s enmity was based on profound ideological convictions.”
Eventually Roosevelt was persuaded to treat Stalin and the Soviets with more gravity, and for the 1944 election he dropped his Vice-President, Henry Wallace, in favor of Harry Truman. Wallace had been a pro-Soviet voice in the administration, and when he was to make a run for the Presidency in 1948 he would get the support of the Communist Party.
Truman’s idea was to “get tough” with the Soviets, and the policies that he adopted as President would set the course for the Cold War.
Harry Truman had been Vice-President of the United States for less than three months when Franklin Roosevelt died in April of 1945.
He became the first President since 1897 without a college education, but he had shown his courage and leadership ability under fire in the Vosges as an officer in France in World War I. Immediately he was faced with the monumental question of whether to use America’s newly invented atomic bomb against Japan, and his decision brought an abrupt end to the Second World War.
Europe had been devastated by the war, as had the Soviet Union, and as poverty and despair provide a rich seed-bed for communist recruitment, so in the immediate post-war era Moscow- controlled communist parties flourished on the Continent. This was particularly the case in France, Italy, Czechoslovakia, and Greece, and the Soviets, who had occupied northern Iran during the war, showed no willingness to leave there.
The situation was particularly dire in Greece, which had been occupied by German forces until the end of 1944. The legitimate Greek government had gone into exile, but ELAS, the military wing of the Communist Party (KKE), stayed and resisted the occupation. As soon as the Germans left the British moved into Athens and established an interim government with George Papandreou at its head, and the KKE, from their strongholds in the mountains of Macedonia, Thrace and Epirus, stood in opposition. By the start of 1947 full-scale civil war had broken out. The British sent 40,000 troops and financial aid to the government in Athens, but they could see that they would not be able to sustain the necessary commitment.
In February the British Ambassador in Washington passed this information along to Loy Henderson, a career diplomat, who had served with Bullitt, Kennan, and Bohlen in Moscow and who was now at the State Department as the Director of the Office of Near Eastern and African Affairs. At once Henderson set the wheels in motion to convince the President and the American public that it was in the United States’ interest to keep Greece and Turkey out of communist hands. Meanwhile, in April of 1946 George Kennan had sent his “long telegram” from Moscow, urging Washington to develop a strategy to deal with the exportation of communist ideology out of the Soviet Union and the imperialistic intentions of its government. He particularly mentioned Turkey and Iran, both of which were experiencing serious expansionist threats from the Soviet Union
President Truman, with no foreign policy background himself, was prepared to rely upon the advice of professionals at the Department of State. Using Kennan’s “long telegram” as a policy base and with Henderson doing much of the planning in terms of what it would take, Truman went before the United States Congress on March 12, 1947 to request 400 million dollars for the support of Greece and Turkey. He made it clear that his purpose was to stand behind freely elected governments anywhere and, without mentioning the Soviet Union by name, to oppose tyranny. It was the administration’s first formal “containment” program, and it became known as “the Truman Doctrine.”
As for Western Europe, the Communist parties in France and Italy had emerged into the ravaged post-war continent as particularly well positioned. In answer, Kennan, who had become Director of the State Department’s new Policy Planning staff, proposed the European Recovery Program (ERP), a massive infusion of financial assistance into the area. It has been called the “soft side” of “containment.” Working with him to develop the plan was businessman William Clayton, who had left school at 13, become a millionaire cotton-trader at a young age, and worked as adviser to Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman.
The European Recovery Program was announced publicly in a speech written by career diplomat Charles Bohlen, who had served at the United States Embassy in Moscow with Bullitt, Kennan and Henderson in the 1930’s, was a Russian interpreter for President Roosevelt at the Teheran and Yalta Conferences, and was to serve as Ambassador to the Soviet Union under President Eisenhower. The speech was delivered at Harvard in June of 1947 by Secretary of State George Marshall, who had become the first five-star General in United States history and who, as characterized by Winston Churchill, was the “organizer of Allied victory” in World War II. The Plan, although officially known as The European Recovery Program, was called “The Marshall Plan” from the very beginning.
Within a month 16 European nations met in Paris to hash out the mechanics of how the aid was to be distributed. The countries of Eastern Europe had been invited, as had the Soviet Union. It was assumed that the Soviets would decline, but the Czechs and Poles, not yet under total Soviet dominance, showed interest in the Marshall Plan and in attending the Conference. The Soviet response was immediate and hostile. Foreign Minister Andrey Vishinskiy, best known as the prosecutor for Stalin’s show trials during the Great Purge in the 1930’s, accused the United States of attempting to impose its will on independent European nations by dangling a carrot of economic relief. Then Stalin invited all European Communist parties to meet in Poland in late September for the establishment of an “Information Bureau of the Communist and Workers’ Parties,” the real purpose of Cominform, as it was called, being the facilitation of Moscow’s control over the various European communist parties. Out of the Conference came Stalin’s command that all parties should struggle by any means necessary against an American presence in Europe and that Czechoslovakia and Poland had better forget about the Marshall Plan and the Paris Conference. A few months later Czech President Jan Masaryk was found dead, and a communist government had taken over the country. A line down the middle of the Continent had been drawn, with the Soviet Bloc to the east and the “Free World” to the west.
The Truman Doctrine had been successful in thwarting Moscow’s plans in Greece and Turkey, and the 12.4 billion dollars of Marshall Plan money poured into Western Europe from 1948 through 1951 was largely responsible for that area experiencing unprecedented growth. The result was a reduction in poverty and discontent and the consequent waning of the influence of communist parties.
On the home front President Truman had been in the process of demobilizing the army and mothballing its equipment in the aftermath of the War, but he recognized the need to upgrade and reorganize the military and intelligence establishments at the very highest level. To this end he signed into law the National Security Act of 1947, the main elements of which have endured to the present and which is now regarded as a key Cold War document. It set up a Department of Defense and a National Security Council and called for the United States Air Force to become an independent service. It also created the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) as the government’s primary civilian organization for acquiring and processing information vital to the security of the country. A phrase buried in the document tasking it to perform “other functions and duties related to intelligence” authorized for the CIA the broadest possible mandate. It was the phrase that was soon to be used to justify covert operations.
