To someone who has been out of government service, as I have, for more than twenty years, the present spate of revisionist history on the origins of the cold war makes curious reading. One's first reaction is pleasure: it seems that those of us who originally opposed the cold-war mentality have now been rehabilitated; a stand that once was branded as mistaken, quixotic, or possibly even “subversive,” in the light of today's ideological temper (at least among intellectuals), looks very good indeed. The second reaction is more perplexed: the current accounts, many of them by younger historians who did not experience the events in question at first hand, strike us as just barely out of focus. The lapse of two decades, joined to the new perspective our country's colossal mistakes in Vietnam have suggested, has etched the opening stages of the cold war in a sharper and simpler outline than they had at the time. In ceasing to be current events and becoming “history,” they have acquired an unsuspected firmness of contour; today's young historians know crucial details that at the time were the closely-guarded secrets of the top policy-makers. Yet there has been a corresponding loss along the way: something of the feel and taste of the late 1940's has slipped into oblivion.

Thus much of the present polemic goes far beyond the arguments characteristic of the era itself: the reasoning of the handful of civil servants in positions of middle-range responsibility who were trying to persuade their colleagues to damp down the mounting hostility to the Soviet Union was more ambiguous and nuanced than the judgments we are offered today. It was also less moralistic: what offended a number of us at the time was the self-righteous tone both of our country's public rhetoric and of the private talk of the conventional Foreign Service types. Now, twenty years later, we are faced with moralism from the other direction: it is the United States rather than Russia that currently stands accused. Still more, from the present historical vantage-point the decisive American acts of hostility seem to have come very early in the game—in the months immediately following the death of President Roosevelt in April 1945. The events of the succeeding period receive lesser attention. Yet to contemporaries it did not appear that way: when I myself got into the act, in the winter of 1946, I did not have the impression that I was arriving on the spot too late; although I found the ideological atmosphere in Washington quite different from what it had been when I had reported briefly back from Europe a year earlier, I did not think that the future had been foreclosed. The range of choice might be narrowing, but alternative paths still lay open. The year and a quarter from March 1946 to July 1947 is the period of the incipient cold war that I know the best—indeed, the only one on which I can testify with any confidence. It is also the one during which our country and the Soviet Union together reached the point of no return.¹

My own involvement in these events was somewhat accidental. As a former intelligence officer in the oss, I had found my part of that organization—the scholarly, non-secret part—reassigned to the Department of State while I was still in Germany and in uniform. Coming home, unlike most of my friends, who quickly returned to academic life, I decided to tarry on in Washington. A few months later I found myself in charge of a large, sprawling, demoralized staff of experts known as the Division of Research for Europe. I had only just turned thirty: to all outward appearances, I had fallen into a prestigious job, with responsibilities unusual for one so young. The reality was rather different: my new division floated in limbo, distrusted by the State Department professionals and seldom listened to. After two years of bureaucratic frustration, I departed in early 1948, impelled by a mixture of ideological disappointment and the lure of university teaching.

But at least I had had a ringside seat on the cold war's shift from tentative to definitive shape and, in the slow-paced life of pre-air-conditioned Washington, a chance to reflect on what was going on. These reflections were not all of a piece: they oscillated between weary resignation and occasional explosions of wrath at the obtuseness of the conventional judgments—explosions that in moments of particular annoyance at official complacency might sound pro-Communist. My area of expertise, of course, was Europe. In the second year of the cold war, European concerns still dominated the international scene. China had not yet been “lost,” and besides, my counterparts in the research division for the Far East were accepted by the Foreign Service people far more as equals than was true on the European side. The purge of “old China hands” which was to sweep up diplomats and professors indiscriminately was as yet only a distant menace.

