Gar Alperovitz

Volume 7, Number 6 · October 20, 1966
Letter
COUNTER-INTELLIGENCE
By Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Reply by Gar Alperovitz
In response to The Double Dealer (September 8, 1966)

To the Editors:

Surely the time has come to blow the whistle before the current outburst of
revisionism regarding the origins of the cold war goes much further. In your
issue of September 8, Mr. Gar Alperovitz, in effect, blames the Soviet decision
to turn against the west on poor old Allen Dulles and his part in arranging the
surrender of the German armies in Italy. By his handling of this affair, Mr.
Alperovitz concludes, "Dulles helped set in motion the events that we know as
the Cold War."

Mr. Alperovitz is a gifted young historian: But it is a hopelessly shallow
interpretation of the Soviet Union to suppose that "suspicions arising from
these events in early 1945" led to the Russian decision to abandon the wartime
coalition. It is also an interpretation which does little credit to the
seriousness of the Russian leaders. Stalin and his associates were, after all,
Marxists. They regarded the United States as the enemy, not because of anything
Allen Dulles did, but because the United States was the leading capitalist
power. The very existence of the United States was, by definition, a menace to
Soviet security. Nothing the United States could have done in 1945 would have
dispelled Stalin's mistrust—short of the conversion of the United States into
a Stalinist despotism, and even this would not have sufficed, as the experience
of Yugoslavia and China later showed, unless it were accompanied by total
subservience to Moscow. So long as the United States remained a capitalist
democracy, given Stalin's rigid theology, no American policy could win basic
Soviet confidence, and every American initiative was poisoned from the source.

The wartime collaboration was created by one thing, and one thing alone: the
threat of Nazi victory. So long as this threat was real, collaboration
continued. The Yalta conference, which took place in the shadow of the
Rundstedt counteroffensive in the Ardennes, was the last expression of the
wartime mood. In the weeks after Yalta the military situation changed with
great rapidity. With Nazi Germany shattered, the need for cooperation was
disappearing. The Soviet Union therefore began the post-war political battle
for Europe, moving quickly to violate the pledges it had just made at Yalta for
political freedom in Poland and Rumania.

The definitive proof of the Soviet change of line was, of course, the article
by Jacques Duclos in the April 1945 issue of Cahiers du Communisme, This
article, with its savage attack on "Browderism"—i.e., the policy of post-war
support for bourgeois democratic governments, like that of Franklin
Roosevelt—was plainly an authoritative announcement by the Comintern official
formerly responsible for the western Communist parties that the period of
anti-fascist collaboration was over. The Duclos piece must obviously have been
planned and scheduled at least six or eight weeks before its publication—that
is, well before Allen Dulles began to negotiate for the surrender of the German
armies in Italy, well before Franklin Roosevelt died, and many months before
Harry Truman ordered that the atomic bomb be dropped on Japan. William Z.
Foster, who replaced Browder as leader of the American Communist Party and
brought the CPUSA policy into line with Moscow, later boasted of having said in
January 1944, "A post-war Roosevelt administration would continue to be, as it
is now, an imperialist government." The Soviet "change" of line was the direct
result of two things: (1) this intransigent Marxist view of the United States,
which had been submerged but not altered during the war; and (2) the
approaching end of the war, which brought this view to the surface again.

The United States government may be pursuing strange policies in Vietnam. But
let not the intellectual community, in an excess of remorse, suppose that the
United States—or even the CIA—has been responsible for everything that has
gone wrong in the world in the last twenty years. The record shows beyond
dispute that Allen Dulles did not start the cold war.

Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.

City University of New York

Gar Alperovitz replies:
Arthur Schlesinger's statement of the doctrine of historical inevitability
helps set the terms of debate over the origins of the Cold War. He writes: "One
thing, and one thing alone," permitted wartime Soviet-American cooperation;
"nothing" could have dispelled Stalin's mistrust; "no" American policy could
have won confidence; "every" American initiative was poisoned from the source.
Since Stalin's "rigid theology" required him to start a battle for Europe,
American activities could have played no substantial role in the beginning of
the Cold War.