MY RACKET
BY JACK FROST
CHAPTER 1
THE COLD WAR
END OF CHAPTER 1
This url is
http://www.derekmo.net/coldwar
BY JACK FROST
INTRODUCTION
Chapter 1 THE COLD WAR
Chapter 2 THE MONTEREY PENINSULA
Chapter 3 YOUTHFUL IMPRESSIONS
Chapter 4 TENNIS
Chapter 5 THE TRUMAN YEARS
CHAPTER 1
THE COLD WAR
My wife and I had been married in Prague a few days earlier and then had taken the old wooden train to Marienbad for a couple of nights before making our way to the Austrian border. She was a Czech girl, fluent in Russian, and as a teen-ager had taken tourist groups into the Soviet Union. She was now without a passport or identity of any kind, and we waited at the iron Curtain hoping to make it to the other side. It was 1964, the height of the Cold War that existed between the Soviet Union and her satellites and the “Free World.” We were at the eye of the tornado.
Forward forty-some years to a posh cruise liner sailing between Singapore and Sydney, affording the super-rich of the Free World” the opportunity to laze in exotic places. Only here a dozen of the best suites had been occupied by Russians, benefiting from the post-Cold War opportunity to consume conspicuously---as their ex-enemies in the West had been doing all along. They were actually Tatars from near Kazan, older people, and the son of one of them had become a very rich man, one of the richest in the world; done so not by plundering the ruins of the failed Communist state, but by shrewdly developing his own business empire. He had started by making and selling vodka, and then he branched into banking and insurance.
Their interpreter was a striking Russian woman, who in the old days might have made you want to cross over. We sought each other out and had several dinners together. Her English was impeccable, and so was my wife’s Russian, and we spoke with joy and haste about each other’s cultures, like college kids. We asked her about singers we knew from youtube---Grebenchikov and Bichevskaya---and she sang a few bars of the haunting “Ivushka.” We discussed Stalin and Communism, you could do that now, and the West and the Cold War. But through the passionate conversations my wife and I---and I suspect that Elena, too----kept a place of reserve in our thinking that intelligence was being gathered and hearts and minds were being won or lost. Decades of Cold War exposure had that effect.
The term “Cold War” was first used publicly in April of 1947 by the financier and presidential adviser Bernard Baruch in a speech he delivered in the South Carolina House of Representatives. He warned: “Let us not be deceived, we are today in the midst of a cold war” and added as a foretaste of a spirit that was to pervade the country a few years later during the McCarthy era: “Our enemies are to be found abroad and at home.”
The term was not of Baruch’s own inspiration but came to him through his speechwriter, Herbert Bayard Swope, who in 1917 had been the first recipient of a Pulitzer Prize for reporting and was to win three more for the New York World as executive editor during the 1920’s. It is not known whether Swope himself took it from George Orwell, who had used it in a theoretical sense in an essay of October, 1945 entitled “You and the Atomic Bomb.” At any rate, “Cold War” became the lexical coinage to describe the nuclear arms race, propaganda barrages and brinksmanship that were to define the relationship that endured between the world’s two super-powers for over 40 years.
Baruch’s expression gained traction through a series of articles written later in 1947 for the New York Herald Tribune by Walter Lippmann. They were in response to an essay that had appeared in the July edition of the influential publication Foreign Affairs, a piece entitled “The Sources of Soviet Conduct” by “Mr. X.”
Lippmann had been the founding editor of the journal The New Repbulic and was an advisor to President Wilson during the First World War. Later in his career, in l958 and 1962, he was to win Pulitzer Prizes. Following World War ll he became the leading
proponent of the need to respect a Soviet sphere of
influence in eastern Europe, that which had been outlined at Yalta in 1945. He felt that diplomatic efforts should be spent toward removing all military occupation of Europe, and peace treaties should be designed and agreed upon with that end in mind. It was an approach that assumed cooperation from Joseph Stalin.
The essay by “Mr. X” which Lippmann was challenging set forth the ideas and argumentation for a “containment ” policy in relation to the Soviet Union. It was the one which President Truman was to follow and was to remain the foreign policy touchstone for the United States throughout the conduct of the Cold War.
As astute observers at the time knew, and what was revealed to the public soon after, was that “Mr. X” was George F. Kennan, Director of the State Department’s Policy Planning staff. The idea of “containment” was his, and it had grown out of his years of intense observation of and contact with Stalin’s Soviet Union.
An older relative of Kennan’s had been a recognized authority on Czarist Russia, and when the younger Kennan was graduated from Princeton in 1925 he joined the Department of State with a keen interest in the new Soviet state. He had early postings in the Baltic states---Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania---and training in Russian language, history and politics at Berlin’s Oriental Institute, and when formal diplomatic relations between the United States and the Soviet Union were established in 1933 Kennan was dispatched to Moscow.
His arrival in the Soviet Union coincided with Stalin’s collectivization of agriculture in the Ukraine, which was resulting in
widespread famine and was costing the lives of millions of peasants. Then, within a couple of years came the Great Purge, a series of campaigns of political repression and persecution lasting until 1938, and again millions of lives were lost, this time Communist Party members and Red Army leaders as well as peasants. Kennan was deeply affected by these frightening years.
Following a stint in Prague and later a five-month internment under the Nazis at Bad Nauheim, Kennan returned to Moscow in July, 1944 to serve as deputy head of the United States mission to Moscow. In 1946, at the end of his term, he sent his now-famous, often-cited “long telegram” to Secretary of State James Byrne outlining a proposed strategy on how to handle diplomatic relations with the post-war Soviet Union.
Having the memory of the Great Purge fresh in mind and drawing upon Stalin’s own declarations, Kennan expressed the certainty in his telegram that in the collective mind of the Soviet leadership there could be no enduring, peaceful coexistence with the United States. The Soviets would do whatever possible to disrupt the “internal harmony” of our society, he warned, and he advised that in this respect the Soviets “are more dangerous than ever before.” Under their control, he explained, was “an inner central core” of Communist parties in other countries working closely together as “an underground directorate of world Communism, a concealed Comintern tightly coordinated and directed by Moscow.” Their purpose was to infiltrate and dominate wherever a foothold could be gained among the disaffected: labor unions, youth leagues, racial societies, women’s organizations, and so on.
