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Harry S. Truman

Czechoslovak workers' May Day
poster with hammer and sickle.

Truman and Churchill versus Stalin

At the end of World War II, the Soviet army was in parts of Germany and Austria, in Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and in Poland. At the Yalta conference in February, 1945, Joseph Stalin, representing the Soviet Union, had promised "free and unfettered" elections in Poland and in the other East European countries that it occupied. Stalin feared, with good reason, that free elections in Poland would bring to power Poles who were critical of him and the Soviet Union. He and his colleagues were mindful of Poland's history of hostility to the Bolshevik Revolution, including Poland's invasion of Soviet territory in the early 1920s, and mindful of Poland having been a corridor for invasions eastward. If Stalin saw it necessary for the sake of security to have a regime in Poland that was friendly to him and his policies it was a calculation that would prove to be a mistake. A democratic Poland would have been hostile to the Stalin, but it is hard to imagine Poland launching another war against the Soviet Union or contributing to another invasion of the Soviet Union. Stalin's heavy hand in Poland was foremost in turning the United States from what had been its friendship with the Soviet Union. Just before his death in early April, President Roosevelt had been disappointed with and angered by Stalin. Stalin was giving the new administration in Washington, led by President Harry S. Truman, grounds for expressing hostility toward him. Truman and some others in Washington had in the1930s been hostile to the Soviet Union. Stalin, by his policy in Poland and his broken promises, contributed to the creation of the Cold War - with its enhanced insecurities and enhanced possibility of war.

Perhaps it was not the security of the Soviet Union that Stalin was most interested in. Stalin was interested in protecting a certain kind of Soviet Union, the kind of Soviet Union that he had created. He wanted to protect Stalinism. This was more important to him than the best of relations with the United States. Stalin still spoke of being at war with capitalism. He believed that another economic depression was coming in the capitalist economies. He had told Milovan Djilas of Yugoslavia that another war would come in twenty years or so with the anti-Communist West. He had stated his belief that the Soviet Union would recover by then, and he was looking forward to meeting that war with his brand of unity. To repeat a quote that I used in a previous chapter, Stalin had said to Djilas: "If the Slavs keep united and maintain solidarity, no one in the future will be able to move a finger against them. Not even a finger!" [note]

In May, 1945, President Truman reacted to Stalin's policies in Poland by cutting off all aid to the Soviet Union, and in late August he expressed misgivings about a world dominated by rivalry between the Soviet Union and the rest of the world. As he saw it, the Soviet Union did not really want peace. Truman was aware of Stalinist expectations of another economic depression in the United States, and he spoke of the Soviet Union being eager to take advantage of it to spread communism.

Truman was not afraid offending the Soviet Union's diplomats and was described as having used "mule driver's language" with foreign minister Molotov. Truman was impatient with talk and compromise concerning the number of non-communists in the governments of those nations occupied by the Soviet Union. He called Romania and Bulgaria police states, and in a speech on October 27, 1945, he announced that the United States would recognize no government "imposed upon any nation by the force of any foreign power."

In the U.S. Senate, the Soviet Union was under attack. Senator Burton Wheeler of Montana proclaimed that the  Soviet Union was in Eastern Europe because the United States had appeased it.  From the Senate came announcements that Soviet aggression was on the march, and there were calls for no more appeasement.

On February 9, 1946, Britain's former prime minister, Winston Churchill, standing alongside Truman, gave a major address in Truman's home state, Missouri, a speech in which he said that an "iron curtain" had fallen from the city of Stettin on the Baltic Sea to the city of Triest on the Adriatic and that in front of the curtain were "Communist Fifth Columns." Churchill criticized the Soviet Union, saying:

We cannot be blind to the fact that the liberties enjoyed by individual citizens throughout the United States and throughout the British Empire are not valid in a considerable number of countries, some of which are very powerful.