In my review of The Secret Surrender I argued neither that Allen Dulles started
the Cold War, nor that the United States has been responsible for everything
which has gone wrong in the last twenty years. What I wrote was quite specific:
"The Cold War cannot be understood simply as an American response to a Soviet
challenge, but rather as the insidious interaction of mutual suspicions, blame
for which must be shared by all." As an illustration I pointed out we now have
evidence that Dulles's secret 1945 negotiations with the Nazis undermined
American-Soviet relations in much the same way as did the later U-2 incident.

One approach to a discussion of differing interpretations of the Cold War is to
recall the view urged by Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson in 1945: He held,
contrary to Mr. Schlesinger's idea, that the United States had it in Its power
profoundly to influence postwar relations with the Soviet Union. This
responsibility, he believed, demanded that provocative actions be avoided.
Arguing against the hawks of his day—especially on European matters—Stimson
urged "the greatest care and the greatest patience and the greatest
thoughtfulness." By the time of his resignation, however, he had lost the
debate. And on nuclear matters he was dismayed to find Secretary of State
Byrnes "very much against any attempt to cooperate with Russia…."

Most observers agree the major turning point of the Cold War came in 1947. What
happened earlier? Stimson was aware the tough line had won out in 1945 in the
US Government. Did this fact have consequences, or was everything inevitably
fated from the start? Soviet provocations, brutality, and terror called forth
American responses, but what produced Soviet policies? Why such surprising
beginnings as Soviet sponsorship of the 1945 free elections in Hungary which
routed the Communists? And how account for Stalin's agreement not to aid the
Greek Communists (strictly adhered to, according to Churchill)? Any study of
the Cold War must go beyond current simplifications to define with precision to
what extent American actions can be understood as responsive to Soviet
behavior, or on the other hand, causative of it, or both.

Serious historians of the Cold War will also have to deal with the 1945 Jacques
Duclos article cited by Mr. Schlesinger, but many will be surprised to see him
offer the article as "definitive proof" of a shift in Soviet strategy towards
Europe. Duclos's article did have impact in American Communist circles,
precipitating both a change in Party leadership and a hardening of policy. In
point of fact, however, Duclos did not argue against supporting bourgeois
governments, as Mr. Schlesinger has it. On the contrary, he even endorsed
Communist support of Roosevelt. What he did attack was the 1944 decision of the
American Communist Party to dissolve itself, and he denounced such
excesses—for Marxists—as Browder's wartime embrace of "monopolistic trust"
leaders like J.P. Morgan.

As for Europe, again Duclos's article had a meaning different from that
ascribed to it by Mr. Schlesinger: In 1945 it was one of many confirmations
that European Communists had decided to abandon violent revolutionary struggle
in favor of the more modest aim of electoral success. Duclos's main point was
that it would be a mistake to copy the American Communist Party's withdrawal
from electoral politics. Subsequently, French and other European Communists,
including Duclos, lay down the arms they had learned to use in the resistance,
to devote primary attention to the open political arena; and they continued to
toss Marxist theology to the winds by participating in De Gaulle's and other
early post-war "bourgeois" governments.

Communist policy throughout Europe was to become militant, totalitarian, and
brutal, but not in response to Duclos's article, and not in 1945, but for the
most part in late 1946 and 1947. That surprising ambivalence and considerable
moderation were evident in the earliest post-war years suggests a more open
view of historical possibilities—and, also, that the Cold War may be viewed
as the result of decisions made by men in at least two nations. It may well be,
as Walter Lippmann observed at the time, that "an accommodation, a modus
vivendi, a working arrangement, some simple form of cooperation" was possible,
but that by demanding more, US policy got less, "making the best the enemy of
the good."

Historians are now beginning a painstaking review of the period before
Communist strategy toughened to determine precisely how American and Soviet
moves interacted. In this significant investigation there is need for much
research and an open and public sifting of evidence and testing of ideas. It is
disappointing and somehow sad that an eminent member of the historical
profession should feel called upon to admonish that "the whistle be blown" on
this intellectual effort.



Chris Mark

Volume 9, Number 2 · August 3, 1967
Letter
DIPLOMATIC HISTORIAN
By Herbert Feis, Reply by Gar Alperovitz

To the Editors:

In his comment on my book, The Atomic Bomb and the End of World War II [NYR,
June 15], Gar Alperovitz writes that I come "close to being our official
national diplomatic historian." I don't know how close that is supposed to be.
But I should like readers of his article to know that this book was an entirely
private and independent undertaking. No one in the government, or former member
of the government had anything to do with its inception; nor did any of them
pass upon the manuscript. I was under no obligation to defer to any official or
official opinion, nor did I. No branch of the government (not even the CIA
provided a dollar toward its production. Long before the book was begun my last
connection with the government had ended.