As far as official Soviet power and influence was concerned, he went on to write, they would do whatever possible to advance their reach. In the immediate sense this would mean into Northern Iran, with an ultimate eye to the Persian Gulf, and into Turkey, with its access to the warm waters of the Mediterranean. Eventually, if Spain were to fall to the Communists, a Soviet base at Gibralter would become a possibility.
Having thus cautioned concerning the Soviet urge to disruption and expansion Kennan’s counsel to the United States was to avoid panic. The problem “is within our power to solve,” he wrote, and we can do so “without recourse to any general military conflict.” After all, he encouraged, the Soviets were still considerably weaker than the West, hence disinclined to take unnecessary risks, and they could be expected to withdraw when encountering strong resistance. What will be critical in our response, he concluded, will be the promotion and maintenance of healthy, vigorous and harmonious Western societies, making them impenetrable to Soviet subversion.
In July of the following year, 1947, Kennan published “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” an elaboration of his telegram. In it he gave to the American reading public the term “containment,” which became a touchstone, in whatever distorted form, for American foreign policy throughout the Cold War and beyond. He wrote: “the main element of any U.S. policy toward the Soviet Union must be that of long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies,” and “It must be an adroit application of counterforce at a series of constantly shifting, geographical and political points, corresponding to the shifts and maneuvers of Soviet policy.”
He insisted that this was not to be taken as a strictly defensive posture: “The United States has in its power to increase enormously the strains under which Soviet Policy must operate . . . and . . . to promote tendencies which must eventually find their outlet in either
the breakup or the gradual mellowing of Soviet power. He finished with this challenge: “The issue of Soviet-American relations is in essence a test of the overall worth of the United States.”
The roots of the oncoming ideological struggle between the two post-war super-powers lay in the 19th century, when Marx and Engels issued the call in Europe for workers of the world to unite against Capitalism. The First International was formed in 1864, volume 1 of Das Kapital appeared in 1867, and the Paris Commune, a working class seizure of government took place in March of 1871.
In the United States communist organizations began to develop in the 1850’s and gained impetus following the Civil War and through much of the 1970’s. An economic depression that had hit in 1973 was followed by violence in the coal mines of western Pennsylvania and by railroad strikes, and the period between 1873 and 1878 was a precursor to the “Red Scares” of the following century. The derogatory label “communist” came to be used against labor agitators and their sympathizers” and often against immigrants. But the organization of labor continued, and the Industrial Workers of the World was founded in 1905 in Chicago with clear Marxist underpinnings. “Big Bill” Hayden thundered in his opening speech: “We are here to confederate the workers of this country into a working class movement that shall have for its purpose the emancipation of the working-class from the slave bondage of capitalism.”
Hayden had himself lived out the inequities and injustices of being on the working-class side of the industrial revolution. Born into poor circumstances to a Pony-Express riding father whom he never really knew, he grew up with little formal education and went underground to work in a Nevada mine when he was still a boy. Later he was involved in several important labor battles and was acquitted of a murder charge along the way. In 1918 he and some 100 others were arrested for violating federal espionage and sedition acts by calling a strike during wartime. Hayden was convicted, served a year at Leavenworth, and jumped bail after he had been freed pending an appeal. He fled to Soviet Russia and became a labor advisor to the Bolshevik government, but his influence ended with Lenin’s death in 1923. Five years later he died of diabetes and alcoholism, and part of his ashes are buried at the Kremlin Wall.
The two years following the 1918 trial of “Big Bill” Hayden are sometimes referred to as “the First Red Scare,” a reaction not only to the public exposure of Hayden and the others, but to a depressed economy and the consequent domestic turmoil. President Wilson, preoccupied with the post-war Paris Peace Conference, had failed to prepare for the reintegration of close to four million American troops into civilian life. Also, the war-time price bubble in agricultural produce had burst leaving many farmers destitute, there were several major industrial strikes throughout the country, and in Chicago, Omaha, and in other cities there were race riots. Wilson turned to Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer to bring order. Palmer did so, with the assistance of a young J. Edgar Hoover, through a series of raids. Thousands of suspected radicals and anarchists were rounded up and held without trial, and over 200 were eventually deported to Soviet Russia. Prior to the raids there had been anarchist bomb-scares, two of them directed against Palmer himself, and a fearful American public generally supported the raids and deportations.
During President Wilson’s second term of office, 1916-1920, the United States became a major participant in a cataclysmic European war, and there was a successful revolution that turned Tsarist Russia into the Soviet Union. Wilson had resisted going to war and would not recognize the new Bolshevik government that was avowedly atheistic. His response to these, two of the most influential events of the 20th century, must be seen with reference to his own background.
Wilson’s father, who held family prayer meetings five times a day, had been a Presbyterian minister in Georgia and for a time was a professor at a theological seminary in South Carolina, and the President’s first wife had been the daughter of a southern minister. Protected by his family, his religion and by his church, he was also the product of private education. His undergraduate degree was from New Jersey College, which formally became Princeton University in l896, and he earned his Ph.D. in History and Political Science from Johns Hopkins. He taught at Princeton and became its President from 1902 until 1910.
In a commemorative address that he gave at the University in 1896 Woodrow Wilson articulated a vision that had evolved within him of the individual and the School and that he was later to apply to the country in a world context. He titled it: “Princeton in the Nation’s Service,” and it was to become the School’s motto. In it he dwelt on the ideals and wisdom of its founding fathers, a small group of Presbytyerians, who established the School with church affiliation, and expectation of the Princetonian was to be high: “your thorough Presbyterian is not subject to the ordinary laws of life,” he challenged.
Wilson’s vision for his country and the world, “Wilson Idealism” it has come to be called, is most evident in his second term as President of the United States, from 1916 through 1920, and it has endured through the years of the Cold War and beyond as a raison d’etre of American foreign policy. He enunciated it in January of 1918 to a joint session of Congress ten months before the First World War was ended, and it became the basis of the German surrender as negotiated at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. His vision was of a lasting world peace with collective security, guaranteed by a League of Nations. He called for self-determination for ethnic groups, clearly with the components of the disintegrated German, Austrian and Ottoman empires in mind, and he urged interventionist foreign policy on behalf of the United States to promote the spread of peace and democracy in the future.
