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CHAPTER 3

Provoking Confrontation: The United States and the Origins of the Cold War

In his June 24, 2015, Times column, “Cold War Without the Fun,” Thomas L. Friedman lamented that the new confrontation between the United States and Russia has so far lacked some of the drama of the twentieth-century version, such as “Nikita Khrushchev’s shoe-banging, a race to the moon or a debate between American and Soviet leaders over whose country has the best kitchen appliances.”

According to Friedman, the new “post-post-Cold War has more of a W.W.E.—World Wrestling Entertainment—feel to it, and I don’t just mean President Vladimir Putin of Russia’s riding horses barechested, although that is an apt metaphor. It’s just a raw jostling for power for power’s sake—not a clash of influential ideas but rather of spheres of influence.”¹ Friedman’s remarks promote a nostalgic view of the twentieth-century Cold War characteristic of the U.S. political establishment. Cast aside is the horrific human costs that led Mikhail Gorbachev to conclude that the Cold War “made losers of us all.” These costs include the millions of deaths in Korea and Vietnam, the destabilization of Third World countries, the overmilitarization of the U.S. political economy, abuse of civil liberties, and wide inequality.

Carl Marzani, an Office of Strategic Services (OSS, forerunner of the CIA) and State Department employee convicted of lying about involvement with the Communist Party, described in his 1952 book We Can be Friends how the United States became thrust into “semi-hysteria” amid a manufactured “war psychosis” with “dog tags on children, airplane spotters on twenty-four-hour duty … roads marked for quick evacuations, buildings designated as air raid shelters, air raid drills everywhere in streets, in stores, in schools.”² The twentieth-century Cold War was not really fun at all if we consider all this. Certainly not for victims like Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, a Jewish couple unjustly executed as atomic spies, thousands of Americans who lost their jobs because of left-leaning political views, or political activists around the world who experienced torture or were “disappeared.”

The next four chapters will provide a pocket history of the Cold War, showing how Gorbachev was sounder in his assessment than Friedman, America’s “imperial messenger,” as he is named in a book by Belen Fernandez, and others of his ilk. We will begin by looking at the breakdown of U.S.-Soviet relations following the Second World War, and the origins of a conflict that in hindsight we believe, like the current U.S.-Russian standoff, was avoidable.

While derided by critics as naïve and a communist sympathizer, FDR’s vice president, Henry Wallace, had a sound vision for U.S. foreign policy after the Second World War, one in which the United States would promote the industrialization of newly decolonizing nations absent any military or economic imperialism, and would pursue peaceful rapprochement with the Soviet Union. Unfortunately, Wallace was the target of political machinations that ousted him from any position of power and led to his being red-baited.³ This marked an important watershed in the origins of the Cold War, the history of which needs to be remembered as a cautionary lesson and not the object of nostalgia.

“HOLDING THE LEG FOR STALIN TO KILL THE DEER”: U.S.-SOVIET RELATIONS IN THE SECOND WORLD WAR

The seeds of the Cold War lay in the uneasy U.S-Soviet alliance during the Second World War. After withdrawing troops from Soviet Russia in 1920, the United States had promoted “Open Door” expansion as part of an effort to penetrate Russia economically, holding off on recognition until 1933. When the Nazis broke the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact, a temporary alliance between the Soviet Union and Germany, and invaded the USSR in 1941, Roosevelt aide Harry Hopkins was sent to meet with Stalin and the United States began extending Lend-Lease aid, amounting to over $10 billion during the war. In popular cultural depictions the treacherous “Reds” were transformed at this time into “the brave Russians,” whose resistance to the Nazis “amazed the world.”⁴

American elite opinion had been divided in the 1930s and early 1940s over the Soviet Union. The State Department favored support for right-wing dictatorships that repressed the political left and kept an open door to foreign investment, including in Eastern Europe.⁵ Wall Street firms like Sullivan and Cromwell, employers of the Dulles brothers, provided a cloak of respectability for the Nazis before the war, acting as counsel for financiers who bankrolled Hitler while supporting the FDR–Neville Chamberlain “appeasement” policy enabling Hitler’s early conquests. According to Joseph E. Davies, U.S. ambassador to Russia from 1936 to 1938, they were among the influential classes of people in the United States and elsewhere “who abhor the Soviets to the extent they hope for a Hitler victory in Russia.”⁶

