The Cold War: A Tale of Two Joes

I’ve been reading Norwegian historian Odd Arne Westad’s vastly ambitious and very largely successful The Cold War A World History.¹ One of the great advantages of reading a European’s take is that he has a much more nuanced understanding of what was happening in Europe during the Cold War than an American historian would. He’s writing history that he himself has lived through and can rely on “original sources” of a variety and scope that no mere foreigner ever could.

The downside, of course, comes when Westad is writing about the United States, where the shoe is on the other foot. Here is what Westad says about Joe McCarthy:

“Joseph McCarthy, the demagogic and hyperbolic Wisconsin senator who through his speeches on the Senate floor came to symbolize anti-Communist paranoia, did more damage to US interests than any of Stalin’s covert operations. In February 1950 McCarthy declared that he had evidence of 205—later correct to 57—Communists working in the State Department, and denounced the president as a traitor who “sold out the Christian world to the atheistic world.” The series of hearings and investigations, which accusations such as McCarthy’s gave rise to, destroyed people’s lives and careers. Even for those who were cleared, such as the famous central Asia scholar Owen Lattimore, some of the accusations stuck and made it difficult to find employment, as Lattimore said in his book title from 1950, Ordeal by Slander. For many of the lesser known who were targeted—workers, actors, teachers, lawyers—it was a Kafkaesque world, where their words were twisted and used against them during public hearings by people who had no knowledge of the victims or their activities. Behind all of it was the political purpose of harming the Administration, though even some Democrats were caught up in the frenzy and the president himself straddled the issue instead of publicly confronting McCarthy. McCarthyism, as it was soon called, reduced the US standing in the world and greatly helped Soviet propaganda, especially in western Europe.”

Well, very largely true, but Westad fails to provide sufficient context. He gives the reader no information whatsoever on Soviet espionage in the U.S., never even mentioning either Alger Hiss or the Rosenbergs. Historian John Earl Haynes, in his essay “An Essay on Historical Writing on Domestic Communism and Anti-Communism”, gives a little more detail: “Hundreds of Americans, most Communists, assisted Soviet espionage and Soviet intelligence sources included dozens of mid-level government officials but also impressively high level ones as well: not only Alger Hiss but also Lawrence Duggan, long-time head of the State Department Division of the American Republics; Lauchlin Currie, a senior White House aide to President Roosevelt; Duncan Lee, a senior officer in the Office of Strategic Services; and, most significantly, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Harry White.”

It is, in fact, “arguable” that the course of the Cold War was significantly shaped for the worse by the theft of America’s atomic secrets by Soviet espionage, although this was largely due to the British spy Klaus Fuchs rather than the spy ring organized by Julius Rosenberg. If the Soviets had not obtained the bomb in 1949, it’s possible that Stalin would not have given the green light to North Korea’s invasion of the South in 1950. A Cold War without the Korean War would have been a different beast. How different I cannot imagine, but the course of American politics would have been far smoother without the rancor induced both by the theft of the secrets and the war.

Fortunately, Westad is more clear-eyed when it comes to the other Joe:

“The alarm that the Cold War created in the United States paled in comparison to the spasms that the Soviet Union and eastern Europe went through. Up to Stalin’s death in 1953, denunciations, purges, and show trials were the order of the day. … The first problem was the hundreds of thousands of soldiers who returned from German prison camps; could they be trusted? More than a third of them were marched straight from German to Soviet prison camps. Then there were those who had lived under German occupation; most were investigated and many, including all Communist Party officials there, were sent to the camps. Even victorious Red Army soldiers returning from the battlefield were seen as suspect. They may have glimpsed ways of life abroad that were inconsistent with Soviet visions of the future.”

Westad describes the enormous transfers of populations that occurred both during and after World War II as the Soviets’ “worst crime”. At the start of the war, more than a million Germans living in the USSR were transported into eastern Russia, along with a million Muslims in the Caucasus and Crimea. About 20 percent of these people would die within three years of their departure from what was once their home. As the war closed, mass deportations from the reconquered territories—the Baltic states, Ukraine, Belorussia, and Poland began. There were also mass transfers of populations from the other end of the Soviet Union. When Japan absorbed Korea into its empire, hundreds of thousands of Koreans fled into Russia. When conditions between the USSR and Japan worsened, Stalin moved these people into central Asia. By the time Stalin died, the Soviet GULag prison system held over two and half million inmates.

The U.S., of course, had its own relocation program—over 110,000 Japanese Americans living on the West Coast were removed to internment camps in remote locations. But these relocations, though brutal (and racist) enough, only lasted for three years and in fact a quarter of those relocated left the camps before they closed to live freely in other parts of the U.S., where they would not be a “danger”.

The “death toll” for the McCarthy era amounted to two persons, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. McCarthy, of course, played no role in their prosecution or their execution, which appears to have been the decision of one man, Judge Irving Kaufman, who went out of his way to preclude the U.S. attorneys who tried the case from giving him recommendations for sentencing. President Eisenhower rejected suggestions from FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover that he commute Ethel Rosenberg’s sentence.²

Afterwords
Very unfortunately for his party, Franklin Roosevelt would not have cared if there were 57 communists in the State Department (205 might have been too much). While many New Deal liberals, like Hubert Humphry, were knowledgeable and bitter anti-communists, thanks to long struggles for control in the labor movement, many, like Roosevelt, were not, and insisted on thinking of communists as “progressive”—progressives who just seemed to have the strange habit of murdering anyone they disagreed with. Roosevelt honestly hated the Nazis, with their cult of war and bloodshed, but the communists were different! They said so themselves! Perhaps most of all, Roosevelt hated the red-baiting of the right wing, who insisted on labeling any liberal proposal as a communist plot, and, as a consequence, he reflexively rejected any accusations of communist “penetration” out of hand. Even if it was true it didn’t matter, so why admit that it was true?

Rather remarkably, I don’t think Roosevelt’s rosy vision of the Soviet Union led him to give Stalin anything Stalin didn’t already have. At the Yalta Conference, the Red Army was already the sole military power in eastern Europe. Roosevelt (and Churchill) ratified an existing reality. At the same time, Roosevelt obtained Stalin’s pledge to join in the war against Japan, causing the notoriously hard-boiled Ernie King to exclaim “We just saved a million American lives!”³ However clear-eyed Roosevelt was about Stalin personally, he should have made others more aware of the true nature of Stalin’s plans for eastern Europe. It’s painful to learn that someone as shrewd as Harry Hopkins believed, as he did believe, that Stalin could be trusted to bring democracy to Poland.