After V-J Day Truman
gravitated more towards domestic politics and left foreign policy to his Secretary
of State more often for the next few months. Truman had full confidence in
James Byrnes who within a few weeks had to prepare for the first Council of
Foreign Ministers established at Potsdam. During this period Byrnes made a small
change necessitated by the retirement of Joseph Grew. His choice for
undersecretary was Dean Acheson.
At this state Acheson had
none of the anti-Soviet reputation he would become known for. He was in alignment
with Byrnes in terms of the Japanese surrender and had been involved in the
negotiations at Dumbarton Oaks. Acheson was there to help administer the state
department and Byrnes agreed to appoint the Republican John Foster Dulles, a
foreign policy expert to join him at the various CFM meetings. Byrnes wanted
foreign policy to have bipartisan support and Dulles was more than willing to join.
Byrnes made it clear he
intended to be a departure from FDR’s secretary of state Cordell Hull; he intended
to lead and not allow himself to be ignored by his superior the way that
FDR had been more than willing to do throughout the war. By this point many of
the major advisers from the Roosevelt era had retreated from the policy scene.
Hopkins retired in September, Joseph Davies who was ailing withdrew and Byrnes
would never ask him for further advice and Secretary of War Henry Stimson
retired after the war.
Alone among them
Stimson refused to go quietly into private life. His main job would be an attempt
to instruct Truman about using the atomic bomb as leverage in settling postwar
issues. While Truman by and large chose to ignore this advice Stimson would attempt
to revise it. Worried that if America tried to keep a monopoly on the atomic
bomb would fail and lead to an arms race, he began to formulate a proposal for
the international sharing of atomic information. He was unaware that Stalin not
only had full knowledge of the atomic bomb but after the occupation of Berlin
had more than enough material to make its own. Using the Assistant Secretary of
War as a go between, he raised the idea of international sharing with Byrnes.
Operating on the same
fallacy Byrnes thought it would be an extended period before the Soviets caught
up with America. However he also believed that he could use it as a trump card
to negotiate with Stalin going forward. Despite meetings both with Byrnes and
Truman, Stimson was unable to convince him of this approach. Stimson judged
this Byrnes’s approach unseemly but given Byrnes experiences at Potsdam with
the Soviets, it is hardly surprising he wanted this advantage.
Yet Byrnes did nothing
to commission planning documents or assigned members of his department to
consider any potential strategy. For all the talk of so-called atomic diplomacy
the fact remains the Truman administration never really tried to use it. Truman
left Byrnes to his own devices during this period and seems to have paid
limited attention to diplomacy after Potsdam. After the formal surrender of
Japan, Truman gave an address that was basically cliched and full of the platitudes
of moving towards a better world ‘of cooperation, peace and goodwill.) Not long
after he arrived in London Byrnes would realize how distant from reality that
would be.
The London meeting
began on September 11th 1945, the first of what would be six
meetings in the next year and a half to resolve the issues of a postwar
settlement. Byrnes and Ernest Bevins very quickly saw that Molotov was resolved
to present serious negotiations. Byrnes eventually approached Molotov at the
House of Lords and demanded when they might get down to business. Molotov made
things very clear by asking if Byrnes “had an atomic bomb in his side pocket”
Byrnes waived this off good-naturedly: “If you don’t cut out all this stalling
and let us get down to work, I am going to pull an atomic bomb out of my hip
pocket and let you have it.”
There was absolutely no
seriousness to this threat – which was the most direct effort the Americans
ever made to raise the possession of the atomic bomb as leverage over the
Soviets. It was met with laughter on both sides and Molotov responded by
mocking Byrnes for the American monopoly on the bomb. One wonders why, after it
became clear the bomb’s presence wasn’t going to make the Soviets move one millimeter
on negotiations, Byrnes did nothing to rachet up the pressure.
John Lewis Gaddis
argued: “why didn’t Washington issue an ultimatum demanding the dismantlement of
Soviet authority in Eastern Europe, perhaps even of the Soviet dictatorship
itself, backed up by the threat…that Moscow would be bombed if it didn’t go
along?”
