The Great Betrayal - Part 1
By James W. Carden
James W. Carden has worked as an advisor to the State Department. He has also written articles for, among other periodicals, The Nation, The National Interest, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Washington Post and the LA Times.
The Nation has published his new book entitled The Great Betrayal. It is subtitled “How the Democrats Became the Party of War.” Right off the bat, this figures to be an interesting topic. Because after enduring the likes of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and President Joe Biden, it would be hard to disagree with that thesis. Yes, there are significant differences between those two versus Donald Trump and George W. Bush on domestic policies. But it is difficult to detect any shade between them on foreign policy.
For example, all four were initially in favor of W’s completely unmerited invasion of Iraq. That invasion turned out so badly that Trump and Biden later tried to hide the fact that they had no problems with it at the start. (ABC News, 9/8/2016, story by J. J. Gallagher; Fact Check, 9/10/19, story by Bob Farley) In fact, on the day after the outbreak, Biden said, “We voted to give him the authority to wage that war. We should step back and be supportive.” (ibid., Farley)
On the day the war commenced, Biden said this:
There’s a lot of us who voted for giving the president the authority to take down Saddam Hussein if he didn’t disarm. And there are those who believe, at the end of the day, even though it wasn’t handled all that well, we still have to take him down. (ibid)
Biden, like Clinton, later tried to dodge the point that the way the war was conducted was not the relevant issue. The point was that the pretext the White House gave for the war was ersatz. Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction, and he was not in league with Al Qaeda. These excuses were false.
Charles Duelfer was the CIA’s special advisor to the Iraq Survey Group. He testified in the Senate that Iraq destroyed its stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, and also eliminated its nuclear weapons program after the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Another witness who preceded Dulfer, David Kay, also testified to the same. But Duelfer’s report went into greater detail. (Click here https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/DOC_0001156395.pdf)
II
One should add that not the whole Democratic Party went along with the misrepresentation. Bernie Sanders and Barbara Lee, both House members at the time, did not. They were joined by 124 other Democratic members of that body. In the Senate, 21 Democrats refused to go along with it. But still, that is not enough of a minority, especially with what happened to Iraq as a result of the war. The US spent a total of 1.6 trillion. About 4,500 American troops were killed and 33,000 wounded. (NBC News, 3/20/23, story by Mark Murray)
The number of Iraq casualties has been much debated. The low estimates are placed at about 200,000; the higher ones are over 600,000. (Lancet Survey of October 11, 2006) This is a remarkably high price to pay for a war that was based upon a myth. It is stunning that so many Democrats, including its leading candidates for the presidency, swallowed this fable.
How did this happen? How did the party of Franklin Roosevelt turn into, more or less, a rubber stamp for the hawks in the Pentagon? In Carden’s view, the beginning of this transformation came with the regime of President Harry Truman and Secretary of State Dean Acheson, which followed the Franklin Roosevelt/Cordell Hull team during World War II. Acheson began in the State Department as an assistant secretary from 1941-45; he then became under-secretary from 1945-47; and then he was Secretary of State from 1949-53. During those 12 years, he was only out of government service from 1947-49. So he was an important figure at State for a decade. There can be very little doubt that he was quite instrumental at his department, and he was a principal advisor to Harry Truman in his decisions on the formation of the Cold War.
In 2012, historian Frank Costigliola wrote about this subject in his volume titled Roosevelt’s Lost Alliances. He featured a quote at the beginning of the book by Anthony Eden. One which Eden did not want made public during his lifetime. By about 1947, Eden—a counselor to Winston Churchill on foreign policy—lamented what had happened among the relations between England, Russia and the USA. He stated in an interview that this would never have occurred if Roosevelt had lived. Costigliola accented in his book that Roosevelt tried to develop a personal relationship with Stalin. (p. 242, p. 419). He extended this kind of courtesy to Stalin’s representatives like foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov, whom he gave a signed photo to when he visited the White House in 1942. All the indications were that Roosevelt intended to keep the alliance together after the war was completed.
Consequently, FDR’s death was a great tragedy to Stalin because the two men understood each other and the equation of reciprocity. FDR understood that Stalin would grant him freedom in what he considered his areas of vital interest in return for reciprocity on Poland—which Germany had used as a launching pad to invade Russia twice in less than thirty years. And those invasions caused almost unimaginable damage to the USSR. (Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick, The Untold History of the United States, p. 124). After all, the Russians faced off against over two-thirds of the Wehrmacht in 1942. There was also a difference of opinion over what had really happened at Yalta, and the secret agreement that Churchill had made with Stalin in October 1944 in Moscow, which allowed for spheres of influence in postwar Europe. (ibid., p. 115). Truman was very badly informed on these matters.