My main point of opposition to the wisdom of the State Department professionals had to do with their apocalyptic outlook on Europe. In the West, where they emphasized the threat of Communist subversion and revolution, I drew attention to the conservative recovery that was already taking place and to the possibility that the United States might eventually find itself aligned with authoritarian regimes of the Right. Where they saw crisis and collapse, I detected elements of continuity with the past and viewed the danger to society less in terms of what militant Communists might do than as the result of what routine-minded governments might fail to do in alleviating the misery of populations just emerging from the trials of war. In the East, I similarly found reasons for taking Soviet domination more calmly than was considered good form at the time. In short, I discovered the outlines of a new and unfamiliar kind of stabilization on both sides of what Winston Churchill had just baptized the “iron curtain.”

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Churchill's address at Fulton, Missouri, delivered in Truman's presence in March 1946, marked the opening of the cold-war phase in question. Matters that the statesmen of the West had previously spoken of in diplomatic euphemisms—however blistering their language in private—had now been laid bluntly on the line. The iron-curtain speech was followed almost immediately by a series of Soviet moves which suggested that Stalin in his own fashion agreed with Churchill's gloomy estimate—more particularly a strengthening of ideological curbs at home associated with the rise of Andrei Zhdanov and a shift of economic policy in Germany presaging the partition of the country. Such were the actions and the responses that sent the Soviet-American antagonism into high gear. A year later a similar cluster of events gave the cold war in Europe its permanent configuration: in March, the enunciation of the Truman Doctrine and the launching of a “Security Loyalty Program” in the United States; in May, the departure of the Communist ministers from the governments of France and Italy, and the Soviet-inspired elimination of the democratic leader Ferenc Nagy as prime minister of Hungary; finally, on the second of July, the Russian refusal to cooperate in the Marshall Plan and the veto on Polish and Czech participation that was its inevitable sequel.

The assumptions from which I—and a small group of friends and associates—judged this series of events differed both from the conventional cold-war stance that was then emerging and from the revisionist view that has recently become so widespread. Perhaps our standpoint was eccentric; certainly it seems forgotten today. Recalling it may help to restore to the year 1946-1947 the quality of bewilderment and moral untidiness it had at the time.

Our first assumption was that the cold war, however distasteful we might find it, was something more than the product of inflamed American imaginations; it was based on the irrefutable realities of an unprecedented situation—the Soviet domination of the whole of East Central Europe. I remember looking at a map in the autumn of 1944—when the Red Army, having chased the Germans from the Balkans, stood at the gates of Warsaw and Budapest—and concluding that a severe political reaction would set in at home when my countrymen awoke to what had happened. It never occurred to me that the American government could do anything to induce the Russians to “behave”; hence the subsequent controversy about Yalta struck me as largely beside the point. The cold war, or something resembling it, I took as a fact of life, the dominant fact in the lives of the unusual breed of civil servants among whom I worked: it could be reduced or attenuated—that was the purpose of our labors—but it could not be completely avoided, as some of the revisionist historians seem to imagine.

At just about the time in late 1944 when I was taking my look at the map, Churchill went to see Stalin in Moscow. The result was the celebrated spheres-of-influence agreement which assigned to the Russians a predominant role in the Balkans, while leaving Greece under Western supervision. The United States never accepted this arrangement, and its exact status remained unclear. Nor did those at my level in the State Department know of its existence. I first learned about it a half decade later when Churchill published the concluding volume of his wartime memoirs. I also learned later still that a minority of highly-placed figures in the American government, including Henry L. Stimson, Henry A. Wallace, and George F. Kennan, at various times and with varying emphases, had pushed the spheres-of-influence line.² In the second year of the cold war, my friends and I were quite in the dark on these matters: we reached the notion of spheres of influence on our own. This became our second assumption—that the readiest way to mitigate the ravages of the incipient cold war was for our country to keep to its side of the iron curtain in the hope that the Soviet Union would oblige us by doing the same.

