Cold War Consensus Research Articles

Setting a Course: Congressional Foreign Policy Entrepreneurs In Post-World War II U.S. Foreign Policy

“Congressional foreign policy entrepreneurs” are those legislators who initiate their own foreign policy agendas. These individuals seek to frame policy discussions and mobilize public and interest group interest; to direct congressional agendas toward specific foreign policy issues; to structure and influence the formulation of foreign policies by the executive branch; to revise, refocus, or reformulate foreign policies; to generate alternative and replacement foreign policies; and to fill policy vacuums with their own preferred foreign policies. This paper examines the evolution and impact of such entrepreneurs across the periods of the Cold War Consensus (1946–1967), the Cold War Dissensus (1968–1989), and the Post-Cold War (1990–2000). The paper first provides an overview of the concept of foreign policy entrepreneurs. It then turns to case studies of entrepreneurial initiatives from three prolific entrepreneurs whose careers span the post-World War II era: Senators Jacob Javits, Edward Kennedy, and Christopher Dodd. Together, the overview and cases shed light on the different avenues and activities that entrepreneurs use to address their preferred issues and the impact entrepreneurs have on policy, as well as highlight changes in both over time.

Reinventing NATO

The authors are researchers at the Center for Security Studies, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich. They would like to thank Andreas Wenger and S. Victor Papacosma for their helpful comments on earlier drafts and Greg Donaghy and Ted Kelly of Canada's Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade for their generous assistance during their research stay in Ottawa. They owe special gratitude to Beth Fischer for encouraging them to submit this article.INTRODUCTIONWith the evolution of detente after the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, the cold war consensus within the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was endangered. In times of diminishing fear, some members, particularly Charles de Gaulle, the president of France, increasingly questioned both the future of NATO and American leadership in it. For Paul Martin, Canada's secretary of state for external affairs at the time, Canada had 'a vital stake in the welfare of the Alliance.' He concluded that the Atlantic alliance provided 'a framework in which Canada is able to play a useful independent role as a responsible middle power.'(1) For a 'responsible middle power,' the challenge in the 1960s was double-edged - how to pursue detente without jeopardizing alliance cohesion.We argue that Canada, together with several 'small allies,' was in the vanguard in advancing within NATO the understanding that a multilateral East-West detente was not only necessary but also that it would benefit the Western powers. In NATO's search for new legitimacy in an age of detente, Ottawa campaigned for transforming NATO from a purely military defence organization into an instrument for peace.In general, the literature on Canada and NATO pays relatively little attention to the years in which Lester B. Pearson was prime minister (1963-8).(2) However, we show that those years not only provide valuable insights into Canadian foreign policy in a period of transition, but offer an attractive topic from an alliance perspective. Patterned habits of Canadian foreign policy - such as its proverbial internationalism - did prevail but did not preclude attempts at alliance reform and change. Rather, we argue, Canada combined alliance policies with the promotion of detente in an imaginative way that in the event proved viable when NATO ministers agreed on the landmark Harmel report in 1967.As a middle power, Canada in the 1960s chose to work the NATO connection - the multilateral angle - to advance the core concerns of its foreign policy.(3) Canada had been present at the creation of the alliance; it now pressed for the transformation of the alliance in times of detente.NATO AND THE 'LITTLE' DETENTE, 1963The outcome of the Cuban missile crisis marked an important watershed in the cold war. Stepping back from the brink, the president of the United States, John F. Kennedy, and the Soviet leader, Nikita S. Khrushchev, seemed ready to discuss major East-West problems, particularly disarmament questions.(4) At the NATO ministerial meeting in Paris in December 1962, however, the United States secretary of state, Dean Rusk, noted a 'certain division of opinion about the desirability of broad East-West negotiations' among NATO governments.(5) On the one hand, Canada's secretary of state for external affairs, Howard Green, saw 'renewed hope of a East-West settlement of major issues.' His Italian, Belgian, Norwegian, and Danish colleagues agreed that the West should move fast to negotiate with the USSR from a position of strength. On the other hand, several other foreign ministers could not imagine negotiating with Moscow in the near future when Khrushchev had so recently deceived the West by secretly installing missiles on Cuba.(6) While Green later claimed that he had seldom encountered as much friendliness toward Canada as at that meeting,(7) Washington increasingly regretted having tolerated 'the essentially neurotic Canadian view of the world and of the Canadian role' during the tenure of the government of John Diefenbaker in 1958-63. …

Book Reviews

Books reviewed:Benjamin O. Fordham, Building the Cold War Consensus: The Political Economy of U.S. National Security Policy, 1949‐51.Saskia Sassen, Globalization and Its Discontents: Essays on the New Mobility of People and MoneyArnold Fleischmann and Carol Pierannunzi, Politics in GeorgiaMarian Meyers, News Coverage of Violence Against Women: Engendering BlameFrank Levy, The New Dollars and Dreams