But he was adamant about the talk that could be heard in the U.S. about the inevitability of another war. He said that he repelled that idea, and still more that a war was “imminent.” He added:

We British have also our twenty years Treaty of Collaboration and Mutual Assistance with Soviet Russia. I agree with Mr. Bevin, the Foreign Secretary of Great Britain, that it might well be a fifty years treaty so far as we are concerned. We aim at nothing but mutual assistance and collaboration with Russia… I have a strong admiration and regard for the valiant Russian people and for my wartime comrade, Marshall Stalin. There is deep sympathy and goodwill in Britain - and I doubt not here also - towards the peoples of all the Russias and a resolve to persevere through many differences and rebuffs in establishing lasting friendships. We understand the Russian need to be secure on her western frontiers by the removal of all possibility of German aggression. We welcome Russia to her rightful place among the leading nations of the world. We welcome her flag upon the seas. Above all, we welcome, or should welcome, constant, frequent and growing contacts between the Russian people and our own people on both sides of the Atlantic.

Churchill spoke in support of the United Nations. “We must make sure that its work is fruitful, that it is a reality and not a sham." This was far from the anti-internationalism and anti-communism of the fascists. But the Soviet Union responded to the speech in a most primitive fashion. The Soviet newspaper Pravda described Churchill as a "warmonger," like Goebbels and Hitler. Stalin used Churchill’s speech to reinforce his claim that conflict with the West was inevitable and to persuade people that a threat from the capitalist West made adherence to his policies and leadership in their interest.

Truman's Doctrine and the Marshall Plan

In Stuttgart in early September 1946, the U.S. Secretary of State, James F. Byrnes, announced a changed policy concerning Germany that also annoyed the Russians. Byrnes spoke of returning to the German people a centralized government, of helping Germany to recover economically, and he suggested that for the sake of fairness Germany's eastern border might be readjusted, returning to Germany some of the lands given to Poland. The Soviet Union was hostile toward any show of favoritism to Germany and remained focused not on Germany's economic recovery but on receiving more reparations. And France was also unenthusiastic about a German recovery.

The winter of 1946-47 aggravated Europe's miseries. Hunger was accompanied by economic stagnation, inflation and political unrest. Economic crisis in Britain led the British government to ask the United States to assume the burden of overseeing affairs in Turkey and Greece, seen as a bulwark against communist expansion southward. In Greece, a communist led insurgency was taking place, and the Soviet Union had been pressuring Turkey, interpreted in the United States as a threat to advance communism. [link]  In March 1947, Truman responded with what became known as the Truman Doctrine, designed to contain communism. A grand strategy in foreign policy had been devised by the U.S. State Department, created by an experienced diplomat, George F. Kennan. He had been stationed in Moscow beginning in 1944, second only to the U.S. ambassador there, and he had interacted with Russians and with Soviet officialdom. Kennan had known the hostility to the West that Stalin was supporting. He disliked it, and he disliked talk of an inevitable war with the Soviet Union that could be heard among some in the United States. His strategy was for long range containment of Soviet power, patience and if possible the avoidance of all out war. His was the grand strategy that would prevail, willy-nilly, through a variety of administrations to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War in 1989.

Truman faced a Republican Congress, the Republicans having gained a congressional majority in the 1946 elections. Truman asked Congress for military aid for Turkey and for Greece. He spoke tough about the dangers of communism, believing as did an advisor or two that in order to get Congress to loosen its hold on the nation's purse strings it was necessary to scare people regarding the dangers of communism.

In June, 1947, Truman and his new Secretary of State, George Marshall, began pushing what was called the European Recovery Program, which would become known as the Marshall Plan. The purpose of the plan was to create economic cooperation among the states of Europe and to stimulate economic growth in Europe. And there was some hope that creating hope and relieving misery would diminish the appeal of Marxist arguments and the appeal of communism among Europeans.

The Soviet foreign minister, Molotov, welcomed the plan, arguing with his colleagues that everyone wanted reconstruction. But Stalin was suspicious. He described the plan as a ploy by Truman. "They don't want to help us," he said. "They want to infiltrate European countries." But he agreed to Molotov discussing it with Western diplomats.

Yugoslavia, Poland and Czechoslovakia agreed to join in the U.S. plan for economic help, and Stalin recoiled, fearing the influence it would give the capitalist West in these countries. On July 3, 1947, in the middle of his discussions with Western diplomats, Molotov switched positions. He followed Stalin's leadership and accused the Western powers of seeking to divide Europe into two hostile camps.