I have the impression that Alperovitz attributes my uncertitude about various
hypothetical "options" to my wish to spare friends or former associates. Could
it be due rather to knowledge that in decisions upon which so many
considerations bore, what is known justifies only surmises, not certitudes?
Sometimes decision-makers do not themselves clearly know the relative impact of
the many ideas or calculations which influence them. Sometimes what may appear
in the calm of the study years afterward to have been a genuine "option" at the
time, was not actually so in the hot flux of events.

Alperovitz also seems to impugn my judgment because of my previous personal or
professional connection with some of the chief figures in the narrative. Might
that rather not have caused my interpretation of complex circumstances to be
closer to the whole truth than any derived from the available record, even were
it impartial?

Who, if he did not know it, would gather from reading his article that a bloody
and dreadful war was being fought, that each day it continued meant agony to
our combatants as well as to the Japanese? Who would gather that the fanatic
military leaders preferred death to acceptance of defeat?

In short, this essay illustrates how preconceptions assist hindsight; they act
as a focus which selects the conclusions.

May I take this chance to state that one of my main efforts at present is to
induce the American government to make the records of the diplomacy of the
recent past available to all, more quickly and fully. My latest attempt to
arouse interest in the purpose is an article in the January, 1967 issue of
Foreign Affairs, called "The Shackled Historian." Perhaps Alperovitz and his
colleagues in the Kennedy Center will take up the cause.

Since Alperovitz, like myself, is interested in the origins of the cold war,
will he not call on the Soviet government—which he apparently thinks was
merely the hapless object of our vicious diplomacy—to do the same? Without
the Soviet documents and memoirs all accounts of the cold war must be lopsided.
Were they to be published, I do not think it possible that Alperovitz could
continue to write in the same vein as he does now.

Herbert Feis

York, Me.

Gar Alperovitz replies:
Herbert Feis's letter is strangely ambiguous: The trouble is that like his book
it never quite faces fundamental issues squarely.

My review attempted to document three specific points about the Hiroshima
decision: (1) By July 1945, before the atomic bombs were used, other courses of
action seemed likely to end the war well in advance of the planned November
landing; (2) This is true not merely in retrospect: We now know that a variety
of other courses were offered directly to the President by his highest official
advisers before Hiroshima—at a time when he was also shown intercepted cables
revealing Japan's willingness to end the war on acceptable terms; (3) The main
reason other possibilities were passed up appears to be that implicitly or
explicitly a demonstration of America's new power was judged necessary to
strengthen the U.S. hand against Russia. The bomb was a "master card" of
diplomacy, in the words of Secretary Stimson; it would make Russia more
"manageable," according to Secretary Byrnes.

Characteristically, Mr. Feis does not directly dispute any of the documents,
facts, or arguments offered in support of this view.

Neither do his comments about Soviet documents relate to the main point at
issue (although, of course, as a historian I welcome his efforts to obtain
further historical materials).

When Mr. Feis does touch on a point of substance, he does so in a curiously
defensive way. I mentioned his official connections and privileged access to
inside information not to impugn his motives. Rather I wished mainly to stress
that an established historian—not an ill-informed layman, not an inflammatory
publicist—has reached important new conclusions about Hiroshima: It is
significant that an expert of Mr. Feis's stature—who has private information
not available to other scholars—has come to understand there were other ways
to end the war. And he has written that President Truman "probably," and
Secretaries Stimson and Byrnes "certainly," viewed the bomb as a way to bolster
the US diplomatic position against Russia.

In sum, Feis's book marks a major shift in the accepted view of America's use
of the first atomic bomb (although the shift is unfortunately shrouded in
rather vague phrases). My review attempted to cut through to underlying
evidence to show that considerations related to Russia were absolutely central
to the Hiroshima decision. His response, I had hoped, might contain documented,
expert objections. Regrettably, however, his general remarks about
preconceptions and hindsight once again define a position of ambiguity. We are
left to puzzle whether Mr. Feis is withholding such objections as he has, or
whether, in fact, he holds no substantive objections at all.




Chris Mark