President Wilson was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1919, but many seasoned European diplomats were highly skeptical of the Vision. Indeed, the League of Nations was doomed from the outset, as Wilson was unable to persuade the Senate to ratify the Treaty, and the United States never became a contracting party with the collective organization that was supposed to guarantee world peace.
The Germans dropped out in 1933, and the Soviet Union joined a year later but without positive conviction.
Wilson’s address to the joint session of Congress responded to one delivered to the Second All-Russia Congress of Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies by Vladimir Lenin a couple of months before. Bolshevik forces, with the shed of very little blood and needing only a couple of hours on the dark and snowy Julian Calendar night of October 25, 1917, had taken the Winter Palace in Petrograd, seat of Kerensky’s provisional government. The following day, in his Decree on Peace, Lenin called on “the governments and peoples of all warring countries” to engage in a “just and democratic” peace, one “without annexations . . . and without indemnities.”
There was a basic similarity between Wilson’s vision of world peace and Lenin’s. Both professed to support the nationalist aspirations of ethnic minorities, but within a short time after he seized power Lenin had swallowed up the newly independent states of Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan. Their inclusion in the Soviet Empire, he explained, would save them from capitalism. At the same time Wilson refused to receive Eamon de Valera, President of the revolutionary Irish Republic, when he came to America in 1919.
Also, both leaders faced domestic difficulties, Wilson with economic disorder, industrial strikes, and the need to demobilize millions of servicemen. Part of his response involved the Palmer Raids and the abrogation of civil rights, a response which was publicly well received, reduced social agitation considerably, and was accomplished with very little bloodshed.
Lenin, on the other hand, had taken on the monumental task of creating a new, classless society and of promoting world revolution, while fending off counter-revolutionary armies at the same time.
Almost immediately he created a secret police, commonly known as the Cheka, with Felix Dzherzhinsky at its head, and in September of the following year, 1918, Dzherzhinsky was ordered to institute a Red Terror, to murder intellectuals, priests, capitalists, and anyone else suspected of anti-Bolshevik behavior. In Dzherzhinsky’s own words, “the terrorization involve(ed) arrests and extermination of enemies of the revolution on the basis of their class affiliation or their pre-revolutionary roles.”
Lenin certainly conceived of the mass murders and exiles to gulags as philosophical and political necessity. Yet there was also a good measure of vengeance, as well. When he was l7 years old his eldest brother, Alexander, had been hanged for his complicity in an assassination plot against the Tsar and a sister had been banished. As far as religious constraints on his behavior were concerned, Lenin had been baptized into the Russian Orthodox Church, but as he developed his Marxist beliefs at Kazan State University, at law school in St. Petersburg, and during a three-year exile in Siberia he came to regard atheism as an important part of a future revolutionary state.
In his Decree on Peace speech of October, 1917, while outlining his proposals for closing down what he regarded as an imperialist war, Lenin used the same forum to broadcast to the world the global revolutionary aims of the new Bolshevik government: “Russia appeals particularly to the class-conscious workers of . . . the largest states participating in the present war—England, France and Germany . . . that by their . . . efforts in various directions these workers will help us to bring to a successful end the cause of peace, and, together with this, the cause of the liberation of the toiling and exploited masses from all forms of slavery and all exploitation.”
In order to establish Soviet control over the various world-wide socialist movements the Third Communist International, or Comintern, was founded during the frigid Moscow days from March 2-6, 1919. Grigory Zinoviev, born in the Ukraine to a Jewish dairy farmer and who had little formal education but had plotted for years on behalf of the Revolution, was elected Chairman of the Executive Committee. It has been estimated that within ten years the organization could claim over 500,000 members from outside the Soviet Union.
Marxist agitation had been at work through labor movements in the United States since before the turn of the century but gained impetus with the success of the Revolution and the establishment of the Comintern. Simultaneous with the murderous Red Terror in Soviet Russia came the Red Scare in America, with its trials and deportations. “Big Bill” Hayden, who could have been a poster-boy for the new proletariat, fled his native country for the Bolshevik state where he was a labor adviser to Lenin for a time.
On the other side of the coin from Hayden was John Reed, born to privilege in Portland, Oregon. He attended private schools all the way through an undergraduate degree from Harvard (1910), but as hard as he tried to advance into the upper crust socially at the University, in the end he was left with the bitter taste of the snobbery and rejection of his aristocratic eastern school-fellows. One of his friends at Harvard was Walter Lippmann, who had founded the school’s Socialist Club, and who in 1947 was to oppose George Kennan’s policy of “containment” toward the Soviet Union.
In New York City, after his graduation, he worked as a journalist alongside “muckrakers” Lincoln Steffens and Ida Tarbell, coming under their influence, and soon surpassing them in his radicalism.
He wrote poems that were published, and in 1913 Metropolitan Magazine sent him to Mexico to report on the Mexican Revolution. After traveling with Pancho Villa’s army for four months, Reed came away with a deep sympathy with the plight of the peons and a strong feeling that the United States should not interfere in the Mexican Revolution.
In 1916 Reed was again living in New York in a ménage-a-trois with Louise Bryant, whom he was to marry later in the year, and playwright Eurgene O’Neill. Having been sent to Europe by Metropolitan Magazine to cover the outbreak of World War I, a war which he opposed as inspired by imperialist commercial rivalries, he and Bryant left for Russia in the autumn of 1917 to take part in the unfolding of revolutionary events there. Reed met Lenin and Trotsky and witnessed the Bolshevik takeover of power from the Provisional Government, and he wrote a book about it which he called Ten Days That Shook the World.
Reed returned to the United States, and while in Chicago for the National Socialist Convention in August of 1919, he helped to found the Communist Labor Party. However, in February he had been called before a United States Senate committee exploring Bolshevik propaganda activities and now faced indictment on charges of sedition. In October he boarded a Scandinavian frigate and escaped from the country using a forged passport.
Having made his way to Soviet Russia and already in ill health, Reed was directed, against his will, to make an arduous train journey to Baku to attend a conference. The following year he died of typhus in Russia with Louise Bryant at his side and was accorded a hero’s burial at the necropolis wall in the Kremlin in Moscow, where half of “Big Bill” Hayden’s ashes would also reside.