Czechoslovakia still had a coalition government, with a third of its cabinet communists, reflecting the third of the vote that communist candidates had won in 1946. Czechoslovakia's president, Eduard Beneš, was a liberal. Its prime minister, Klement Gottwald, was the head of the Czechoslovak Communist Party. Angry with the Czechoslovak government, on July 9 Stalin summoned Gottwald to Moscow. The Czechoslovak delegation returned to Prague on July 11, and after a long meeting among the full government it was announced that Czechoslovakia would cancel its decision to join the Marshall Plan. Czechoslovakia's foreign secretary, Jan Masaryk, was distraught. "I went to Moscow as the foreign minister of an independent sovereign state," he said, "I returned as a Soviet slave." [note]

With Stalin against the Marshall plan, communists in Western Europe led street demonstrations against it. France's Communist Party made a bid for power. The labor unions it led went out on strike, calling for united action on the Left, for a 25 percent increase in wages and more bread. Millions supported the strike and through the autumn France remained economically paralyzed. The more conservative leadership of France's government expelled the government's communist ministers.

In September, in response to the Marshall Plan, the Soviet Union organized an international organization called the Communist Information Bureau (Cominform). Its invited members were the communist parties of France, Italy, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary and Yugoslavia. The Communist Party USA was eager to join but uninvited. The Soviet Union's members proclaimed that the world had divided into two camps, one devoted to socialism and democracy and the other to reaction and war. The U.S. was described as imperialist and the Marshall Plan as an attempt to revive a German industry controlled by U.S. financiers. Communist Party representatives were urged to give up nationalism in favor of internationalism and were invited to confess their previous mistaken tactics.

In December in France a passenger train derailed, killing twenty people. It was seen as the work of saboteurs supporting the labor strike. Public opinion was swinging against the strike. People were tired of it. A settlement was reached, labor winning a rise in wages, but less than the twenty-five percent originally demanded. The U.S. told the French that no Marshall Plan aid would be forthcoming until the threat from communists within France was over.

The popularity that the communists had won from their fight against fascism and Germany was on the decline in France. Communists were losing in France, but in occupied Romania their domination of the government increased, and in December they forced the abdication of the king, Michael.

Also in December, President Truman submitted the Marshall Plan to Congress, the plan involving $13.3 billion in aide from the U.S., which Congress had to approve. Week after week the debate in Congress dragged on. This was a Republican Congress, the first since the days of Herbert Hoover and the Great Depression. A significant number in Congress balked at  pouring billions of dollars into "a bottomless pit of wasteful altruism." But then events in Czechoslovakia shocked them into loosening their hold on federal spending.

Czechoslovakia had been suffering from especially bad harvests and unrest. Masaryk had appealed to the U.S. for aid but had been told that a loan would not be forthcoming until Prague changed politically. The Soviet Union promised Czechoslovakia 600,000 tons of grain to prevent starvation, and among the Czechoslovaks this won support for Stalin. With the arrival of the deputy foreign minister of the Soviet Union, supposedly to oversee the grain delivery, the government's non-communist ministers resigned, hoping to force an early election. In February, 1948, the Czechoslovak Communist Party organized street demonstrations and worker assemblies in factories. Units of communist-led armed factory workers marched. President Beneš feared civil war and allowed Gottwald to form a new government, and from a minority within a coalition government the communists became the government.

Headlines in the United States screamed takeover. The Secretary of the Navy proposed steps to prepare Americans for war. President Truman spoke to a joint session of Congress, blamed the Soviet Union for the takeover in Czechoslovakia and called it "a ruthless action." He called on Congress to pass the Marshall Plan and for the enactment of a universal military training and a Selective Service (conscription) bill. On April 3, Congress approved 5.3 billion for the Marshall Plan.

In mid-April, 1948, sixteen European nations signed onto the Marshall Plan - now called the Organization for European Economic Cooperation (OEEC). Not joining were Czechoslovakia, Poland, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary and Albania - places where communists had considerable influence. Finland did not join either, wishing to avoid antagonizing the Soviet Union.

Stalin against Tito

Where the communists had come to power without the Soviet army - in Yugoslavia - resentment arose over the Soviet Union's attempt at domination, threatening in Stalin's eyes the unity that was needed among Slavs. There was tension too concerning the economics between the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. In 1947 the Yugoslavs discovered that from the Soviet Union they could not get the machinery they wanted. Instead they received bad quality consumer items at a price well above retail prices in Western Europe.