But there was another element at work here, which Costigliola brought forth. There was a group of hardliners whom Roosevelt was trying to leave out of his negotiations, e.g., William Bullitt, Loy Henderson, George Kennan, Acheson and later Averell Harriman. (It should be noted that Kennan later made an apologia for his former deeds.) When Roosevelt died, these men saw their opportunity to regain influence with the failed haberdashery owner. They were all too successful. Kennan’s infamous Long Telegram from Moscow set the official American policy towards the Soviet Union for at least four decades. It had such a grip on the collective political consciousness that even in the face of a man who was clearly a reformer, Mikhail Gorbachev, the hardliners would not let it go.
III
Carden begins his book by setting out myths that the Achesonians swallowed. These were that:
- FDR was taken advantage by Stalin at Yalta
- It was necessary to use atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki
- That America had to the Cold War, because
- The USSR practiced a creeping imperialism
FDR did not buy into the last two, and his intent was to withdraw from Europe after the war. (Carden, p. 14) To illustrate just how unsophisticated Truman was on these issues, on the Senate floor in 1942, he said that in the war between Germany and Russia, America should aid the losing side until it gains the advantage, and then vice versa, so as many as possible would be killed. (Carden, p. 17). This makes for a significant contrast to Roosevelt’s final speech in which he said the following:
It is only too easy for all of us to rationalize what we want to believe, and to consider those leaders we like responsible and those we dislike irresponsible (Carden, p. 22)
As the author notes, this tendency toward demonization took hold of both political parties under Truman and Acheson as they forged ahead into a Manichean world. There was really no letup on it until John Kennedy became president. (ibid). When he was killed, both parties reverted back to the Achesonian model. As Carden notes, according to polling, the public was never really behind this headlong leap into a bottomless abyss. (Carden, p. 25) That did not matter. Truman terminated Lend-Lease to Russia in September of 1945. This was right after Stalin kept his pledge to FDR and attacked the Japanese empire in Manchuria. America was repaying good with evil.
In 1946, three things happened which constituted a death knell for the Rooseveltian hope for cooperation among the Big Three. These were the transmittal of Kennan’s Long Telegram which warned of Soviet expansionism; Truman’s invitation for Churchill to speak in Missouri to orate his infamous Iron Curtain speech; third, Henry Wallace made his anti-Cold War speech in New York City. After which Truman fired him as Secretary of Commerce. (Carden, pp. 27-29)
IV
After those three terminating events, Truman and Acheson went on the offensive. The Truman Doctrine was announced in March of 1947, which gave the White House the ability to aid any nation they felt threatened by hostile external or internal authoritarian forces. Which really meant any perceived threat of communism. Then came Executive Order 9835, which demanded loyalty oaths from five million people working in the government and led to 14,700 resignations and dismissals. (Carden, p. 31) This was the domestic complement to the Truman Doctrine. What made it strange was that it was not illegal to be a communist in America. But now, with these loyalty oaths, people were losing their jobs if they even admitted they went to one communist meeting, or they socialized with a known communist. As author Marty Jezer titled his book on the era, America had entered into the Dark Ages. And this was three years before the rise of Joe McCarthy.
There were other steps taken along this perilous path, like the Marshall Plan and the National Security Act; the latter created both the CIA and the National Security Council (NSC). The former provided cover for CIA propaganda and covert operations. The first act of the NSC was to subvert the elections in Italy in 1948, which they succeeded in doing. (Carden, p. 34)
When Truman won his upset victory in 1948, he brought Acheson in as his Secretary of State. Like John Foster Dulles, Acheson was a white shoe lawyer at Covington and Burling. Like Dulles, Acheson was an early advocate of the Domino Theory. (Carden, p. 39)
In some ways, Acheson was as extreme in his view of the Soviet Union as Dulles was. For instance, in NSC 20/4, it states that “The ultimate objective of the leaders of the USSR is the domination of the world” (ibid). So in 1949, Truman and Acheson signed the Washington Treaty, which paved the way for the creation of NATO. Which was contrary to FDR. Roosevelt wanted troops out of Europe, with little or no American presence there after a short duration. (p. 40) Today NATO still maintains 80,000 active soldiers on the continent. In other words, these two men created an apparatus that is still active today, even after the rise of Gorbachev--who actually ended the Cold War--the fall of the Soviet Union, and the unification of Germany. Since it has no real reason for its existence, eternal Cold Warriors like Hillary Clinton used it against, of all places, Africa, e.g., Libya.
The capper to all this Sturm und Drang came in 1950. In that year, Truman decided to pursue the creation of the hydrogen bomb; this was a reaction to the Soviets now having an atomic bomb. (Carden, p. 40) Incredibly, there was no correlation involved here: If the Soviets duplicated America’s first atomic device, would they not do the same with the second? It did not matter, and Robert Oppenheimer’s attempted protest against it did not either.
