Ambrose 5 – The Truman Doctrine and the Marshall plan

Two halves of the same walnut.  Truman’s folksy Missouri language comes forward here in his analysis that the Truman Doctrine (containment) and the Marshall plan, the economic aid, were equally necessary in guaranteeing peace in Europe and protecting governments from falling to communist influence.  This concern will spread to Asia with the Korean war in 1950 and the middle East with the election of a socialist leader in Iran, part of Southwest Asia of course, but bordering the middle East.

That which Truman was most proud of, that we thoroughly defeated our enemies and then helped them rebuild their economies, is the story here, and it almost didn’t happen.

Opposition for the TD/MP was almost universal in the Republican party with the exception of Senator Vandenberg who tells Truman he must “scare the hell” out of the American people. We know how things went of course but what is interesting is the way things might have gone.

What if communists came to power in Greece and Turkey?  What would really change?  What if communists were elected in Italy?  What if the CIA had never been given authority to conduct covert operations?

Ambrose’s little jibe at Truman being disingenuous and losing sleep over his decision is I think miss-placed.   I agree Truman had made up his mind as to what to do, but I think he struggled greatly at figuring out how to get it done.  How do you take a people that has been traditionally isolationist, and re-enroll them into an international struggle that could turn as ugly as any preceding World War, or even more so, and convince them to join the fray after four long years of devastating warfare?

Kissinger 18 – The Success and Pain of Containment

This lovely treasure is from Truman’s re-election campaign of 1948. He hadn’t run in ’44 because FDR was still alive (until Spring of ’45) and he would decline to run in ’52 mostly over unpopularity of Korean War.  “Build a Better America” Sound familiar?

George F Kennen.  His influence, according to Kissinger, through the Long Telegram, and the “Sources of Soviet Conduct” published in “Foreign Affairs” under the pseudonym “X” not only were the foundation of the policy of containment but went so far as to predict what would happen under Gorbachev, namely, the dissolution of the USSR.  Ambrose will go so far to call him the father of the policy of containment; the policy which ended the Cold War.

Was it just me or did anybody else think, wow, this kind of describes Putin, when you were reading excerpts from the long telegram?  Do you think Putin knows his rule is “archaic in form, fragile and artificial”? I sort of do.  It is fitting to remember Pipes’ claim that the distinction between Czarist rule and communist was communist brutality.  There were otherwise the same.  Is Putin a similar extension of Russian history’s “mechanical” rather than “organic” structure of state, as advanced by Pipes?

There is a lot here in this little chapter.  What if Lippman had been more influential?  What about Wallace?  Was Truman really returning to a style of Realpolitik (Is that why Kissinger likes him so much?) and merely couching the protection in moral codes, or did he really believe he was advancing collective security?  Did Acheson really believe NATO was not an alliance aimed at the Soviet Sphere?  The Matthews Memorandum is worth noting as is Clark Clifford.

Were the suggestions of Kennan really implemented or did he want them to be interpreted as they were?  In 1957, over a decade later, he said where we should best apply our efforts to the Soviet threat by addressing our own American failings.  What do you think? Without getting off of too much of a tangent do you think our best strategy in the face of ISIS and Putin and North Korea is to address our domestic problems?  Are ISIS, Putin and North Korea even really similar threats?

Kissinger 17 – The Beginnings of the Cold War

Welcome back! Hope you had a great break! Just three more weeks/ eight classe sessions and you get another! (Don’t forget your bibliography outline due in the middle of that Dec 9)

So that’s my Dad on the right.  Summer after his freshman year at college he signed up.  Pearl Harbor had happened just six months earlier.  After the war he returned on the GI Bill and attended the University of Wisconsin, not Yale where he had started, because he wanted to be near his family.  That’s his brother Robin on the far left.  He would end up in the foreign service after the war, in the beginnings of the Cold War, in Hungary where he helped smuggle anti-communists out in the trunk of a car, and later in Iran near the time of the US sponsored coup there.  His service ended with a recurrence of childhood Polio and he would spend his career as a professor of Russian studies in Eugene Oregon.   He wrote a book on Stalin.  In the middle is their younger sister, my Aunt Mary.  One of my favorites.  Passed away three years ago now.  A professor of English literature she was.  Her dissertation was on Virginia Woolf.

Wow.  Look at your page numbers.  445.  The whole book is 835 pages long.  You’re over half way through with Kissinger!  Congratulations!

Truman, whose famous “Whistle Stop” campaign of 1948, was the only election he ran in for the executive office. In 1952, like LBJ in 1968, he would be too unpopular to run, largely because of an increasingly unpopular war in Asia; Korea for Truman, and Vietnam for LBJ.  Truman of course became president in 1945 on FDR’s death.

So this is the start of the Cold War, and I would argue the start of the world as you know it.  Was it Molotov’s intransigence as Kissinger argues, that turned America’s good will into the confrontation that would become the Cold War?  If this is the case can we / should we lay the blame for the Cold War, and the near annihilation of our population in 1962, on Molotov, or do we lay blame on Stalin who Molotov was so fearful of displeasing?

Or, do we blame Truman who talked to Molotov like a “Missouri mule driver”?  Had FDR lived another four years to finish his term would the Cold War have manifested itself in the same way in which it did?  Or Churchill?  Why did we really care about free elections in Poland? The “Russian” people, as Stalin called them in his last address as political leader of the USSR, had paid in blood and guts, 40 million, and didn’t they deserve a little security on their borders?

And what about today?  Potential meddling by the Russians in the US election, intransigence in North Korea and threats of nuclear war, the continued isolation of Cuba and Iran lead one to wonder if the Cold War is really over.  To have that discussion though, we need to really understand its origins.

Enjoy!