Stalin was offended by Tito's independence. This was the nationalism the Soviet Communist Party disliked. The Soviet army moved to Yugoslavia's border. The Soviet Union charged Tito with "pursuing an unfriendly policy to the Soviet Union."  It ceased trade with Yugoslavia, called Tito a Trostkyite and tried to encourage anti-Tito communists within Yugoslavia. The Yugoslav Communist Party was expelled from Cominform. And in 1950, Tito was to join Yugoslavia to Marshall Plan assistance.

Communism in Italy

The leader of Italy's Communist Party, Palmiro Togliati, was one of communism's brighter stars. His was the largest communist party in Western Europe:2,000,000 members. He was cooperating with Stalin, and his party was a member in good standing in the Cominform. Togliati let criticism from the Cominform slide. He wanted for Italy something more suited to the disdain that the Italian people had learned in the fascist years for dictatorship and the "great" leader.

Togliati was himself charismatic. He could easily draw a crowd of 100,000. He campaigned vigorously for the general election scheduled for April 18, 1948. In the United States a campaign was launched to prevent a victory of the communists and their allies. Italian-Americans wrote letters to their relatives in Italy. Frank Sinatra made a Voice of America radio broadcast. The Central Intelligence Agency was asked to do what it could, and with approval of the National Security Agency and its chairman, President Truman, the CIA funneled "black bag" contributions to Italy's anti-communist candidates. The U.S. Ambassador to Italy, Claire Booth Luce, and Joseph P. Kennedy helped raise $2 million for the Christian Democrat Party's candidate, Alcide de Gasperi. More influential was the Catholic Church in Italy, which worked hard to encourage people to vote against communist candidates. And their work paid off. The communists received only half the votes they had in 1946. The Christian Democrats won a parliamentary majority and de Gasperi formed a new center-right government.

Anti-Communism and Politics in the United States

While Truman was fighting for  funds to combat poverty and communism in Europe, some Congressmen spoke of their fear of communist propaganda in Hollywood filmmaking. These were members of the House on un-American Activities Committee - HUAC. In 1945 Congress had created HUAC to investigate "un-American propaganda" of domestic or foreign origin.

HUAC began public hearings on communist influence in the film industry in the autumn of 1947. According to a former Communist Party leader in Southern California, about 300 actors, writers, directors and designers in the film industry were members of the Communist Party in the postwar forties. And no doubt there were more who were Marxist in outlook but who did not belong to the Party. But by the autumn of 1947, the Hollywood communists had hardly succeeded in spreading much sympathy for communism. Anti-communism was sweeping the nation.

It was the duty of Congress to investigate for the sake of passing legislation, and the hearings began with friendly witnesses, including heads of studios and the actors Robert Taylor, Ronald Reagan and Gary Cooper - the studio heads wanting to preserve respect for their businesses. Inviting Hollywood communists to testify was not necessary for gathering information. These hostile witnesses would not give the committee any useful information, but calling them did serve the purpose of exposing them and punishing them. And bringing the hostile witnesses before the committee and the newsreel cameras did benefit the Congressmen by showing their drive against what was popularly believed to be evil.

Most hostile witnesses refused to answer whether they were or had ever been members of the Communist Party, which was public exposure enough to end their careers. They were protected by the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution from having to incriminate themselves. The hostile witnesses refused to answer questions put to them, citing the Fifth and the First Amendments, and the public began speaking with derision toward "taking the Fifth." Those who refused to answer questions were charged with contempt of Congress. They were found guilty in April, 1948 and sent to jail for around a year.  There they were joined by HUAC chairman, J, Parnell Thomas, convicted of having padded the payroll of his congressional staff.

The Supreme Court declined to take up the question whether their use of the Fifth Amendment disqualified them from prosecution, Supreme Court justices thereby saving themselves from having to make a ruling that would have been extremely unpopular.

Progressives" and the U.S. Elections of 1948

Henry Wallace, the Vice President under Roosevelt, replaced by Truman, still believed in the co-operation between the Soviet Union and the United States that Roosevelt had believed in. Between 1946 and '47 he and some other New Dealers believed that Truman was abandoning Roosevelt's formula for peace. Wallace at this time complained of propaganda in the press and over the radio suggesting the inevitability of war with Russia. Wallace was a religious man and opposed to communist ideology, but he believed that for the sake of peace and prosperity non-Communists could work with communists. He was opposed to what was called Red baiting. He rejected a warning from former Secretary of War, Henry Stimson that the Soviet Union had been pursuing "an obstructive and unfriendly" course. As Wallace saw it, the Cold War was Truman's fault.