There is some indication that John Reed spent his last days disillusioned with communism, and there is certainly irony in the fact that as he began to turn against America for social snubs during his Harvard years---one has to wonder how his life might have turned out had he gained admittance to the clubs of his desire-- he now perhaps ended his days embittered with the Soviet alternative due to the overbearing attitude of Grigory Zinoviev who sent him to Baku by train.
The legacy of John Reed, poet and idealist, was to carry forward the romantic essence of revolution through generations of artists and writers in America. By the height of the Great Depression there were John Reed Clubs in some 30 cities around the country. Renowned writer Richard Wright was a member of the Chicago branch. Over the subsequent years there have been numerous books and films covering Reed’s life, the most successful being the 1981 film “Reds” with Warren Beatty, Diane Keaton, and Jack Nicholson that won three Academy Awards.
In another touch of irony, poor, tough and uneducated “Big Bill” Hayden, who went into the mines as a child and died a communist, alcoholic and virtually alone in Moscow, is remembered in America only by students of the labor movement.
While trying to create a classless society at home and to export it, as well, Lenin and Trotsky and the rest of the Soviet leadership had to fight a civil war against counter-revolutionaries. The principal enemy was known as the White Army and was comprised of various bodies of ill-coordinated groups. In general, the Whites represented the overthrown Tsarist regime, and their numbers were bolstered by some 200,000 troops from Britain, France, the United States and Japan, nations which were hostile to the Bolsheviks. The fighting lasted a good three years before the Red Army, distinguished by Trotsky’s generalship, carried the day.
If the West had reason to fear the Bolsheviks for their announced war on capitalism, then the new Soviet government, failing to get diplomatic recognition from the Western powers and already having to face them militarily on Soviet soil, was developing its own justification for fearing and distrusting its future Cold War enemies. What they did share was a desire to trade, and this trumped ideological differences between the United States and the Soviet Union through the 1920’s and beyond. By 1930 American exports to Russia exceeded those in value of any other country, and Joseph Stalin’s first five-year economic plan (1929-1933) relied upon and received extensive American assistance. Between 1923 and 1933 there were 170 licensing agreements awarded to American companies to manufacture and to do business in the Soviet Union. One of the richest of these involved the Ford Motor Company, which in 1929 signed an agreement to sell the Soviets some 13 million dollars worth of automobiles and parts and to give technical assistance over a ten-year period for the construction of two automobile manufacturing plants. As a result many hundreds of American engineers and skilled auto workers moved to the Soviet Union to work, among them Walter Reuther, a Communist Party member, who was to mold the United Auto Workers into a major industrial and political force in post World War II America.
To act as a liaison between Ford and Autostroy, the Soviet body in charge of the construction project, Moscow used Amtorg, which it had established in 1924 in New York City as the official agency for the conduct of trade. Many years later, with the opening of Soviet archives, it was discovered that Amtorg was a front for Soviet espionage.
Throughout this two-decade period of Soviet-American trade relations lurks the enigmatic Armand Hammer, later to be head of Occidental Petroleum, art collector, philanthropist, and staunch Republican. His father, Julius Hammer, of Jewish-Ukrainian background, earned a medical degree in New York and became owner of a small chain of stores called Allied Drug and Chemical. A dedicated Socialist, in 1907 he had attended the Seventh Congress of the Second International in Stuttgart. He met Lenin there, and it has been suggested that he was recruited at that time to use Allied Drug and Chemical as a front for future revolutionary needs.
After the Bolshevik takeover in 1917 Julius Hammer toured America urging business leaders to enter into negotiations with the new Soviet government, and at the 1919 Convention of Socialists in Chicago he served on the steering committee that gave birth the the Communist Party of the U,S.A.
In 1920 Julius Hammer was convicted of manslaughter while attempting an abortion, and was sent to Sing Sing Prison. One of his sons, Armand, having just finished medical school, took over the business. Almost immediately federal agents began investigating Armand Hammer and Allied Chemical and Dye, the name he was using, amidst allegations that he had obtained a concession from the Soviets for the operation of asbestos mines in the Ural Mountains. J. Edgar Hoover, head of the General Intelligence Division of the Justice Department and in 1924 to become Director of the Bureau of Investigation (predecessor to the F.B.I.) had opened a dossier on the Hammer family in 1919 that was to remain act through the days of the Cold War. Armand Hammer moved to Soviet Russia in 1921 to work his mining concession and to engage in other commercial activities, and he remained there for nine years During this time he was instrumental in bringing big American corporations together with the bolsheviks and obtaining licenses and concessions to do business in the Soviet Union for such companies as Ford, Allis-Chalmers, and Underwood typewriter. He continued to deal with the Soviets, and, as it would seem to some, to promote their interests until he died, along with the Cold War, in 1990. Whether or not his conduct was ever treasonous is the subject of debate.
The Soviet Union controlled its ideological war on capitalism through the Comintern, which organized seven world congresses between 1919 and 1935. Its subversive aims---propaganda, money laundering, the establishment of officially illegal trade connections, and espionage coordination--- were conducted through front operations in various countries. In the United States the Hammer families’ Allied Drug and Chemical/Dye Company was such a front, as was the Soviet Bureau, the “unofficial Soviet Embassy,” set up in New York City in 1919 by Ludwig Martens, the “first Soviet Ambassador.” Martens had grown up in Russia, lived in Germany and England, and then immigrated into the United States in 1916. After establishing his Soviet Bureau, he and Julius Hammer contacted some 1000 American companies which wanted to trade with the Bolsheviks. In 1921 Martens was deported, leaving the Bureau with sizeable debts, some of which were paid by the Hammer family. Back in Soviet Russia Martens was appointed a member of the Supreme Soviet of the National Economy and Chairman of Glavmetal, a state organization that controlled all Soviet metallurgical enterprises.
The New York office of Amtorg, set up in 1924 and used by the Soviets as a liason between their own Autostroy and the Ford Motor Company was another front, as was the Tass News Agency.