Thus in our minds the real drama—and tragedy—of the cold war was the progressive erosion or degradation of the spheres-of-influence idea. It was not within our style of thought to assign exclusive or even predominant blame for this state of affairs to one side or the other. We saw it rather as the result of a cumulative, mutually reinforcing series of mistakes and misunderstandings—an elaborate counterpoint in which our government and that of the Soviet Union seemed almost to be working hand-in-hand to simplify the ideological map at the expense of minor political forces, intermediate groups, and nuances of opinion. Our contention had been that if each side would stay out of the other's sphere, then each could tolerate substantial dissent within that sphere. Our prize exhibits were, in the East, the quasi-democratic functioning of the governments of Hungary and Czechoslovakia and, in the West, the presence of Communists in the French and Italian ministries. But as the year 1946-1947 wore on, it became increasingly apparent that all such “bridges” or way-stations were doomed. Their mere existence offered an excuse for one side to accuse its adversary of maintaining a fifth column in its midst. Virtually every move of either one—however neutral its intent—bred suspicion in the other. As Russians and Americans alike tried to shore up the governments of the countries dependent on them, each act of ideological buttressing was bound to produce a corresponding reaction in the opposing camp.

It may sound paradoxical to have believed that a de facto partitioning of Europe would have facilitated rather than hindered the building of bridges from one side to the other. But that was what eventually proved true. In the crucial year 1946-1947 the Russians were treating this partition as the legitimate consequence of their military victories and the indispensable guarantee of their national security: the Americans were speaking of it as abnormal and immoral. Such at least was their public rhetoric; in actuality our government was to accept piece by piece over the years a situation it had originally rejected in toto. The proof came a decade later, in the autumn of 1956, when the United States failed to go to the aid of the anti-Communist insurrection in Hungary. And the result was what my friends and I had predicted: once the Russians knew that the Americans would not step over the line into what they had always considered their own sphere of influence, a thaw in the cold war, the beginnings of liberalization in Eastern Europe, and the inauguration of East-West cultural contacts finally became possible.

But that is to get ahead of our story. In the context of the cold war's second year, what was of prime importance was that the spheres-of-influence concept survived in the State Department's bureaucratic underground. Moreover, those of us who thought in such terms acted on the conviction, which we seldom, if ever, explicitly expressed, that our chiefs did not mean quite what they said. This was our third assumption—that neither our own country nor the Soviet Union had any serious intention of resorting to force in its dealings with the other; neither would attempt a real power play at the other's expense. Perhaps there was wishful thinking' in our attitude; certainly we needed to grasp at some shred of comfort to get us through the rigors of an inordinately depressing year. Yet we were less far afield than the revisionist historians who have defined “the object of American policy” in the immediate postwar era as “not to defend Western or even Central Europe but to force the Soviet Union out of Eastern Europe.”³ In my own experience in Washington I never found any solid evidence of such a plan. There were warlike noises aplenty—everyone from President Truman down talked tough when the occasion (ordinarily incarnate as Congress) seemed to demand it. But these pronouncements were exceedingly vague; they were far less sinister than they have appeared in retrospect. Before the Korean War the American capability in conventional arms was patently inadequate for the task of “liberating” Eastern Europe, and while atomic blackmail may always have been lurking in the wings, Stalin and Molotov, who prided themselves on their nerves of steel, were not allowing themselves to be frightened.

If a military showdown was tacitly ruled out, what remained? Was it simply a choice between preserving the close Soviet-American relationship of the period 1942-1944, and institutionalized hostility in the form of the cold war, as revisionist historiography seems to argue? At the time, my friends and I thought otherwise—and this was our fourth and final assumption. We believed that one could find an intermediate course between armed antagonism and a cordial modus vivendi. Such a course, we recognized, was inordinately difficult to chart, and I am far from sure today what its outlines might have been. The best I can think of is some formula like wary, cautious, mutually suspicious relations handled with the “correctness” and consummate diplomatic tact that Europe's precarious situation required.