In October 1947, Wallace toured the Holy Land, and his devotion to peace intensified. From the Holy Land he went to the Vatican and met with Pope Pius XII, and when he departed he was further inclined to do something for peace and universal brotherhood. So moved, on December 2, 1947, he decided to run for the presidency, as a third party candidate. The third party was called the Progressive Party. By December it was too late to get the party on the ballots in all states, but organization of the new party began, Wallace leaving the details of party organization to others.

Rushing to join the Progressive Party were those on the Left experienced at organizing - Communist Party members. They too were blaming Truman for the Cold War, and they were upset and vocal about what they called warmongering.

At the Progressive Party's platform hearings a proposal was rejected that read:

Although we are critical of the present foreign policy of the United States, it is not our intention to give blanket endorsement to the foreign policy of any nation.

During the early months of 1948, rejection of this proposal was focused on by the press, and communist participation in the Progressive Party was widely publicized. Wallace held to his principle of rejecting "red baiting," in other words not criticizing communists. He believed that Communists had a right to participate peacefully in politics and that people could work side by side with communists. He saw  that the communist issue was hurting his candidacy and suggested publicly that if the communists left the Progressive Party he might lose a hundred thousand votes but would gain four million. He wanted the communists to leave, but the Communist Party did not take the hint.

Wallace wrote an open letter to Stalin expressing desire for peace, and in mid-May Stalin wrote back, saying that,

...a peaceful settlement of differences between the USSR and the United States are not only possible but also doubtlessly necessary to the interests of general peace. [note]

Truman played the peace card by announcing that he was prepared to send Chief Justice Fred Vinson to Moscow on a special mission, but Secretary of State Marshall disliked the idea, seeing it as a mere election gimmick. He knew that diplomatic channels were routinely open without any special mission.

During the campaign, Woody Guthrie sang for Wallace. Paul Robeson and W.E.B. Du Bois supported Wallace. The old union leader, A. Philip Randolph, did not. Einstein sympathized with Wallace. He had supported Wallace's desire to ban atomic weapons. In a letter to Wallace's publisher he described Wallace as one of those who are above selfish interest who can save us "from the threatening domestic and international situation." [note]

Wallace knew he was losing but he labored on. He suffered abuse from crowds, and as a martyr drew on his Christian faith, saying what he believed he should say, including speaking up for civil rights to hostile white audiences in the deep South.

It was widely believed that the Republican Party candidate, Thomas Dewey was headed for victory. President Truman had been suffering from low approval ratings, down into the thirties, but in November he won 49 percent of the vote, against Dewey's 45 percent. The Democrats won back the Senate and the House of Representatives. For the presidency, a state's rights candidate, Strom Thurmond, won 2 percent, or 1,169,063 votes. Henry Wallace managed to win over the Prohibition Party candidate, with 1,157,176 votes. The communists, who had stuck with Wallace to the election, again showed an unimpressive influence on Americans.

Indeed, many in the labor movement had been offended by Wallace's third party candidacy and were abandoning any sympathies they had had for the communists - the communists having been solid supporters and workers for the labor movement. The Communist Party was losing its influence  within the Labor movement.

Opposing Communists in New York City

Through 1948, the top leadership of the Communist Party USA  was being prosecuted under the Smith Act of 1940 (otherwise known and the Alien and registration Act) which outlawed conspiring to advocate forcible overthrow of the government. Making conspiracy illegal made possible the apprehending of ideological enemies rather than those who had committed overt criminal acts. Using the conspiracy charge, a handful of Nazi sympathizers had been convicted in July 1942 for violating the Smith Act, and the U.S. Communist Party delighted in those prosecutions. In 1948 they changed their minds about the Smith Act.

The accusation against the party leaders was that they conspired to willfully advocate and teach "the principles of Marxism-Leninism," and thereby meant to overthrow and destroy the government of the United States by "force and violence." The leading defendant, Eugene Dennis, Secretary General of the Party, believed that if the communists won an election the capitalists would not allow them to take the reins of government, making violence necessary.  The Communist Party U.S.A. was conforming to the view of the Cominform. It had difficulty in making a case that it was opposed to violence. It was still opposed to what it called Browderism: the belief in a peaceful and democratic transition to communism.