The Strangest Dream: Communism, Anti-Communism and the U. S. Peace Movement, 1945-1963

Strangest Dream: Communism, Anti-Communism, and the US. Peace Movement, 1945-1963. By Robbie Lieberman. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2000. Pp. 272. Illustrations, index. Cloth, $34.95. A volume in the Syracuse Studies on Peace and Conflict Resolution series. Robbie Lieberman, associate professor of history at Southern Illinois University and author of the award winning Song Is My Weapon: People's Songs, American Communism, and the Politics of Culture (1989), has long been involved in promoting and studying peace movements. Combining her various academic interests, she now directs her attention to the convoluted connection between the always controversial Communist Party and the struggle to promote peace from the 1930s into the 1960s. As a fitting touch, the book's title and each chapter title are drawn from a song dealing with matters of war, peace, and social change. Using a wide variety of primary and secondary sources, including a number of stimulating interviews, Lieberman begins with the ups and downs of the peace movement during the depression years, when lingering memories of World War I propelled many college students to support pacifism. The Communist Party dropped this position with the outbreak of civil war in Spain in mid-decade and increasing fears of escalating fascism in Europe. Others on the left became increasingly suspicious of communists, however, particularly after the signing of the Nazi-Soviet peace pact in 1939 and the party's turn towards non-intervention as Germany launched World War II. Then, two years later, with the German invasion of the Soviet Union, soon followed by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, pacifists were in short supply as the vast majority of Americans, particularly communists, became pro-war. Following the war, Lieberman makes a distinction between the Soviet Union's vocal struggle for peace and the U.S.'s preference for freedom, with the two goals increasingly clashing and diverging. Part of the early controversy centered on the use and future of the atom bomb, with perhaps international control, although the author does not explore this topic in depth. She does detail the Henry Wallace presidential campaign in 1948, on the Progressive Party ticket, which, for some, clarified the split between the Communist left and its supporters opting for negotiations versus the Truman administration's increasing emphasis on a Cold War confrontational style (which the Republican Party thoroughly supported). Anticommunism fueled the attack on Wallace and the peace movement, which fared poorly in the election, as communism and liberalism permanently parted company. The following year two events drove home the message. A peace conference at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York, attracting a range of prominent individuals, faced a firestorm of criticism, as it coincided with the opening trials of the Communist Party leadership also in New York City - although the conference ended with eighteen thousand attending a rally at Madison Square Garden. Then, a few months later, a concert for peace and civil rights at Peekskill, New York, featuring Paul Robeson, became a battleground as thousands of concert-goers were viciously attacked by screaming patriots as they left the grounds. As the fifties dawned, Lieberman notes, peaceful coexistence became an extreme and isolated position, associated exclusively with the Communist Left. Pressure to accept the cold war consensus came from government agencies and private citizens alike. …

U.S. Television News and Cold War Propaganda, 1947-1960.

Introduction: selling the Cold War consensus 1. Business, the state, and information from World War II to Cold War 2. Democracy and the advent of television news 3. The State Department's domestic information programs 4. The television industry at war in Korea 5. The White House and NBC present battle report - Washington 6. The Defense Department's domestic information programs 7. Objectivity and consensus journalism Conclusion Selling America: corporate prerogatives and democratic processes.

John Foster Dulles: Piety, Pragmatism, and Power in U.S. Foreign Policy.

Chapter 1 The Great Enlightenment Chapter 2 The Cold War Consensus Chapter 3 A Policy of Boldness Chapter 4 The New Look Chapter 5 United Action Chapter 6 Maximum Bargaining Power Chapter 7 Walking a Tightrope Chapter 8 The Final Crises

Building the Cold War consensus: the political economy of U.S. national security policy, 1949-51

Building the Cold War consensus: the political economy of U.S. national security policy, 1949-51

The Integration of the US Working Class under the Cold War Consensus: The Creation of a New Middle Class

The Integration of the US Working Class under the Cold War Consensus: The Creation of a New Middle Class

With Friends Like These...

