Alan Axelrod - Complete Idiot’s Guide to American History

The single boldest step toward winning the peace was proposed on June 5, 1947, by George C. Marshall. The former army chief of staff, now secretary of state, described in an address at Harvard University a plan whereby the nations of Europe would draw up a unified scheme for economic reconstruction to be funded by the United States. Although the Soviet Union and its satellite nations were invited to join, in the growing chill of the Cold War, they declined. Sixteen western European nations formed the Organization for European Economic Cooperation to coordinate the program formally known as the European Recovery Program, but more familiarly called the Marshall Plan.

Winston Churchill called the Marshall Plan the “most unsordid” political act in history, but it was, above all, a political act. Although Marshall assured the Soviets that the plan was riot directed “against any country or doctrine but against hunger, poverty, desperation, and chaos,” it was a powerful economic salvo fired against communism. Having witnessed totalitarian regimes rush to fill the void of postwar economic catastrophe, Marshall and other U.S. leaders were eager to restore the war-ravaged economies of the West and even to stimulate growth. Economic well-being, they felt, was the strongest ally of democracy.

The United States poured some $13 billion into Europe and also established a massive Displaced Persons Plan, whereby almost 300,000 homeless Europeans (including many Jewish survivors of the Holocaust) immigrated to the United States and became citizens.

On March 5, 1946, Winston Churchill addressed tiny Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri. “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic,” he declared, “an iron curtain has descended across the continent.” The former prime minister’s eloquent phrase took root, and Iron Curtain was used for more than 50 years to describe the economic, social, and military barriers created against the West by the Soviet Union and the communist countries of Eastern Europe.

In 1823, President James Monroe issued his famous “Monroe Doctrine,” warning European powers that the United States would act to halt any new attempts to colonize the Americas. In 1947, President Harry S Truman promulgated the “Truman Doctrine,” warning the Soviet Union—which supported a threatened communist takeover of Greece and Turkey—that the United States would act to halt the spread of communism wherever in the world it threatened democracy.

The Truman Doctrine had its basis in a proposal by State Department official George F. Kennan (b. 1904). The proposal stated that the most effective way to combat communism was to contain it, confronting the Soviet Union whenever and wherever it sought to expand its ideological influence. Thus the “Cold War” began in earnest, and with it, a National Security Act, passed in 1947. The act reorganized the War Department into the Department of Defense and also created the Central Intelligence Agency—perhaps the most controversial federal agency ever established. The CIA had as its mission covert intelligence gathering, which meant that the CIA sometimes functioned with neither executive nor legislative knowledge, let alone approval. In the name of fighting communism, the National Security Act had created the closest thing to a secret police (long a mainstay of oppressive eastern European regimes) this nation ever had.

Truman’s policy of containment prompted the United States and its western allies to take a strong stand in Germany after the Soviet Union began detaining troop trains bound for West Berlin in March 1948. (Although Berlin was deep inside the Soviet sector of occupied Germany, the city, too, was divided into zones of Allied occupation.) In response, on June 7, the western allies announced their intention to create the separate, permanent capitalist state of West Germany. Two weeks later, the Soviet Union blockaded West Berlin, protesting that because of its location in Soviet-controlled territory, West Berlin could not serve as the capital of West Germany.

President Truman did not take armed action against the Soviets. Instead, he ordered an airlift, a spectacular chain of round-the-clock supply flights into West Berlin—272,000 flights over 321 days, carrying tons of supplies. The airlift was a political as well as logistical triumph, which caused the Soviet Union to lift the blockade. The event was also a vindication of the policy of containment, and in April 1949, it led to the creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization—NATO—a key defensive alliance of the western nations against the communist East.

While national leaders and the military were scrambling to “contain” communism abroad, certain Americans looked homeward. Joseph R. McCarthy (1908-1957) was a thoroughly mediocre senator from Wisconsin whose popularity was flagging. McCarthy made a provocative speech to the Women’s Republican Club of Wheeling, West Virginia, on February 9, 1950. He held up a piece of paper, which he said was a list of 205 known communists in the State Department.

The audience was electrified. The speech was reported nationally, and the nation likewise was stunned. McCarthy suddenly became famous and, over the next four years, spearheaded a legislative crusade to root out communists in government and other positions of power. Crusade is a word McCarthy and his followers would have been comfortable with. Others called what happened a witch hunt. (And no one ever bothered actually to examine that piece of paper the senator waved in Wheeling.) McCarthy pointed fingers, raised suspicions, leveled charges. Due process of law, the rules of evidence, and the presumption that a person is innocent until proven guilty mattered not at all to “Tail Gunner Joe” McCarthy. He gained chairmanship of the powerful Senate Subcommittee on Governmental Operations and, from this post, launched investigations of the Voice of America broadcasting service and the U.S. Army Signal Corps. That McCarthy pointed a finger was quite enough to ruin a reputation and destroy a career—even if no actual evidence of subversion or disloyalty was presented. Those called to testify before the committee were asked to “name names,” expose other individuals with communist affiliations. If the witnesses refused, they were found to be in contempt of Congress and subject to imprisonment. If a witness exercised his constitutional right not to testify against himself—a right guaranteed in the Fifth Amendment-McCarthy (and much of the public, it seemed) presumed him guilty.

McCarthy was aided in his witch hunt by a slick young lawyer named Roy Cohn, who was instrumental in one of the most highly publicized phases of the witch hunt, an investigation of communist influence in the Hollywood film industry. A parade of executives, producers, directors, and movie stars appeared before the Senate committee. Some witnesses “named names.” Some refused. Those who failed to “cooperate” with the committee and those who stood accused were blacklisted—which meant that no studio would hire them.

The McCarthy witch hunts were certainly not born of fantasy. Many influential Americans did have ties to communist organizations—though most of these associations had come and gone with the 1930s, when intellectuals and liberals flocked to socialist and communist groups in order to oppose fascism, which was then menacing the world. The Cold War also spawned a veritable legion of spies, including those who communicated U.S. atomic secrets to the Soviets, thereby enabling the U.S.S.R. to develop an atomic bomb in 1949 and a hydrogen bomb in 1954.