By early 1949 the notion of a peaceful evolution to communism was being disavowed by communists internationally. Dennis announced that if Wall Street succeeded in plunging the world into war that it would be an unjust, aggressive and imperialist war. He pledged that his party would defeat "the war aims of U.S. imperialism and help bring the war to a speedy conclusion on the basis of a democratic peace."  Truman was unimpressed by the statements of Dennis and his lawyer. He called the communists a "bunch of traitors."

In the summer of 1949, at what was supposed to be a Paul Robeson concert in Peekskill, New York, people with rifles, presumably to assassinate Robeson, were routed from behind bushes near where Robeson was to sing. And the concert was broken up by a patriotic mob hostile to Robeson.

The trial against the Communist Party leadership had begun in January and ended nine months later. Ten of the eleven Communist Party leaders were convicted and sentenced to five years in federal prison and fined $10,000. The eleventh, a veteran with a Distinguished Service Cross, Robert Thompson, was sentenced to only three years. In 1951 the U.S. Supreme Court heard the case and sided with the prosecution. Some of the communists went to prison. Some others, believing their leadership in the Party necessary, decided to go "underground" rather than serve time. And in prison, an inmate beat Thompson with a pipe, leaving him brain damaged.

Meanwhile, the Communist Party U.S.A. had been troubled by differences of opinion within the Party over the Soviet biologist Lysenko. And a star among the world's radicals, America's own supporter of communism and revolution, Anna Louise Strong, was declared a "notorious spy" by Soviet authorities. The U.S. Communist Party initiated no inquiry and made no protest to the Soviet Union.

The Hiss Case

Americans were also concerned about spies. In the thirties a few Communists had managed to join the Roosevelt Administration. These were people who thought that Soviet-style economics was the best solution to the depression, and they saw the Soviet Union as the leading power against fascism and as the hope of humanity. The U.S. and the Soviet Union were not enemies during the thirties. And during the war, when the Soviet Union and the U.S. were allies, a few communists in the Roosevelt administration and some communists outside the administration were eager to help the Soviet Union and passed information to Soviet agents, some of it classified. In 1945 much of the spying for the Soviet Union had ended when a disillusioned communist, Elizabeth Bentley, exposed the Soviet spy operation in the United States.

One of the communist spies who became disillusioned with Stalinism in the late thirties, Whittaker Chambers, came forward in the late forties and accused Alger Hiss, a State Department official during the Roosevelt years, as having passed information to Soviet Agents. Beginning in August 1948, A special subcommittee headed by Congressman Richard M. Nixon, was investigating an accusation by Whittaker Chambers - an senior editor at Time Magazine - that a former State Department official, Alger Hiss, had spied for the Soviet Union. In December 15, 1948, Hiss was indicted on two counts of perjury. His trial began at the end of May and ended July 7 with a deadlocked jury.

Another trial against Hiss began on November 17, 1949 and ended in January 1950, with the new jury finding Hiss guilty on both counts. He was to serve 44 months  in the federal penitentiary at Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. Meanwhile bigger things were happening in the world. [note]

The Berlin Airlift, NATO and Germany Divides

The U.S. had been urging the Soviet Union to conform to the agreement at Potsdam that Germany be treated as one economic unit. The U.S. wanted to move ahead with German reunification while the Soviet Union remained uninterested. The U.S. and Britain merged their zones of occupation. And from the reunification issue came the crisis over Berlin - a city deep in the Soviet zone of occupation and a city itself divided into zones of occupation. The Western powers issued a new currency in their zones. The Soviet Union retaliated on June 23, 1948, by cutting access by the Western powers to Berlin, and the U.S. and Britain countered with what was called the Berlin Airlift, which was to last to May 1949.