The Soviets had built up a powerful military through a centralized political economy. The Red Army faced the majority of the Reich military on the Eastern Front when the Allies faced a dramatically smaller force on the Western Front, making it clear that without the Soviet Union, the Nazis would have ruled all of Europe.⁷ General Douglas MacArthur stated in February 1942 that during his lifetime, he had

participated in a number of wars and witnessed others, as well as studying in great detail the campaigns of outstanding leaders of the past. In none have I observed such effective resistance to the heaviest blows of a hitherto undefeated enemy, followed by a smashing counterattack which is driving the enemy back to his own land. The scale and grandeur of this effort marks it as the greatest military achievement in all history.⁸

The most important battle was at Stalingrad in February 1943, where the Soviets fought the Nazi invaders to the last basement in frigid temperatures after the city had been reduced to rubble by Luftwaffe bombers. The epic victory—compared in the Soviet press to the ancient battle of Cannae in which Hannibal’s Carthaginians routed Rome—was followed by the Battle of Kursk, in which the Red Army turned back the last major German offensive three days before the Anglo-American landing in Italy.⁹

Historian Richard Overy, in his book Why the Allies Won, credits Soviet planning and central direction for providing the “weapons and food and labor to sustain the deep war.” He wrote that “the [Soviet] success in 1943 was earned not just by the tankmen and gunners at the front, but also by the engineers and transport workers in the rear, the old men and the women who kept farms going without tractors or horses, and the Siberian workforce struggling in bitter conditions to turn out a swelling stream of simply constructed guns, tanks and aircraft.”¹⁰

In December 1941, the State Department had rejected Stalin’s proposal for an agreement in which the United States and Britain would recognize the Soviet Union’s existing boundaries and acquisition of the Baltic States and Eastern Poland after the war, forcing Stalin to “trust to the power of the Red Army to win the guarantees the West rejected.”¹¹ Even more troublesome from the USSR’s point of view was the diversionary strategy of fighting in Northern Africa in 1942–43, leaving it to absorb the full brunt of Germany’s fury. This is when the United States was urging the Soviet Union to take the risk of having to fight on a second front—in the Far East. The United States invaded Italy in September, 1943 and then on June 6, 1944, landed at Normandy, France, where nine thousand American soldiers died. By that point, the Soviets had reversed the Nazi blitzkrieg at a cost of over seven million military and five to six million civilians killed, with shattered towns and villages destroyed by fire. And they were occupying much of Central Europe.¹²

Secretary of War Henry Stimson wrote to Dean Acheson on May 17, 1943, that “the British are trying to arrange this matter so that the British and Americans hold the leg for Stalin to kill the deer and I think that will be dangerous business for us at the end of the war. Stalin won’t have much of an opinion of people who have done that and we will not be able to share much of the postwar world with him.”¹³ These comments capture the essence of a military policy that forced the Soviets to shoulder a huge portion of the military burden, which added to the legacy of the Wilson administration’s “Midnight War” in sowing Soviet mistrust for the West. This mistrust was also deepened with proposals by military leaders like George Patton for preventive war, and the exclusion of Soviet influence and repression of the political left during the Allied occupation of Italy, which intensified Stalin’s urge to consolidate his own sphere of power in Eastern Europe.¹⁴

THE PROMISE OF YALTA AND ITS BREAKDOWN

“Russia hands” in the U.S. State Department and British Foreign office considered the Soviets to display Asian features, which made them inclined toward tyranny, adopting a mix of Russophobia and anti-Communism tinged at times with anti-Semitism. Nevertheless, during wartime conferences, President Roosevelt established a good rapport with Stalin and recognized the Soviets’ need for a security buffer in Eastern Europe to protect the country from renewed German aggression. Stalin in a November 1944 speech had called for creation of an organization akin to the United Nations to “defend peace and ensure security” and would establish a military force that could be activated to “liquidate aggression and punish those guilty of aggression.”¹⁵ Even Dwight Eisenhower was hopeful about postwar cooperation, telling a group of congressmen, “Russia has not the slightest thing to gain by a war with the United States. There is in Russia a desperate and continuing concern for the lot of the common man and they want to be friends with the United States.”¹⁶