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With the options thus narrowed, what was there that a middle-level official with my convictions could do? Naturally it was very little: in my division at least, we felt most of the time as though we were firing our memoranda off into a void. The atmosphere was that of Kafka's Castle, in which one never knew who would answer the telephone or even whether it would be answered at all. Two tasks, however, seemed possible: one was to try to explain that Soviet actions which our superiors thought outrageous would look rather less so if viewed in a spheres-of-influence context; the second was the notion of using America's economic power to build bridges between East and West.

While a whole succession of Soviet moves in the autumn and winter of 1946-1947 aroused official ire in Washington, the key event occurred in Hungary the following May. Hungary, we subsequently learned, had been treated in the original spheres-of-influence agreement in a peculiar fashion: as opposed to Bulgaria and Rumania, in which Soviet influence was to predominate, it had been assigned fifty-fifty to the Russians and to those oddly referred to as “the others.” Parenthetically, it is also worth noting that Czechoslovakia and Poland were not covered by this agreement at all—hence the ramifying post-Yalta difficulties, particularly with regard to the latter. Such fine distinctions were lost on my friends and me: not knowing that any accord existed (even if unrecognized by our country), we simply assumed that the Soviet sphere should be considered coterminous with the area in which the presence or vicinity of the Red Army was the primary fact of life. Thus it seemed natural to us to lump with the two Balkan countries where Soviet influence was already entrenched, the three nations to the west of them, two of which had held relatively free elections and were struggling to maintain the basic minimum of democratic procedures.

The overthrow of democracy in the second of these, Czechoslovakia, in early 1948 has so caught the attention of historians as to dim the importance of the similar series of events that occurred in Hungary a year earlier. Yet viewed in retrospect, the destruction of Ferenc Nagy's Smallholders' party may be the more important of the two, as offering the first sign of what the Russians would and would not tolerate in the part of Europe they regarded as theirs. I am not sure today that I was right in saying as flatly as I did—I quote from a memorandum I wrote at the time—that “it was not the democratic character of the Hungarian government that brought down upon it the wrath of the Soviet Union. It was its foreign policy of cultivating the favor of the Western democracies, particularly the United States.” The subsequent fate of Czechoslovakia was to suggest that with the cold war in high gear, internal policies alone might be sufficient to arouse Russian suspicion. Yet I think I was correct in arguing that the action in Hungary was a “routine and anticipated move on the part of the USSR to plug an obvious gap in its security system.” Although “whittling down the Smallholder majority . . . had been going on for months, . . . the enunciation of the Truman doctrine accelerated the process,” as did “the removal of the Communist ministers from the governments of France and Italy. . . . Once the United States had served notice that it was beginning to organize a counter-bloc,” the Soviet Union was bound to tighten its grip on its own client states. And I concluded: “The coup in Hungary has really altered nothing: it has only destroyed a few illusions.”

Some of the illusions, of course, were my own. On rereading after more than twenty years my note on Hungary, I find in it the tone of a rearguard action and of slightly desperate special pleading. The time was fast running out in which an effort to explain Soviet actions in East Central Europe could find a hearing in Washington. My second self-imposed task was more promising. Fortunately enough, my division was awarded the job of preparing preliminary studies for what later became the Marshall Plan. Besides reviving the flagging spirits of my associates, this technically challenging and ideologically congenial assignment gave me a chance to put on paper my thoughts as to the form an economic recovery program for Europe should take.

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A month before Secretary Marshall gave his celebrated commencement address at Harvard, I had noted down the following:

1. The aid program should be administered by an international body. . . .
2. Aid should be granted solely on objective economic rather than political grounds.

1. No discrimination against Soviet satellites;
2. No effort to give overt or tacit support to any particular political groups or parties;
3. Reliance solely on the indirect political effect of improved standard of living, etc.