In February, 1949, average daily goods delivered by the U.S and Britain by airplane to West Berlin was tonnage was 5,437 tons. in March it increased to 6,328 tons per day. In April this climbed to 7,845 tons per day. More tonnage of goods was being transported over the air bridge than had been delivered to West Berlin by truck, rail, and barge prior to March 1948. [link]

While the U.S. and Britain were conducting their airlift to Berlin, their strategists were considering a defense organization for Europe. U.S. intelligence had no information telling them that the Soviet Union was preparing to march into Western Europe or even thinking about it, but there was belief that a defensive force should come into existence anyway. On April 4, 1949 five nations joined together in a defensive alliance called the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Membership soon enlarged to twelve: Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal and the United Kingdom (Britain) and the United States. Parties to the treaty pledged their faith in "the purposes and principles" of the UN and their "desire to live in peace with all peoples and all governments." They pledged their determination "to safeguard the freedom, common heritage and civilization of their peoples, founded on the principles of democracy, individual liberty and the rule of law" and to "seek to promote stability and well-being in the North Atlantic area."

Stalin did not want war. He dropped a hint that he wanted settlement of the crisis in Germany, and the United States began secret negotiations with the Russians: the Jessup-Malik negotiations. In May, the Soviet Union lifted its blockade and the Western powers lifted a counter blockade. Both sides claimed victory, and a meeting between the Russians and the western powers took place. The meeting's closing communiqué acknowledged that no agreement had been reached on the economic and political unity of Germany, but it did describe Germany's occupation powers (the Soviet Union, the U.S., et cetera) as duty bound to take necessary measures which would assure a normal functioning of traffic and other communications to and from Berlin.

The Western Powers still had no written access rights to Berlin, other than the air corridor agreements of 1946-47. The Soviet Union had not been able to eliminate the Berlin window to the West. The zones occupied by the Western powers now became the German Federal Republic, a federation of German states also known as West Germany. Parliamentary elections were held in August 1949, and the Federal Republic of Germany was officially declared on September 15, 1949, its capital Bonn, with Konrad Adenauer elected by Parliament (the Bundestag) as chancellor.

In West Germany, the Americans had been gaining respect. Adenauer was openly associating himself with the United States and many Germans viewed their country's future as aligned with the United States. There was still the view that people who had abandoned Germany during World War II, such as Willy Brandt, had been traitors, but admiration for fascism was dying a natural death. Leftists in West Germany were blaming wars on capitalism, and some of Germany's Social Democrats wanted more central planning. But what was coming to the fore in West Germany instead was a belief that the best way to recover from the war was to let the economy run freely. This was about to bring what would be described as West Germany's economic miracle.

Stalin decided to consolidate and solidify the Soviet Union's gains in Eastern Europe. That was his reaction to his inability to prevent the formation of the West German government and his recognizing that the tide had turned in Western Europe with the Marshall Plan, NATO, and the failure of the Berlin blockade. A part of his reaction was his the creation of a rival German government in the Soviet zone of occupation. The Soviet Union tried to make the regime in East Germany look democratic by creating a coalition government consisting of members of the Social Democratic Party and others who had opposed Hitler. But few of the Social Democrats in the Soviet sector were interested in joining such a government. So orders came down from Moscow compelling Social Democrats to join the government. Those Social Democrats who resisted mysteriously disappeared. Some others were sent to Buchenwald - a concentration camp in the Soviet zone that had been converted to Soviet uses. And some were sent to Siberia. The forced integration between the Communist Party and the Social Democrats in the Soviet zone produced what was called the Socialist Unity Party (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutchlands) - a party subservient to Moscow. The Soviet zone, on October 7, 1949, became the German Democratic Republic (GDR), or East Germany, with East Berlin as its capital.

In 1949, Stalin conducted another of his purges of Communist Party officials within the Soviet Union - officials numbering more than one thousand. Meanwhile, in countries that had accepted the Marshall Plan, business confidence was rising. Between 1947 and 1949 these countries enjoyed a 25 percent rise in total output of goods and services. Agriculture was also improving, and agriculture was being revolutionized with the arrival of tractors and fertilizers from the United States. Inflation was being brought under control - except in France. The average European still could not buy a refrigerator, automobile, canned foods, washbasins or sinks, but goods were beginning to reappear in shop windows and life was becoming brighter.

The Soviet Union Acquires the Bomb

In September 1949 the Western world learned that the Soviet Union had exploded an atomic bomb. U.S. government officials had predicted that it would take the Soviet Union as long as a decade to develop atomic weapons. The speed with which the Soviets produced a bomb led to charges that development of the device was a product of Soviet espionage. People spoke of the Russians having used German scientists or having stolen secrets. Indeed, a German scientist, Klaus Fuchs, had provided the Russians a detailed description of the plutonium implosion bomb in June 1945, while he was working at Los Alamos, New Mexico.