Under Truman and Acheson, Paul Nitze—a triple-distilled Cold Warrior to his toes—was allowed to supervise the writing of NSC 68. This document might have been written by General Buck Turgidson out of Dr. Strangelove. It today seems to belong in a distant museum designed for eccentrics and the psychically disturbed. It declared that the Soviets were trying to impose their authority on the rest of mankind. And because of that, “The issues that face us are momentous, involving the fulfillment or destruction not only of this Republic but of civilization itself.” (Carden, p. 51) It also declared that the Soviets could very well launch atomic strikes on England, vital areas of Europe and also at vital centers of the USA and Canada. This is one year after the Russians had tested their first nuclear device. When, in fact, the man he was writing this for, Truman, was—and still is—the only political leader to ever use atomic weapons.
Acheson acted along these principles. It is true that Acheson and Truman did not accept the British invitation to overthrow Mossadegh in Iran. But as the ambassador to that country, Henry Grady later said, Acheson took so long to decline that this encouraged London that all they had to do was wait for the 1952 election to take place. Grady made it clear to his superior that he wanted no part of any overthrow. What did Acheson do? He forced Grady out, and in his place appointed Loy Henderson who, as I mentioned above, was one of the militant anti-communists who Roosevelt had sidelined. Grady and Acheson were at such loggerheads over this issue, that the animus more or less forced Grady into retirement, thus ending his career. Henderson was maintained by Eisenhower, and he paved the way for the eventual overthrow of Mohammed Mossadegh. (The Mossadegh Project, “Interrogation at Dawn”, 11/1/23)
V
Another aspect of Roosevelt’s post-war vision was that he was not going to back a return to European colonialism. He specifically said at the Tehran Conference in 1943 that France should not be allowed to go back into Indochina after the war. He said they had been there for nearly a century and the people were worse off now than they were previously. Chip Bohlen, who was there as a translator, said that FDR’s views on the matter revealed a deep dislike of colonialism, which the president frequently expressed. (Carden, p. 44)
Again, this policy was changed under Acheson and Truman. As Carden notes, even in a sympathetic biography of Acheson, the writer notes that Acheson was “in the vanguard in leading the United States into Indochina’s Big Muddy.” (Ibid) As the authors of the Pentagon Papers noted, American policy for the years of 1950-54 saw the French/ Indochina war as part of a monolithic communist plot; and the Viet Minh were seen as the tool of a worldwide expansionist movement. Therefore, French resistance to Ho Chi Minh was seen as resistance to this plot. And this is the way that Acheson saw this conflict. (Pentagon Papers, Volume 2, p. A2)
When John Kennedy flew into Saigon in 1951, one could say that he was of a similar mindset. But when he dined at night and saw the French shelling Viet Minh positions across the Saigon River, he thought there was more to it. So he visited two men for advice. These were Seymour Topping, a journalist, and Edmund Gullion, a diplomat stationed there because he spoke fluent French. Both men told Kennedy that contrary to what American leaders might think, this war between Vietnam and France was not about communism vs. democracy. It was really a war of national independence. (On the Front Lines of the Cold War, by Seymour Topping, p. 152)
When he knocked on Topping’s door, Kennedy said he would only stay a few minutes. He ended up staying for more than two hours. He asked many probing questions, like what the average Vietnamese thought of Americans. Topping said that America was well liked at the beginning of its involvement. That was not the case today. It had become clear America was not going to help gain independence, but was on the French side of maintaining colonial aspirations. He then told JFK that France was not going to win the war. Ho Chi Minh controlled entry into the mountain passes into China, and there was an endless pool of young men who would enlist in the Viet Minh. Topping added that he thought keeping Emperor Bao Dai in power and funneling money and weapons to him was not going to be a viable solution. Because he was too much associated with Paris. After this, Kennedy told Topping, “I’m going to talk about this when I get home. But it will give me trouble with some of my constituents.” (Topping, pp. 154-55)
Kennedy then met with Bao Dai and came away singularly unimpressed. He then met with the French commander. He asked him so many difficult questions that the Frenchman wrote a letter of complaint to American Ambassador Donald Heath.
In an appearance on the news program Meet the Press in December of 1951, Kennedy said that as far as Iran went, America had allied itself with the British for too long. He thought America should side with the nationalistic forces there rather than backing British efforts to preserve London’s control over Iranian oil. As we shall see, these two positions would remain constant while JFK was president. So I would take issue with Carden that Kennedy’s evolution toward Roosevelt came with the famous Algeria speech in 1957. In my view, its origins came earlier. (Carden, p. 56)
We will explore these issues more in Part 2