The recruitment of spies was done mainly through and by the Communist Party of the United States. Earl Browder, who became General Secretary of the Party in 1930 and Party Chairman two years later, had joined the United Communist Party in 1921 and attended the Founding Convention of the Red International of Labor Unions in Moscow in July of the same year. During the late 1930’s he traveled once, maybe twice, to the Soviet Union on a falsified passport and was jailed for doing so. Browder had run a spy network, and when he faced incarceration he turned it over to Jacob Golos, who operated still another Soviet front, the World Tourist Travel Agency. Golos was married and already had a mistress, but when he met Elizabeth Bentley, a highly intelligent but plain and disaffected Vassar graduate, he became her lover, taught her the work of espionage and turned the Browder contacts over to her. One of her sources was Mary Price, secretary to Walter Lippmann, who had been a fellow socialist with John Reed at Harvard and who was to popularize the term “Cold War,” when he wrote in opposition to Kennan’s proposed “containment” policy in 1947. When Golos died in 1943 Bentley could muster no enthusiasm for dealing with her new handlers, and as tireless a worker as she had been for Golos and the communists, in 1945 she walked into an F.B.I. office in Connecticut and told all. Bentley became an ardent anti-communist, and for years was an invaluable source for those concerned with rooting out spies in America. It has been aptly observed that Elizabeth Bentley “opened the door to the McCarthy era.”
Perhaps the best remembered of the spy-catching episodes was triggered in Canada, where in September of 1945 a cipher clerk for the Soviet Embassy in Ottawa, Igor Gouzenko, defected to the West. The information he provided resulted in the arrest of 39 suspected spies, including Fred Rose, the only Communist member of the Canadian House of Commons. More significantly, his further testimony was vital in the conviction of wartime atomic spy Klaus Fuchs and was probably useful in the convictions of David Greenglass and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, the latter two being put to death at Sing Sing in 1953 for smuggling information pertaining to the atomic bomb out of Los Alamos and turning it over to the Soviets.
During the two decades following the Bolshevik Revolution the Soviets planted “sleeper agents” in the West, ideologically motivated individuals who were able to rise to positions in their respective societies from which they could obtain information useful to Soviet Intelligence. The most notorious of these were the “Cambridge Five” in England; Donald MacLean, Kim Philby, Anthony Blunt, John Cairncross, and Guy Burgess, all who had been recruited while at University in the early 1930’s.
At the same time the Americans had no spies, “sleepers” or otherwise, transmitting intelligence out of the Soviet Union.
Until the United States formally recognized the Soviet Union at the end of 1933 and installed an embassy in Moscow practically the only intelligence on the Soviet Union that was available to Washington was picked up via anti-Bolshevik émigrés coming through the Baltic States. It was of distinct advantage, however, that the Department of State had attracted a handful of outstanding individuals for its Division of Eastern European Affairs. Robert Kelley, a Harvard graduate, headed the Division throughout its existence from 1926 to 1937, was an adamant anti-communist and was a strong influence on a generation of Soviet specialists. Three of his protégés who were to distinguish themselves during the later Cold War years served at the Baltic “listening posts” in Latvia and Estonia and at the new United States Embassy in Moscow.
Loy Henderson, a Northwestern graduate, had entered the Consular Service in 1922 and had been assigned the task of investigating the connection between the Soviet Comintern and left-wing organizations in the United States. Then, following a Baltic stint, he was sent to Moscow in 1934 as Second Secretary at the new Embassy.
Another was Charles “Chip” Bohlen, Harvard class of 1927, who became a Soviet specialist working first in Riga before joining the United States Embassy staff in Moscow in 1934. He learned Russian to such fluency that he acted as President Roosevelt’s interpreter at the Teheran Conference in 1943 and again at Yalta two years later.
A third of Robert Kelley’s protégés was George Kennan, who was graduated from Princeton, class of 1927, and who 20 years later was to set down the post-war policy of “containment.” In 1928 he was assigned to the Division of Eastern European Affairs and the following year was enrolled at the University of Berlin’s Oriental Institute to specialize in Russian language, history, and politics. After postings in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania he was sent to Moscow in 1933 to assist with the opening of the Embassy.
William Christian Bullitt, Jr., Yale 1913, Phi Beta Kappa, brilliant, temperamental and vengeful, was not a State Department man but in 1933 was appointed to be the first United States Ambassador to the Soviet Union. He had been born to privilege in Philadelphia to an Anglo father and Jewish mother and as a child traveled extensively in Europe and gained fluency in both French and German. Upon the outbreak of the First World War Bullitt found employment as a foreign correspondent. The subsequent contacts that he made led to his appointment as Assistant Secretary of State in late 1917, and at the conclusion of hostilities he was made a member of the Staff of the American Commission to Negotiate Peace that was sent to Paris.
At the time Bullitt was a political radical and had been advocating recognition of the Bolshevik government, and while he was in Paris he was able, most remarkably, to acquire from the anti-communist President Wilson authorization for himself and two others to travel to Moscow in great secrecy to discuss the possibility of recognition.
The two others were Swedish communist Karl Kilbom and the American muck-raking journalist Lincoln Steffens, he who had some years earlier befriended poet-communist John Reed in New York.
The delegation arrived in Moscow in March of 1919 and had talks with Georgi Chicherin, the Foreign Minister, and a few days later met with Lenin, but nothing came of the meetings. Upon their return to Paris Bullitt found President Wilson dismissive, and when word of the clandestine effort was leaked to an angry American public, the President found reason to repudiate it. An indignant Bullitt resigned from government service and later testified before the United States Senate Foreign Relations Commission, doing his best to help scuttle the proposed Versailles Treaty and Wilson’s vision involving United States participation in a League of Nations.
In 1924 Bullitt married radical activist and feminist Louise Bryant, widow of John Reed. They lived together in Paris, had a child, and were eventually bitterly divorced over Bryant’s lesbian affair with a French sculptress. During part of this time Bullitt was seeing Sigmund Freud for psychoanalysis, the sessions taking place at the Schloss Tegel clinic on the outskirts of Berlin. The two became close personal friends---Bullitt helped Freud get out of Vienna in 1938---and they co-authored a “disastrously bad” book, a psychological study of President Wilson.