Russia's leading scientist on the bomb project, Igor Kurchatov, and his close associate, Yuli Khariton, had not been sure that Fuch's information was completely reliable. Khariton and his team were assigned the task of verifying everything. Another working on the atomic bomb for the Soviet Union was Andrei Sakharov, aged 27 in 1948, and that year he had already been thinking about the creation of a hydrogen bomb.

The Soviet Union gave its scientists massive resources and privileged living conditions, while those taking part in the project believed that the Soviet Union needed its own bomb in order to defend itself, and they welcomed the challenge of proving the worth of Soviet science.

People in the West saw it differently. For them the prospect of war was now more frightening. In November it was announced in the U.S. that scientists had already created a bomb "six times the effectiveness" of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And in January 1950, President Truman revealed that he had ordered the Atomic Energy Commission to develop the hydrogen bomb.

The People's Republic of China

In 1946, President Truman sent George Marshall to China to prevent a civil war between Chiang Kai-shek's forces and the communists, led by Mao Zedung. The Truman administration was hoping that the communists would accept Chiang's authority and that Chiang would allow the communists their rights to participate in elections, as communists were in France and Italy for example. The Truman administration was hoping for a democratic China, but it did not work out that way. Talks between the two sides in 1946 broke down, and civil war erupted.

The communists were appealing to poor peasants - China's majority - and also to students and workers in the cities. They wore the mantle of social reform and were appealing to people looking forward to change. Chiang Kai-shek's government was seen as a "landlord's government." At the end of the war it had lost prestige by using Japanese forces and Chinese troops that had been on the side of the Japanese and by cracking down on a student peace movement. By late 1948, Chiang's troops were suffering from demoralization and lack of discipline. People in Chiang's China were suffering from rising prices because of inflation. And corruption was siphoning off aide from the United States.

Chiang's forces had taken over Manchuria following the Soviet Union's occupation there, but they had been unable to hold it. Mao's forces pushed Chiang's forces out of  Manchuria. Mao's forces were using weapons taken from the Japanese, and they were capturing an abundance of U.S. weaponry from Chiang's forces. In 1948, communists won numerous urban areas north of the Yangzi River. In December 1948 they moved into Beijing unopposed, and by then they had advanced south to the Yangzi River. By August 1948 Chiang's currency inflated to 67 times what it had been in January, and between August and February 1949 the currency inflated 32,000 times.

In the U.S., a few Chiang supporters hoped for U.S. intervention to stop the communists at the Yangzi. Mao had no navy. Crossing the river heavily defended on its southern banks could be difficult. Stalin advised Mao and his associates not cross the Yangzi. The U.S. continued to send aid to Chiang, including air transport for Chiang's troops. The U.S. had given Chiang two billion dollars in military aid since 1945, but it  was unwilling and unprepared to send troops to prevent Mao from crossing the Yangzi. In the summer of 1949, Mao's forces swept across the river. And as Chiang's forces began their flight to Taiwan, they rounded up and executed those they saw as enemies.

In Beijing, on October 1, 1949, Mao announced the founding of the People's Republic of China. In December, he traveled to Moscow. Against the possibility of an attack by what he called "the imperialist countries," he and his associates wished to align China with the "socialist countries." [note] Mao had discussions with Stalin, and Stalin was friendly and congratulated Mao and the Chinese. But Mao was reserved.  Back in 1945, Stalin had signed a treaty with Chiang in 1945, had advised Mao that the time was not ripe for revolution and had given the communist movement in China little assistance. That Stalin did not now apologize for past wrongs Mao took as a sign that he wished to view China as a "little brother." Nevertheless, on February 14, 1950, the People's Republic of China and the Soviet Union signed a Treaty of Friendship, Alliance and Mutual Assistance, the Soviet Union promising to help China in its reconstruction.

In the United States people were asking who lost China. Chiang, a Christian, was liked in the United States. Henry Luce, publisher of Time Magazine was especially close to Chiang. The view among many in the U.S. was that the Chinese Revolution was an extension of the Soviet Union's power and will. The State Department's Dean Rusk described the Chinese Revolution not as Chinese but as made in Moscow. Purges were now to begin of people in the State Department who saw things differently. To many in the United States it appeared that communism was on a successful march and that if something were not done the communists would engulf the world.

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