In a very general sense, the offer which Marshall made to the Europeans conformed to these criteria. I believed at the time and still believe that the plan which went by his name was the most statesmanlike action the United States took in the opening years of the cold war—indeed the only one that held out a real chance of bridging the widening chasm in Europe. And its rejection by the Soviet Union came as the last and bitterest of the succession of disappointments that my friends and I had experienced over the previous year. There is no need to retrace here the process of gradual reinterpretation by which the Marshall Plan eventually came to be viewed by both sides in a cold-war context. What is more relevant is to recall that such had been from the start the view of a large and influential body of State Department professionals; in their eyes the extension of the offer of economic aid to Eastern Europe was always rather perfunctory. Hence the sharp, dogmatic tone of my own memorandum on the subject. I felt that I was in the minority and that I had to argue hard. I also sensed that even small changes in the manner in which the offer was made might be crucial to its acceptance or rejection—that the Russians might oblige the hardliners in my own country by confirming their predictions. My memorandum ended on a note of warning: “Any program stated in terms of ‘either the Soviet Union cooperates or . . . ’ would almost certainly eventuate in the latter alternative being adopted; those already skeptical of the merits of a Europe-wide, undiscriminatory program would be proved right, and an outright anti-Soviet program would be the result.”

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Thus the curtain came down on a cruel year, during the course of which the mutually reinforcing squeeze from East and West finally left my friends and me without a standing-ground. I spent my last six months in Washington in a state of mild depression, punctuated by gloomy (and exaggerated) predictions of the fate that was about to overtake the democratic Left. Nor was my conscience as clear as in retrospect might be supposed of one who had fought and lost the good fight for Soviet-American reconciliation. In the summer of 1947 I had the trial and execution of Nikola Petkov to reckon with and that I found extremely hard to bear.

If Ferenc Nagy is almost forgotten today—as opposed to Imre Nagy, of 1956 fame—his agrarian counterpart in Bulgaria, Nikola Petkov, is probably even less remembered. Yet at the time these two, along with Stanislaw Mikolajczyk, the Polish peasant spokesman, and like Nagy a fugitive abroad, were celebrated as offering a democratic middle course between Communist domination and the rightist-authoritarian, anti-Soviet type of government that had ruled most of East Central Europe before the Second World War. It was hard not to feel sympathy for agrarian leaders who, after the briefest of respites, were finding themselves once more in the state of political persecution that had been their usual lot before the “liberation” of their countries. And among them the case of Petkov was the most compelling. As opposed to Mikolajczyk and Nagy, the Bulgarian chose the more perilous course of staying on in his own country and fighting what he must have known was a hopeless battle. Tried on trumped-up charges of collusion with the United States, he was condemned to death in August 1947 and hanged the following month.

My associates followed with anguished interest Petkov's stubborn struggle for survival. I recall a friend's showing me a report of a scene in the Bulgarian parliament and of the taunt “You are trembling, Nikola Petkov” hurled at him by a political enemy. The words struck me like a body-blow—as though I were in some sense guilty of Petkov's approaching death. And, as emotional truth, my reaction was not exaggerated. In our spheres-of-influence reasoning, in our anxiety to preserve good relations with the Soviet Union, my friends and I had hardened our hearts and in effect condemned Petkov and his like, just as we had consigned the populations of East Central Europe to Communist tyranny. We had done this with regret; we had sought to make a stand at every halting-place along the way; but in the end we had bowed our shoulders and given up as lost the agrarian leaders and the electoral majorities that either had voted for them or would have voted for them if they could.

This emotional actuality is above all what gets lost in revisionist historiography on the origins of the cold war—the doubts by which we of the bureaucratic opposition were shaken and which gave our policy recommendations so fumbling and tentative a character. The State Department professionals, the fledgling cold warriors, were troubled by no such scruples; they saw the moral issues in simple terms; their consciences were clear. Not ours—our efforts to adopt the coolly detached stance of junior statesmen were constantly undercut by a half-conscious recognition that we might be mistaken and that the policy we advocated carried with it an enormous price in human misery.

