Truman and Eisenhower

In the setup for your book you do a very interesting comparative study of American policy in the Cold War, the development of the containment policy. And you, again and again, compare it with what became the Bush policy after 9/11, a very interesting comparison that points out parallels and similarities. I want to play with that a little before we actually get into your ideas about ethical realism. What was the distinguishing feature of the response to the emerging Soviet threat at the end of World War II?

The key point -- there are a couple, but one is utopians on both the left and the right who have now formed this new, somewhat unholy alliance that we've been talking about ...

You mean for today?

For today. We were marginalized politically in the period under Truman and Eisenhower. The political aspects of what Truman and Eisenhower did are looked at less than some of the other things. We saw that as vital.

Henry Wallace and the left wing of the Democratic Party said Stalin could be appeased -- that's a utopian view, in our view. Truman had to see that off. On the other hand, Truman and Eisenhower had to see off the right wing which said, "We can do rollback, we can be unilateralist," [and also] said, "We can just bomb Manchuria, and the Korean War problem will go away. We're the only power in the world, we can take on world Communism all over the world together and at once." Senator Taft had this view, General MacArthur had this view.

The fact that Eisenhower saw off Taft while Truman saw off MacArthur meant you had a non-utopian center holding in both parties that understood there are limits to American power. That however great American power was then, there were real limits to it; that we needed allies not because we loved or hated them, [but] because it's the way you do business in the world; that America, if it was going to survive as the greatest power in the world, had to acknowledge it couldn't do everything and had to draw clear lines everywhere. So, if Wallace says "no competition with the Soviets," and if MacArthur says "military confrontation," this consensus builds around the notion of political competition with the Soviets, that economics and soft power mattered every bit as much as military power, that if we drew clear lines around the world, in the end our system with all of its attributes would outlast the Soviet system.

It's the remarkable political success of this point of view -- and remember, up through Reagan (we try to reclaim Reagan -- George Kennan would have heartily agreed with what Reagan did in his second term) this success led to a political agreement that was based on non-utopian goals. The danger today, as we write, is that there's almost an Alice-in-Wonderland aspect to this. These utopians, who'd been wrong for sixty years (and as we write in the book, would you trust anyone with your investments if they're wrong for sixty years?) are now dominating, they are now coming together, and the book is a manifesto for the rest of us who don't hold that view, who agree more with Truman and Eisenhower, to get together, band together and see that this new utopian consensus doesn't dominate American politics.

You seem to be suggesting that what Truman and Eisenhower succeeded in doing reflected a subtle understanding of both domestic and international politics. Is that a fair rendering of what you're saying? It seems to be very important give the current situation where we have arrived at the consequences of invading Iraq.

Yes. Critical to their success was the fact that Truman saw off General MacArthur and his plans for a preventive war against the Soviet Union and China. Eisenhower then saw off the preventive war school and the rollback school at the beginning of his administration. In both cases, this took great political skill but also great moral courage, and this is something which the Bush administration, but also we fear to a great extent, the Democratic leadership today, has failed to show. They've failed to make hard choices about American policy today. They've failed to see off the extremists in their own ranks on a number of key issues. They've also failed, by the way, though here the blame is much more on Bush since he was, of course, the president -- they failed to do what Truman did, which is radically reshape the American government and security institutions to face a new kind of threat, which Truman did with the National Security Act in 1947. Nothing like that has happened. What we get instead is this bureaucratic nightmare of the Homeland Security Agency, together with other institutions which remain wholly unreformed basically from the days of the Cold War.

Some of our audience might be younger and not know what you're talking about when you talk about rollback. It struck me how notions of preemption, the dominant themes in the Bush administration, recall the illusions and delusions of that earlier right-wing agenda. Could you talk a little about that?

Sure. One of the points that we were talking about earlier is everyone wants to be Truman right now, that President Bush says he's Truman, Peter Beinart and the liberal hawks say they're Truman. The reason they want to be Truman is that he was politically successful. Nobody wants to be General MacArthur because it didn't work. [As] we write in our second chapter about preventive war, the liberal hawks sound more like General MacArthur, whom they think they loathe, than Harry Truman or Dwight Eisenhower. Iraq was a preventive war; [we were] not about to be attacked.

There's a key difference [between] preemptive and preventive. I know they both start with a "p," I know they sound the same, [but] they're entirely different. Nobody's questioning the notion, like Israel in '67, if you're about to be attacked you can strike the Egyptian air force the day before they attack you. [That is preemptive.] Surely that was not the case in Iraq. We were not about to be attacked the next day.