With Franklin Roosevelt’s election to the Presidency in 1932 Bullitt returned to public life as special assistant to Secretary of State Cordell Hull. His task was to study the problem-issues that existed between the United States and the Soviet Union and then to engage in the negotiations leading to recognition. One of the matters of great concern on the American side was the persistent tampering of the Comintern in the internal affairs of the United States. Having been assured in his conversations with Maxim Litvinov, the Soviet Commissar for Foreign Affairs, that this would not be a future problem, Bullitt recommended to President Roosevelt that formal diplomatic recognition be accorded. This occurred in November of 1933, and Bullitt became the first Ambassador.
He came to the position with high expectations that relations could be greatly improved between America and his Soviet host, but almost immediately he began experiencing disenchantment with the communist government. His assumption of responsibilities coincided with a catastrophic famine in the Ukraine that was to claim at least six million lives, and while perhaps not genocidally inspired on the part of the central government in Moscow, it was at least caused by its terribly misguided and cruel policy of commandeering the bulk of the Ukrainian wheat harvests in order to break opposition to collectivization, while at the same time using the grain to trade abroad for state industrial and military needs.
Also, as time passed Bullitt observed an increasing prevalence of mass arrests and a growth in the size and number of gulag camps. It became clear to him, too, that there was to be no cessation of Comintern-supported agitation within the United States, and by 1936 he had become openly hostile to the Soviet government. During the war years he was to write extensively about the dangers of communism, predicting a post-war “flow of red amoeba into Europe.”
It was the kind of verbiage reminiscent of the bitterness he had expressed in the past toward Woodrow Wilson and Louise Bryant.
Loy Henderson, Charles Bohlen and George Kennan had been trained by an anti-communist at the Department of State and had put in time in the Baltic countries, so came prepared for what they were to see in the Soviet Union. William Bullitt, on the other hand, had been a political radical, who had once traveled with a delegation to Moscow to lay the groundwork for formal recognition of the Soviet Union by the United States. His anguish, then, was the greater for the illusions that he had held. What they all saw they could surely only interpret in terms of criminal behavior and perversion of justice; millions dying through state-sanctioned starvation, mass murders, torture, deportations to labor camps and mock trials.
The leadership that perpetrated these outrages saw it differently. To them it was the playing out of historical inevitability, the seizure and exercise of power by the working-class. What was going on was the process of the creation of a classless society through the destruction of all ownership of private property. This was not going to be accomplished through changes in government but only through revolution, and such times did not call for sophisticated education or moral constraints.
Marx and Engels had issued the call, and over a half-century later Vladimir Lenin brought it to fruition in Russia. He began the atrocities associated with the destruction of property ownership, and the process was expanded and made more brutal by Lenin’s successor, Joseph Stalin. Born in Gori, Georgia, in 1878 to a poor bootmaker and a devoutly religious mother who took in laundry, Stalin attended school until he was expelled from the Tiflis Theological Seminary. His limited education left him permanently intimidated by people of academic accomplishment, and he disliked and distrusted them. Shortly after the turn of the century he became a Bolshevik and was active in organizing and arming revolutionary militias across Georgia. The financing for his activities came by robbing banks and by laundering money through western Europe. He was in and out of jail during the years leading up to the October Revolution of 1917, and he was twice exiled to Siberia.
When William Bullitt was in Moscow in 1933 discussing formal recognition with the Soviets on behalf of the United States, the man with whom he dealt was Maxim Litvinov. Attention to the event in America was such that Litvinov appeared on the cover of Time magazine on April 24. Born as Meir Henoch Mojzewicz Wallach-Finkelstein in 1876 into a prosperous Jewish family in Bialystock, Litvinov left school at 17 and joined the Russian army. Afterward he was incarcerated for leftist politics but escaped and fled to Switzerland. In 1905 after Stalin had held up a truck of the Russian Imperial Bank in Tiflis it was Litvinov who attempted to launder the stolen rubles at Credit Lyonnais in Paris. Then a dozen years later it was Litvinov who was a principal representative for the new Bolshevik Government at the post World War I peace talks. He became Foreign Commissar from 1930 to 1939 and Ambassador to the United States from 1941 to 1943.
Neither Litvinov nor Stalin pursued an advanced education, substituting an all-consuming ideology in its place, and early in their lives they both engaged in criminal and revolutionary activities. The four top Americans facing them at the new Embassy in Moscow in 1933: Bullitt, Kennan, Bohlen, and Henderson, were graduates of outstanding private schools in America: Yale, Princeton, Harvard and Northwestern. The gulf was enormous.
Stalin’s direct counterpart in the United States from 1933 into 1945 provides an even more dramatic contrast. Born into one of the wealthiest and oldest families in New York State, Franklin Roosevelt was frequently taken to Europe as a child and was taught French and German. He was at Groton preparatory school prior to matriculating at Harvard and then did his Law degree at Columbia.
When he was elected President in 1932 Roosevelt inherited a country to run that was wracked by economic depression and was isolationist in its feeling toward foreign policy. He saw the need to relieve unemployment, which was widespread, and to reform the banking system, as well as to see to the recovery of the general economy. His answer to the domestic crisis was the New Deal with its various components: the Works Project Administration, the National Recovery Administration, the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, and so on.
With all of this on his plate and an inward looking population, Roosevelt tended to bypass diplomatic channels in his foreign policy and to engage in personal diplomacy. It resulted in the United States failing to come away with firm agreements during the “recognition” discussions with the Soviet Union in 1933, and when Ambassador Bullitt was reassigned from Moscow to Paris in 1936, the man appointed to replace him, Joseph Davies, brought absolutely no critical faculties to the job. Disregarding the basic tenets of Marxism and what was actually transpiring in the Soviet Union he concluded in one of his memo’s to Washington; “Communism holds no serious threat to the United States.” The frustration over Roosevelt’s indifference toward Russia and naivete when it came to Stalin was such among several career diplomats that they were on the verge of resignation. Charles Bohlen was later to write that he did not think that Roosevelt “had any real comprehension of the great gulf that separated a Bolshevik from a non-Bolshevik, and particularly from an American . . . what he did not understand was that Stalin’s enmity was based on profound ideological convictions.”