The simple answer is
Byrnes didn’t think in those terms at the time of the meeting in London. This
was not a case of intimidate a warring power into surrender. The immediate situation
simply didn’t call for those circumstances. For all the arguments later made of
America being butchers when it came to dropping the bomb on Japan, the idea of
bombing someone who was – at that point – still considered an ally never occurred
to Byrnes or the administration. They might have been frustrated with
negotiations but they had no intention of disturbing the post-war peace. Indeed
back in Washington Stimson – supported notably by Undersecretary Acheson – agreed
after a cabinet meeting on September 21 to pursue efforts to place atomic
energy under international control in what would eventually become known as the
Acheson-Lilienthal plan. America was still willing to collaborate with the Soviet
Union to build a great collaboration.
And Byrnes would acquiesce
on the subject. He continued to focus negotiations with Molotov who gave
absolutely no ground on lessening Soviet domination in Eastern Europe. Byrnes
did everything he could to argue for openness in Eastern Europe and Molotov
countered by demanding Soviet participation in the occupation of Japan and
certain Italian colonies in Africa. The London conference ended with no
substantial progress and the unity of the Big Three in serious disarray.
By now Byrnes was well
aware of what Soviet obstinacy foreshadowed and that Molotov was impossible to
deal with. In a conversation with an aide, he even compared Molotov’s methods
as similar to Hitler’s. Yet Byrnes didn’t abandon hope. Almost laughably he
thought he would find a kinder audience with Stalin. He resolved to continue
efforts to negotiate in a future meeting he wanted held in Moscow.
Byrnes put the best
public face he could on the negotiations in a radio address. In private he
criticized the Soviets bluntly. He confided in his predecessor Edward Stettinius,
now the U.S Ambassador to the UN “we were facing a new Russia, totally different
from the Russia we dealt with a year ago.” Naively he clung to the idea that
this had changed since after the war when it had been constant from the start.
He was still hoping for a compromise.
Dulles, however,
rejected it. The future Secretary of State under Eisenhower made it clear that
this would very much mirror the attitude of appeasement by Chamberlain before
the war had officially broken out in Europe. He made it clear that if he violated
it he would break with the American delegation, denounce it and resign. Byrnes
backed down mainly to keep Dulles on the delegation but he remained convinced
in the idea of going to Moscow. Even before leaving London he was willing to
recognize the Soviet dominated Hungarian government and consider the presence
of them in Japan.
He would arrange to
have a message sent to Stalin under Truman’s name, assuring him that the administration
was determined to stay in concert with the Soviet Union, fulfill Roosevelt
policies at Yalta and address the procedural difficulties with the French and
Chinese which Molotov had used to sabotage the London gathering.
Truman would later
complain Byrnes had never provided him with adequate reports of these meetings.
But there is no contemporary record of this. He showed no interest in the details
of Byrnes at London and remained supportive of him at the time. Trying to
figure out Truman’s own thinking can be hard to pin down, mainly because he
himself may not have been sure yet. As was demonstrated at a speech he gave on
October 27th he spoke of continued military strength and an American
foreign policy “based firmly on fundamental principles of righteousness and
justice.” But he also assured that ‘the cooperative spirit of our allies’ could
not be allowed to disintegrate and that there were no ‘hopeless or irreconcilable
differences between them.” Much of his speech was reminiscent of FDR.
By this point Truman
was still focused on his own liberal agenda. By September 6th, he
had sent a message to Congress defending New Deal programs and calling for
their enhancement and development. He called out for the ‘economic bill of
rights’ FDR had outlined with its calls for decent employment, housing, health
care and education for all Americans. This would mark the beginning of his ‘Fair
Deal’, which he considered “the details of the program of liberalism and
progressivism as the foundation of my administration.”
Over the coming weeks
and months Truman forwarded legislation for a national health care system and
expanding social security. He wanted very much to leave foreign policy in the
hands of his secretary of state, leaving domestic policy where he felt more
comfortable, to himself. And indeed for well into 1946 Truman continued to most
delegate the policies. Both Truman and Byrnes still had the Wilsonian belief
that the United Nations would be able to deal with the post-war world. It would
take them nearly a year to realize that old world no longer existed and they
would have to readjust.
In the next piece I
will deal with the true beginning of the Cold War and how so much of the
thinking on it even now is misplaced as to who was actually fighting in the early
stages and why it really started.
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