This [preventive war] is precisely what General MacArthur said we should do with both the Soviet Union and with China. They're involved in a local offensive? Well, let's strike Beijing without warning, let's just take it out. This is precisely what James Burnham and some of the apologists for MacArthur in the fifties were talking about, and this is exactly the view of the liberal hawks and President Bush. So, even though they say that they're with Truman, if you follow the philosophy behind what they're saying, they're far more with the losers of history than with the winners. That's a vital difference, that we have to be careful historically not to have co-opted realities.

One of the things in the book that we've had the most arguments about is not the policy of what we're saying; it struck us that people have been arguing about the history, because everyone wants to be Truman. There isn't a meeting that goes by that we don't talk about Truman, which has surprised me greatly, but in a way it's about the symbol of victory. We have to be very careful to remind people that these guys [MacArthur and Burnham] are on the ash heap of history, and there's a reason for it, not just now but for the past sixty years.

We very much wanted to revive the memory of Eisenhower for the Republican Party, because everyone in the Democratic Party now wants to be Truman, but one's heard so little of Eisenhower in the Republican Party. Eisenhower would have detested most of what the Bush administration has done. On every single thing, practically, he would have rejected this as insane.

When you look at this period you cite history to compare what happened then to what happened now, and here are some items you mention: "The conflict must be kept within bounds." This was an insight that drove our containment policy, so we had the doctrine of limited war. "The ability to set priorities: you can't have everything, you have to make choices," and so on. Now what I want to ask you is, was this a consequence primarily of the leadership then as compared to the leadership now, or was it a consequence of the threat of nuclear war that hung over the world after the explosion at Hiroshima?

I think it was both. The fact that America did not feel all-powerful then was very important. America was, of course, extremely powerful, but faced with a Red Army which had, after all, defeated the Nazis, faced with the Soviet Union with a nuclear bomb, it increased fear but it also tempered arrogance. So, that was one thing.

I would also say -- and this is why we emphasize Truman and Eisenhower, and Truman's team, as well, very much -- that the quality of leadership was much higher. There was a much greater degree of responsibility of knowledge of the outside world, and a much greater willingness precisely to take morally tough decisions and to make hard choices. That is one of the key failings of both party leaderships, and all the intellectuals and think tanks who depend on them who want jobs in 2009. They will not sit down and make a hard, very unpopular decision to give up certain American aims for the sake of other aims, to compromise with Russia on certain things, to get Russia on our side in others, because of course, any compromise you make you will be attacked within America, you will be attacked by people in Congress, by various lobbies. But frankly, if you're not prepared to make these choices you shouldn't be in a leadership position.

That's right. Eisenhower (I'm glad Anatol mentioned that) is the forgotten guy in all this. Without Eisenhower agreeing to Truman's doctrine -- of course, they hated each other. There wasn't a personal affinity. Truman felt Eisenhower had betrayed General Marshall, his idol, over the attacks from McCarthy and the fact that he never asked his opinion as an ex-president. As McCullough said, he wouldn't talk about Eisenhower without resorting to profanity after he was an ex-president. But they agreed on the basic philosophical principles of what to do.

From Eisenhower's point of view, he had been through his management of the war. The reason Eisenhower was given command in Europe ultimately was [that] Franklin Roosevelt rightly said, "You are the best alliance general. Patton is far more brilliant tactically but we don't need that. We need someone to manage an alliance." That was what Ike had always done, and Ike knew that sometimes you had to give way to the British, as over Arnhem, for instance -- a terrible idea, but Ike didn't care because ultimately keeping the British and Field Marshal Montgomery along with them was more important than any specific area. He'd been making tradeoffs his entire adult life in command, and so when he comes to power that's there.

The other point is he'd been signing death notices his adult life. There's nothing that keeps you honest like seeing that these are real people. The one thing Truman and Eisenhower had in common that we mentioned was that they didn't like America in an abstract way, they liked Americans and they knew that these were real people with families and dreams and hopes, and that to spend them wantonly was the ultimate moral failure. That in and of itself leads you to a policy of limits, of humility, of some of the things we talk about in the book.

You have an image which I think for our audience is a very good one, comparing the Truman/Eisenhower leadership with that of the present period. You say those presidents, Truman and Eisenhower, adopted a James Stewart strategy, they "faced down the enemies in front of them preferably without even having to draw a gun." On the other hand, the Bush administration has been the Charlie Chaplin of the international scene. "They took a wild swing, hit the wrong man, and fell over their own feet."

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