Eventually Roosevelt was persuaded to treat Stalin and the Soviets with more gravity, and for the 1944 election he dropped his Vice-President, Henry Wallace, in favor of Harry Truman. Wallace had been a pro-Soviet voice in the administration, and when he was to make a run for the Presidency in 1948 he would get the support of the Communist Party.
Truman’s idea was to “get tough” with the Soviets, and the policies that he adopted as President would set the course for the Cold War.
Harry Truman had been Vice-President of the United States for less than three months when Franklin Roosevelt died in April of 1945.
He became the first President since 1897 without a college education, but he had shown his courage and leadership ability under fire in the Vosges as an officer in France in World War I. Immediately he was faced with the monumental question of whether to use America’s newly invented atomic bomb against Japan, and his decision brought an abrupt end to the Second World War.
Europe had been devastated by the war, as had the Soviet Union, and as poverty and despair provide a rich seed-bed for communist recruitment, so in the immediate post-war era Moscow- controlled communist parties flourished on the Continent. This was particularly the case in France, Italy, Czechoslovakia, and Greece, and the Soviets, who had occupied northern Iran during the war, showed no willingness to leave there.
The situation was particularly dire in Greece, which had been occupied by German forces until the end of 1944. The legitimate Greek government had gone into exile, but ELAS, the military wing of the Communist Party (KKE), stayed and resisted the occupation. As soon as the Germans left the British moved into Athens and established an interim government with George Papandreou at its head, and the KKE, from their strongholds in the mountains of Macedonia, Thrace and Epirus, stood in opposition. By the start of 1947 full-scale civil war had broken out. The British sent 40,000 troops and financial aid to the government in Athens, but they could see that they would not be able to sustain the necessary commitment.
In February the British Ambassador in Washington passed this information along to Loy Henderson, a career diplomat, who had served with Bullitt, Kennan, and Bohlen in Moscow and who was now at the State Department as the Director of the Office of Near Eastern and African Affairs. At once Henderson set the wheels in motion to convince the President and the American public that it was in the United States’ interest to keep Greece and Turkey out of communist hands. Meanwhile, in April of 1946 George Kennan had sent his “long telegram” from Moscow, urging Washington to develop a strategy to deal with the exportation of communist ideology out of the Soviet Union and the imperialistic intentions of its government. He particularly mentioned Turkey and Iran, both of which were experiencing serious expansionist threats from the Soviet Union
President Truman, with no foreign policy background himself, was prepared to rely upon the advice of professionals at the Department of State. Using Kennan’s “long telegram” as a policy base and with Henderson doing much of the planning in terms of what it would take, Truman went before the United States Congress on March 12, 1947 to request 400 million dollars for the support of Greece and Turkey. He made it clear that his purpose was to stand behind freely elected governments anywhere and, without mentioning the Soviet Union by name, to oppose tyranny. It was the administration’s first formal “containment” program, and it became known as “the Truman Doctrine.”
As for Western Europe, the Communist parties in France and Italy had emerged into the ravaged post-war continent as particularly well positioned. In answer, Kennan, who had become Director of the State Department’s new Policy Planning staff, proposed the European Recovery Program (ERP), a massive infusion of financial assistance into the area. It has been called the “soft side” of “containment.” Working with him to develop the plan was businessman William Clayton, who had left school at 13, become a millionaire cotton-trader at a young age, and worked as adviser to Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman.
The European Recovery Program was announced publicly in a speech written by career diplomat Charles Bohlen, who had served at the United States Embassy in Moscow with Bullitt, Kennan and Henderson in the 1930’s, was a Russian interpreter for President Roosevelt at the Teheran and Yalta Conferences, and was to serve as Ambassador to the Soviet Union under President Eisenhower. The speech was delivered at Harvard in June of 1947 by Secretary of State George Marshall, who had become the first five-star General in United States history and who, as characterized by Winston Churchill, was the “organizer of Allied victory” in World War II. The Plan, although officially known as The European Recovery Program, was called “The Marshall Plan” from the very beginning.
Within a month 16 European nations met in Paris to hash out the mechanics of how the aid was to be distributed. The countries of Eastern Europe had been invited, as had the Soviet Union. It was assumed that the Soviets would decline, but the Czechs and Poles, not yet under total Soviet dominance, showed interest in the Marshall Plan and in attending the Conference. The Soviet response was immediate and hostile. Foreign Minister Andrey Vishinskiy, best known as the prosecutor for Stalin’s show trials during the Great Purge in the 1930’s, accused the United States of attempting to impose its will on independent European nations by dangling a carrot of economic relief. Then Stalin invited all European Communist parties to meet in Poland in late September for the establishment of an “Information Bureau of the Communist and Workers’ Parties,” the real purpose of Cominform, as it was called, being the facilitation of Moscow’s control over the various European communist parties. Out of the Conference came Stalin’s command that all parties should struggle by any means necessary against an American presence in Europe and that Czechoslovakia and Poland had better forget about the Marshall Plan and the Paris Conference. A few months later Czech President Jan Masaryk was found dead, and a communist government had taken over the country. A line down the middle of the Continent had been drawn, with the Soviet Bloc to the east and the “Free World” to the west.
The Truman Doctrine had been successful in thwarting Moscow’s plans in Greece and Turkey, and the 12.4 billion dollars of Marshall Plan money poured into Western Europe from 1948 through 1951 was largely responsible for that area experiencing unprecedented growth. The result was a reduction in poverty and discontent and the consequent waning of the influence of communist parties.
On the home front President Truman had been in the process of demobilizing the army and mothballing its equipment in the aftermath of the War, but he recognized the need to upgrade and reorganize the military and intelligence establishments at the very highest level. To this end he signed into law the National Security Act of 1947, the main elements of which have endured to the present and which is now regarded as a key Cold War document. It set up a Department of Defense and a National Security Council and called for the United States Air Force to become an independent service. It also created the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) as the government’s primary civilian organization for acquiring and processing information vital to the security of the country. A phrase buried in the document tasking it to perform “other functions and duties related to intelligence” authorized for the CIA the broadest possible mandate. It was the phrase that was soon to be used to justify covert operations.
MY RACKET
BY JACK FROST
CHAPTER 1
THE COLD WAR
END OF CHAPTER 1
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