It was to be more than a decade before I recovered my equilibrium, before I was able to see clearly in what sense I had been right and in what sense the majority of American intellectuals had been wrong. Until the late 1950's the view prevailed that sympathy for the people of East Central Europe dictated a moral anti-Communism and that this sense of outrage in turn required an endorsement of the cold war. I simplify, of course—but such I think was the tacit assumption of most of the intellectual community: hence their reluctance to engage in any far-reaching critique of the official wisdom. Nor did the events of 1956 change many people's minds: the lesson of their country's total inability to react to the Soviet occupation of Budapest was lost on most of them. Not until the 1960's, and more particularly with the replay of Budapest that occurred in Prague twelve years later, did it finally sink in that in this case armed hostility was an inappropriate and counterproductive form in which to manifest the moral indignation with which it had so long been justified.

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Throughout the first eight months of 1968 I was haunted by a sense that I was back where I had come in, at first joyous as the Czech idyll took a course which was too good to be fully believed, then profoundly depressed. The familiar litany—1938, 1948, 1968—had a special personal immediacy for one who had been in State Department service two decades earlier. And this was as true of the spring of expectation as it was of the autumn of bitterness. Just as the 1948 coup in Prague had snuffed out the last flickers of the political “openness” in which my friends and I had vested our hopes, so in 1968 Alexander Dubcek suddenly materialized as the reincarnation of those hopes, as the living embodiment of the ideological synthesis—left Socialist in the West, liberal Communist in the East—that our moments of optimism had sketched out. The promised land we had glimpsed had never been very substantial. Yet this non-dogmatic, neutralist, Popular-Front type of government had been precisely what a large and distinguished part of the Resistance to Hitler had longed for. Events had seemed to doom it utterly. And then quite unexpectedly, in the early months of 1968, Dubcek and his colleagues were on their way to making it a reality.

This time the subsequent disappointment banished any thought of a cold-war solution. Those in the West who twenty years earlier had been profoundly divided on Czechoslovakia now saw eye to eye. Nearly everyone dismissed a military response as inappropriate: even the calls for a reinvigoration of NATO sounded perfunctory. It was as though it had taken two decades to realize that the cold war and the fate of the populations under Soviet control were separable issues and that an emphasis on the one was of little help to the other. The armed stand-off between the two superpowers could contribute nothing to improving the lot of the peoples of East Central Europe—rather the contrary; a question that was at bottom one of civil liberties, or of the quality of life, could not be dealt with by military means. In this respect, the Second World War had been the great exception to the more usual human experience: in 1944 and 1945 it had in fact proved possible—at least in the West—to liberate whole populations from tyranny at a price that the liberated were willing to pay. With the cold war and the thermonuclear nightmare which accompanied it, such surgery became too dangerous to be attempted. But the memory and example of the “crusade” that had succeeded confused men's minds—and especially those of intellectuals—for a half-generation.

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It was in this sense that my friends and I had been right two decades earlier. In the late 1940's I had been as incapable as the cold warriors of separating out the military from the civil-liberties aspect of events—hence my qualms of conscience. Today, in the light of what happened in Czechoslovakia in 1968, I am happier than I was at the time about the stand I took in the year and a half preceding the first seizure of power in Prague. Yet I am by no means satisfied with how revisionist historiography treats the events of twenty years ago. I refuse to accept the notion that my countrymen's anti-Communism was evil or misguided all along the line. In 1946 and 1947, as before and after, hostility to Communism made sense in certain contexts and was blind and self-defeating in others. More particularly it was not until a few Communist regimes or parties began to give a minimum respect to the human decencies that liberal-minded Americans could entertain much sympathy for them. And it is perhaps well that those too young to remember the immediate postwar era should hear such a simple truth from someone who twenty years ago labored under the suspicion of being “soft on Communism.”

¹ The emphasis it puts on this period is one of the many merits of Walter LaFeber's judicious study, America, Russia, and the Cold War, 1945-1966, Wiley, 1967.

² Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., “Origins of the Cold War.” Foreign Affairs, XLVI (October 1967), pp. 28-29.

³ Christopher Lasch, “The Cold War, Revisited and Re-Visioned,” the New York Times Magazine, January 14, 1968, p. 54.