Harry S. Truman and the War Scare of 1948: A Successful Campaign to Deceive the Nation. - book reviews

Once the Soviet Union began to withdraw from the arms race in the late 1980s, liberal commentators in the United States popularized the argument that "now at last" it would be possible to move quickly toward a reordering of official priorities: away from military spending--extravagant levels of which could "no longer" be justified--and toward the funding of urgent social needs.

Many progressive activists eagerly adapted their pitch to this line of argument, even though in so doing they were conferring retrospective legitimacy on the "defense" budgets of the previous four decades. To do this was of course to follow a line of least resistance, but the option of challenging such a line seemed to require an expertise that went far beyond most people's awareness. And besides, if all could now agree that the threat was ended, why bother about whether or not it had been artificially concocted at the outset?

The experience of the last few years, and in particular the withering of any "peace dividend" under the onslaught of the Panama invasion, the Gulf War, and subsequent imperial missions, ought certainly to have shaken this kind of thinking. Most dramatic was the about face in Washington's rationale for its campaign against Cuba; suddenly, this had nothing at all to do with Cuba's being a Soviet ally. Here was at least partial proof that, for the U.S. ruling class, the specter of alleged Soviet expansionism was never more than a pretext for its deeper fear of successful revolutions.

So far, however, this lesson does not seem to have spread very widely. Had it done so--had the essential fraudulence of Washington's decades-old military rationale become a matter of common knowledge--we might have found greater skepticism about official justifications for the more recent U.S. shows of force.

This is where Frank Kofsky's work comes in. There is a desperate need not just for proof that established political leaders lie (which is widely recognized), but that they use lies to shape the most basic assumptions of political debate. Kofsky shows precisely this, with reference to a key stage in the formation of U.S. Cold War policy.

The main developments in the period of his study (February-April 1948) are (1) the U.S. decision to underwrite European capitalist reconstruction (the Marshall Plan) and (2) the first major escalation of the post-second World War U.S. arms budget. By the time these steps were undertaken, U.S. policymakers had virtually completed the scrapping of Washington's wartime alliance with the Soviet Union.(1) The one task they still had to carry out was to secure a consensus in Congress supporting the expenditures they envisioned. It is in this context that the already considerable paranoia orchestrated by the government was now raised to fever pitch.

Kofsky describes the relevant behind-the-scenes maneuvers in remarkable detail. His book is a model of historical detective work, guiding the reader gently but zealously through an immense quantity of unpublished documents. The author clearly has more in mind than just filling in the historical record; he is laying bare the enduring cynicism of the U.S. ruling class.

His account of Washington's intentional misreadings of Soviet conduct--specially in the artfully contrived, ambiguously alarmist "Clay telegram" of March 1948-reinforces the findings of Marzani and of later New Left historians on the Cold War's origins. It is an important addition, however, because in the political debate about the apportionment of "blame," the argument may ultimately hinge not just on establishing certain instances of U.S. aggressiveness, or even on showing Washington's initiative in the confrontation, but rather on showing the defining U.S. role in every episode of the Cold War's onset. Kofsky sheds particularly valuable light on the interpretation given to the Prague events of February 1948 and on the circumstances leading up to the Berlin blockade later that year.

Kofsky and other left historians show that the approach taken toward the Soviet Union when it was still reeling from the Second World War can now be seen to foreshadow the Reagan administration's "full court press" against the weakened Soviet economy of the 1980s. The intervening period of great-power rivalry appears in retrospect as a temporary and, for Washington, unwelcome interruption of its long-term campaign of attrition.

In addition, however, to the anti-soviet dimension of U.S. policy, there is another aspect on which Kofsky focuses and which is newer to the Cold War debate. Up to now, the question has turned largely on which side initiated the post Second World War military standoff. The new question raised by Kofsky is whether the war scare--granted now to have originated in Washington--had to be manufactured not only for the sake of anti-soviet or anticommunist objectives, but also in order to satisfy the profit anxieties of the U.S. arms industry.

While there is obviously no incompatibility between these two goals, it appears from Kofsky's evidence that pressure from the aircraft industry added considerably to the urgency of the government's measures. Some of the most interesting documentation in the book is from the unpublished letters of aircraft company presidents to high government officials. The private executives are absolutely blunt in demanding two things: on the one hand, that their enterprises be subsidized, and on the other, that the word "subsidy" never be uttered in public.

Much of Kofsky's narrative focuses on the interplay between such immediate concerns and the larger strategic considerations of U.S. global leadership. In view of the sheer economic weight of the military sector, there was of course some overlap between these two perspectives. But there were also differences, which partially surfaced in the form of tension between the State Department and the Defense Department over the degree of aggressiveness to be projected in official declarations.

Kofsky's judicious blend of narrative and commentary enables us to see such differences within the larger framework of a common class interest. In this sense, his book constitutes a case study whose significance extends beyond the immediate subject matter of 1948. Its overarching theme is the intricacies of management of the U.S. imperial edifice. Methodologically, the study embodies a persuasive synthesis of structural and investigative approaches. Since so much of popular awareness rests on theoretically ill-grounded investigative descriptions, it is refreshing to find a work that instructs while it exposes.

The exposure aspect, however, raises at some points the specter of "conspiracy theory." Kofsky confronts this epithet head-on in an appended essay in which he allows the documentary evidence to speak for itself. At the same time, he reassures us that while conspiracies may arise in fact, it is not they alone that constitute the subject matter of theory. Where state power is concerned, the key concept remains that of class. As he puts it (p. 308), "One of the things we most need to understand--and one of the things historians most often fail to discuss--are the precise means by which the dominant class and those who serve it go about accomplishing their goals in politics."

NOTES

(1.) Washington's role as an instigator of this process could be documented as early as 1952 on the basis of already published memoirs and diaries of high U.S. officials. See Carl Marzani, We Can Be Friends (New York: Topical Books, 1952; reissued, Garland Publishing: New York, 1971). (2.) Among the works of the 1960s, perhaps the most important is Gar Alperovitz, Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1965; expanded edition New York: Penguin, 1985). While Marzani concluded in We Can Be Friends that the A-bombing of Japan was directed principally against the extension of Soviet influence, Alperovitz's work, which is now being further updated, adds importantly to the documentation and context of the decision, and is currently a major reference-point in public debates over the 50th anniversary commemoration of the bombing. See his essay, "Hiroshima: Historical Cleansing," In These Times, 20 February 1995, pp. 18-21.

Victor Wallis is working on a book on the domestic consequences of U.S. imperialism.

COPYRIGHT 1995 Monthly Review Foundation, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group