BOOKS
Agonising Reappraisal
By D. W. BROGAN MHINGS move with great speed in these in- teresting times, and probably not many public-spirited observers of the commonwealth of nations recall when and why Mr. John Foster Dulles launched his famous rebuke, warning and slogan at the heads of the French. It has now passed into current use and can seldom have been more in demand in Washington than in the past week or two. For, more serious than any blueberry-pie upset, is the news that the President is rethinking or reappraising the basis of America's Far-Eastern policy, the solemn farce of accepting the government in Formosa as the government of 'the Republic of China.'
Mr. Agar's short but meaty book* would be timely at any moment, but it is especially timely now. For we tend to see American policy in a way like Kean's acting of Shakespeare, by flashes of lightning. There is a solid barrier of immutable principles, of firm 'nevers,' of noisy rhetoric verging at times on hysteria; there is the com- placent reaction here—'What can you do with people like that?' And then 'comes silent flooding in the main,' silent' being taken in the Pickwick- ian American sense, of noise, rhetoric, shouts of treason, etc. etc. The British public is pushed from one view of American policy to another with a speed that it finds baffling and maddening. If it has the wisdom to read Mr. Agar it will be less baffled and, it is to be hoped, less irritated.
This book has many merits, but the first to be stressed is the extraordinary skill and judgement with which Mr. Agar brings back the 'feeling' of those years, so near in time, so hard to recap- ture in spirit, that followed the ending of the Second World War. Much of what he says applies to Britain as well as to the United States, and his readers will have the useful and often com- forting shock of recalling 'it really was as bad as that.' Our mercies in 1957 may be small, but they are real compared with those of 1947. (It is a pity that Mr. Agar, in his moving account of that great stroke of political genius, the Marshall plan, did not give any weight to the dreadful weather of that winter of our discontents. 'General February turned traitor' all right, but on the Russian side that time.) More novel, and so more useful, is his account of the American temper in 1945. As he points out firmly and suggests adroitly, no people was less bellicose than the Americans in that summer of victory. I was in America on VJ-Day and remember the general air of confident bliss, over- shadowed for the thoughtful (who were many) by the news from Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But victory was won, was secure, would keep. A dis- * THE UNQUIET YEARS: U.S.A. 1945-1955. By Herbert Agar. (Hart-Davis, 15s.) tinguished soldier might dismiss the news of the bomb as 'another attempt to abolish the infantry.' But if there was anything to worry about, it was the threat of unemployment, of the difficulty of attaining Mr. Henry Wallace's goal of 'sixty million jobs.' This worry was widespread, especi- ally in England; I can well remember an impres- sive article on this danger in the Manchester Guardian. I wrote it myself.
The American people were willing to 'leave it to George,' that was, in effect, to the army and navy. There was no great debate such as fol- lowed the Armistice of 1918. 'Peace is wonder- ful' was the slogan and belief of more than Father Divine. Whether the Americans could have been blasted out of Their euphoria by FDR if he had lived and had been reasonably fit for the job is a question that need not much detain us. It is my firm conviction that Mr. Truman will rank high among the Presidents and, in some important ways, higher than FDR will. But in 1945 he became Pregident with hardly more of a public position behind him than, say, Mr. Sel- wyn Lloyd had when he became Foreign Secre- tary. He had to learn before he could teach. An important question that is not purely 'iffy' is suggested by ,Mr. Agar's criticism of the anti- imperialist bee in FDR's bonnet. Was Mr. Truman's innocence not an asset? If he didn't listen to all the bright young men who sur- rounded FDR (among them, although at a dis- tance, Alger Hiss), he may not have missed much that, in the circumstances of 1945-50, was useful. And I suspect that Mr. Truman was less im- pressed by mere historical reminiscence than FDR, if only because he knew so much more history. It is not the American obsession with George III that is so much of a nuisance as their obsession with George Washington. His ghost has taken up residence in the most improbable Bridey Murphys. Chiang is about the most plausible of them. There is Dr. Rhee, Dr. Sukarno, there is Dr. Nkrumah; there was Gandhi (but never Nehru). Some of these figures will have a respectable place in history. So have Sam Adams and Thomas Paine. Some may have the kind of fame that attaches to Benedict Arnold or Aaron Burr (both of whom have their de- fenders even today). But any nationalist leader, mouthing the right words and observing the due pilgrimage rites in Washington, Mount Vernon, Monticello, Hyde Park, has been sure of a credulous welcome.
The illusions about China have been the most expensive of these pieces of political romanticism. On that question and on the role of General MacArthur, Mr. Agar is masterly. When he deals with the American Shogun, an agreeable edge of steely acerbity comes into Mr. Agar's style. Yet it must not be thought that Mr. Agar is full of misplaced charity. He is, I think, too hard on Mr. Truman. By the bright glare of hindsight, it may have been a mistake not to get congressional con- firmation for the 'police action' in Korea. But like Lincoln (who had also served in Congress), Mr. Truman has always felt that that body should attend to its knitting and not be involved in executive decisions. If a tradition was allowed to grow up (as it has grown up under the Eisen- hower administration) that the President needs congressional support for the exercise of his un- doubted prerogatives as director of foreign policy and Commander-in-Chief, the time might come when final decisions were all congressional, a horrid thought. And with all due respect to a very useful and badly missed senator, the late Arthur Vandenberg was not quite the decisive figure Mr. Agar makes him.
McCarthy is dead and President Eisenhower is both celebrating the virtues and achievements of General Marshall and thinking more and more aloud on the emotionally most difficult of American foreign problems, the China tangle. On the birth of the American illusions about Chiang, Mr. Agar is acute and depressing. But I do not quite see how any administration could have de- bunked a 'great ally as Chiang's China had long been presented. It was less defensible that, in private, FDR seems to have believed all the Kuomintang nonsense peddled by the Luce press. For, almost the only serious omission in this sagacious book, Mr. Agar does not allow for the great impact of missionary influence on the American mind. This was the sentimental basis of the belief in Chiang and still more in Madame Chiang, the woman's club Joan of Arc. 'Yale in China' may turn out to be the most expensive missionary enterprise in history. We may not know where American foreign policy is going now (does anybody?), but this book is an ad- mirable rotite report on how it got to its present pass or impasse.
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