Ambrose 3 – The War in Asia

“Pay off for Pearl Harbor”.  There you go.  The War in Asia.  In 17 easy t read pages!

A few things to note.  Mao Tse-tung=Mao Zedong.  Same guy.  Formosa = Taiwan  Same place.  Remember this from our China unit?

So, what of the colonialism thing?  Why couldn’t Great Britain just chill and let French Indochina be governed by a control council until it reached independence.  That’s what they did in Italy, Germany and Austria.  Ho Chi Minh (future leader of war against America in Vietnam) is here helping us find downed pilots, singing our praises in the war and even copying our declaration of independence.  He even claims they want a representative democracy.  Why couldn’t we all just get along?

In case you hadn’t figured it out yet, the roots of our conflict in Vietnam are right here.  The roots of our conflict in today’s Middle East are right around the corner in our next unit and were even in the earlier unit where the modern middle eastern map was drawn after WWI.

The world you are entering is the way it is because of what has come before.  No student of today’s current events, be they social, political, technical, military or religious, will make any sense of the way things are, without a serious study of the way things were.

Enjoy!

Ambrose 2 – The War in Europe

So if you took a TORCH to your SLEDGEHAMMER would you be the  new OVERLORD?  Apparently so.

So what do you make of this “Strange Alliance”?  What was so strange about it?  And what about the decision to go into Africa?  How did that get complicated vis-a-vis Darlan.  The American reaction to allowing him to retain power might be an interesting IA. His assassination seems almost made-to-order for American public opinion.

Why not then press on into the Balkans.  Instead of going into Africa (TORCH) Eisenhower wanted to press for invasion into France.  Why?

And what happened in Italy, esp vis-a-vis Stalin?  This is all going to be very important I think when we get into the next unit and the emergence of the Cold War.

Also… Berlin.  What’s the big deal there?  Why doesn’t Eisenhower want to press on?  Why does he stop at the Elbe?  (Ambrose wrote an entire book about this BTW)  A map might help with this one.

Finally Ambrose says in the end FDR was very concerned with the creation of the UN.  How would it be any different from the League of Nations which had preceded it?

Kissinger 15 – FDR

Recognize the hand that drew that cartoon?  What’s that about?  What’s it mean?

His archive of his work is at the library at UCSD. Def Worth a visit.

So here before you is HK’s case that FDR was this brilliant leader who changed the course of the country more than anyone but Lincoln, taking his isolationist people into the recognition of the need of war.

“perspicacious”.  How many of you looked that one up?

The analysis of the isolationists vs. interventionists, at the beginning, is interesting.  They basically agreed the Monroe Doctrine gave the US control over the western hemisphere and the League could not require the US to engage in any military type of activity outside of the west.

FDR here, is interestingly not compared to the Bismarcks and the Disraelis in Kissinger’s Realpolitik Hall of Fame.  Why not?

You would do well to do a timeline here.  The Quarantine speench, the Neutrality Acts.  Anschulss with Austria, CZ… how does he react?  What evidence does HK use to show FDR was really, by a certain time, clearly an interventionist?  And why is he not (or is he?)apparently in HK’s “Realpolitik” Hall of Fame?

In regards to our film we just finished I think you would enjoy reading the review here on its premier.

Ambrose Chapter 1 – The Twisting Path to War

Heard of Band of Brothers?  You’ve heard of the late Stephen Ambrose.  Unfortunately plagued by accusations of plagiarism later in life, a scholar of Eisenhower and Lewis and Clark he was best known , like AJP Taylor, as a sort of popularizer of history.

His colleague, Douglas Brinkley, a scholar of FDR and Cold War history also taught a very popular class, “The Majic Bus” wherein he traveled across the country with his students listening to period music and visiting historical sights.  Aaaah college.  You’ll get there.

Look in the book jacket at the other titles the two have authored.  Take a look on the Internet to find out more about your two authors.  

My point though is that these two men want you to like history.  The Kissinger, Pipes and Spence books, are serious scholarly pieces dedicated to nuanced detail, analysis and argument.  This little book is not exactly a “survey” (that’s your typical text book from AP World, a “survey” of the current scholarship on history) this book is based on their own research, but obviously its a different animal than “Diplomacy”. Its intended use is as a freshman or introductory course in history.

So what does it say?  To my eye it says that not until his election of 1940 did FDR show any sympathy at all to the Brits and not until November 1941, less than a month from Pearl Harbor, was his tone one of “unrestrained belligerence, in public and private”.  Before that though, despite the fact the we actually have troops in Iceland and Greenland and a raging battle in the Atlantic defending the merchant ships supplying Britain, he cannot and will not bring the isolationist USA into war.  Keep that in mind when you read Kissinger’s view of FDR.

One of the questions you will face on your review and possibly on your test is “The USA was “belligerent in all but name before December 1941. Discuss” An interesting story from last year’s UT sheds some light on a possible answer;

https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/local-history/story/2021-10-31/from-the-archives-80-years-ago-reuben-james-became-first-u-s-warship-sunk-by-enemy-action-in-world-war-ii

I do hope you all learn how important it is to read a good newspaper.

There are two footnotes that you should not skip, one on Hitler’s decision to declare war on us and the other is on the myth of FDR’s knowledge of Pearl Harbor.  The Intro in the eighth edition is worth a look as well. Sort of sad written in those heady days of victory in the Cold War, Clinton’s second term (first Democrat to win re-election since…?), and prior to 9/11.  The ninth edition which some of you have I have not seen.  I suspect it has been updated.

For those of you who prefer to read electronically pdf can be found here;

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B7lZ7JU-iHeBUXdESW9UX2ZkcE0/view?resourcekey=0-XJvN6kPuseN-LPXQpdGSoA

Enjoy.