At the Yalta Conference in February 1945, held at a resort town in the Crimea, a deal was brokered whereby the Big Three (Britain, United States, and the USSR) agreed to accept Soviet influence in Romania and a pro-Soviet government in Poland, a provisional body consisting of leaders known as the Lublin Poles. By way of concession, Stalin agreed to enter the war against Japan and support the United Nations. He also accepted the addition to the Warsaw regime of some members of the anti-Soviet Polish government in exile, the London Poles whom writer and journalist Isaac Deutscher described as a “motley coalition who could not by any criterion, ‘Eastern’ or ‘Western,’ be labelled democrats.” Elections would follow in due course. The Anglo-Americans, Diane Shaver-Clemens writes, had reason to trust Stalin because despite acts of perfidy such as the cover-up of the Katyn Forest massacre by Soviet troops in Poland, he had already allowed free elections in Austria and Finland, and he had recognized Charles de Gaulle as leader of France. Clemens regarded the Yalta Conference as an agreement among realists to maintain spheres of influence, though right-wingers in the United States considered it a form of appeasement by pro-Communist New Dealers (in 2005, George W. Bush compared it to Munich and the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact). As part of the agreement, Stalin agreed to non-interference in the Greek civil war where Britain and the United States backed right-wing monarchists, many of them Nazi collaborators, against left-wing guerrillas advocating for socialism, land and wealth redistribution, and nationalization of industry.

After succeeding Roosevelt in April 1945, Harry S. Truman rejected the Lublin government in Poland that Stalin had helped impose, and created a separate West German government that denied the Soviets access to the Ruhr industrial heartland and provided only minimal reparations payments. Truman felt betrayed because the 1947 election in Poland was considered to be unfair and Stalin endorsed acts of political terror against the pro-Western opposition. Stalin felt the West was hypocritical in trying to interfere in Poland by supporting Stanislaw Mikolajczyk (pro-West candidate who got 10 percent of the vote) when the Soviets did not attempt to interfere in Belgium, Italy, or Greece. The Soviets in turn consolidated control over Eastern Europe with their support for Communist dictatorships, and thus the Cold War commenced. “We are living with the problems of a world that did not benefit from the experience at Yalta,” Clemens concluded from the perspective of the 1970s. “It is perhaps relevant to ask what the world would have been like if the spirit of Yalta had triumphed.”¹⁷ Perhaps it is still relevant.

THE PATH OF PEACE NOT PURSUED: THE REMOVAL OF HENRY WALLACE

A key turning point that may have influenced the entire history of the Cold War occurred at the 1944 Democratic Party national convention in Chicago when Harry S. Truman was nominated over Henry A. Wallace as vice president on the Roosevelt ticket.

Wallace was a progressive New Dealer who supported free trade, national health insurance, abolishing Jim Crow, and free public schooling and day care. Unique among American leaders, Wallace was sensitive to the conditions of grinding poverty and oppression that Lenin had seized upon, and to the accomplishments and appeal of Soviet Communism. He also questioned many aspects of U.S. foreign policy, such as the State Department’s friendliness toward right-wing dictators.¹⁸

As an alternative to Henry Luce’s vision of the “American Century,” which demanded that the United States “accept wholeheartedly our duty and our opportunity as the most powerful and vital nation in the world and … exert upon the world the full impact of our influence, for such purposes as we see fit and by such means as we see fit,” Wallace had proposed a “Century of the Common Man,” in which “no nation will have the god-given right to exploit other nations. Older nations will have the privilege to help younger nations get started on the path to industrialization, but there must be neither military nor economic imperialism. The methods of the nineteenth century will not work in the people’s century which is now about to begin.”¹⁹

At the Democratic Party convention, California oilman, party treasurer, and chief fundraiser Edwin Pauley and chairman Robert Hannegan coordinated with Southern segregationists, big-city machine politicians, and business interests to remove Wallace from his nomination as vice president through a backroom arrangement supported by Congress of Industrial Organization (CIO) leader Sidney Hillman and an ailing FDR. When Wallace appeared poised to receive the nomination, the convention was adjourned and spotlights turned off just before Claude Pepper (D-FL), a Wallace supporter, could take the podium. Overnight, the bosses then worked to secure Truman’s nomination by offering ambassadorships, postmaster positions, and cold cash to delegates, blocking Wallace supporters from entering the arena the next day.²⁰

Wallace was subsequently fired as commerce secretary after proposing in a speech at Madison Square Garden, on September 12, 1946, that the United Nations assume control of the strategically located air bases with which “the United States and Britain [had] encircled the world.” According to Wallace, “nations not only should be prohibited from manufacturing atom bombs, guided missiles and military aircraft for bombing purposes, but also prohibited from spending on its military more than 15 percent of its budget.” The United States, he said, could easily ensure cooperation with the Soviets if they made clear “we are not planning for war against her,” and had “no more business in the political affairs of Eastern Europe than Russia has in Latin America.” Wallace ended the speech by calling on Americans “who look on this war-with-Russia talk as criminal foolishness … [to] carry our message direct to the people—even though we may be called communists because we dare to speak out.”²¹