With Friends Like These . . . James T. Fisher (bio) Joseph G. Morgan. The Vietnam Lobby: The American Friends of Vietnam: 1955–1975. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977. xviii + 229 pp. Appendixes, notes, bibliography, and index. $39.95. The Vietnam Lobby was first “exposed” by the journalists Robert Scheer and Warren Hinckle in a celebrated 1965 article for Ramparts, a formerly Catholic San Francisco magazine that had turned radical after Hinckle wrested the editorship from its financially troubled founder. In “The Vietnam Lobby,” Scheer and Hinckle alleged that a mid-1950s unholy alliance of Madison Avenue publicists, professional humanitarians, ex-leftists, and New York’s Francis Cardinal Spellman had tricked the American public if not the State Department into supporting their client, the Vietnamese Catholic mandarin, Ngo Dinh Diem. The Scheer-Hinckle essay quickly became a New Left muckraking classic that brashly mixed conspiracy theory, intergenerational warfare, and hostility to organized religion into a nearly irresistible tale of corruption and intrigue. Accounts of early U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia that focused on the Vietnam Lobby proved highly durable for critics of the war, including numerous historians who merely repeated versions of the Scheer-Hinckle treatise. While some scholars, including George Herring in America’s Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950–1975 (1986), expressed doubts as to the influence of this interest group on American foreign policy, Joseph G. Morgan’s study of the American Friends of Vietnam represents the first sustained effort to define the Lobby and assess its work. In the spring of 1955 Joseph Buttinger, a former leader of the Austrian Revolutionary Socialists who came to the United States with his American heiress wife in 1940, “made the decision to form a private organization supporting the Diem regime, the American Friends of Vietnam, during the weeks the Eisenhower administration was reconsidering its support for Diem” (p. 24). Buttinger was working in Saigon on behalf of the International Rescue Committee, a liberal anticommunist relief organization with roots in the socialist, anti-Stalinist political movements of the 1930s. Central figures at [End Page 709] the IRC who shared Buttinger’s passionate commitment to the fledgling Diem regime included Leo Cherne, an entrepreneur of international business intelligence and a “renaissance man” with strong humanitarian credentials; the patrician diplomat Angier Biddle Duke; and Harold Oram, a leading publicist of liberal causes. Morgan painstakingly traces the evolution of Diem’s relationship with these and other key American patrons, challenging along the way some of the most cherished myths concerning the mandarin’s period of exile in the United States between 1950 and 1952. “Several accounts have made much of Diem’s relationship with Spellman,” writes Morgan in a characteristic understatement, “claiming that the cardinal played a key role in introducing Diem to a number of influential Americans. It is nevertheless difficult to determine the importance of Spellman’s contacts with Diem. He apparently made arrangements for Diem’s stay at the Maryknoll seminaries (in New York and New Jersey), but the correspondence of Diem’s American supporters in the early 1950s contains no references to Spellman, and access to Spellman’s personal papers is restricted” (p. 5). Morgan does convincingly establish the early links between Diem and a network of American liberals, including Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas (who introduced him to Senators Mike Mansfield and John F. Kennedy), academics Wesley Fishel and I. Milton Sacks, and human rights advocate Christopher Emmet, who helped bring Diem into the orbit of the International Rescue Committee. At a meeting in Paris in June 1954—in the wake of the French defeat by the communist Viet Minh at Dien Bien Phu—Vietnamese emperor Bao Dai appointed Diem prime minister of the new State of Vietnam. “While the American role in Bao Dai’s decision to give Diem power is unclear,” writes Morgan, “there can be no doubt about Diem’s success in attracting supporters during the years he stayed in America—people ready to back him once he gained power” (p. 11). Diem’s vociferous anticommunism placed him squarely in the mainstream of the Cold War consensus, but he was particularly appealing to liberals and social democrats, Morgan argues, because he...

Nationalism, Nuclear Policy and Children in Cold War America

In the wake of the Cold War era, researchers have begun to theorize the US national security state. This article is a preliminary attempt to theorize the place of children and childhood in the American `Cold War Consensus' of the 1950s and early 1960s. Children were widely depicted in the Cold War era as innocent beings at the heart of the contained domestic world, as objects of strictly gender-divided parental care and protection, and as the vulnerable core of American society, whose protection from foreign enemies required the construction of a vast and powerful nuclear defense system. The article counterposes dominant Cold War images of abstract, generic children (invariably presented as white and middle class) to the actual children most vulnerable to risks associated with nuclear weapons production and testing, and with government-sponsored radiation experiments. In various ways, these were all seen as `deviant' children, whose lives could legitimately be put at risk in the interests of safeguarding `normal' children at the heart of Cold War visions of American society.

Political and economic liberalization: dynamics and linkages in comparative perspective

Even amid the apparent post–Cold War consensus, the benefits and drawbacks of economic and political liberalization remain controversial. At the same time, explanations for the recent surge in these processes, and for the forms they have taken, remain fragmentary. Likewise, the linkages between the two remain under-researched—despite many sweeping assertions of a positive relationship. Nonneman investigates these issues, providing a framework for the remainder of the book, in which diverse country studies are used to advance our understanding of the dynamics and complexities of both political and economic liberalization.

Pay any price: Lyndon Johnson and the wars for Vietnam

Lyndon Johnson brought to the presidency a political outlook steeped in New Deal liberalism and the idea of government intervention for the public good-at home or abroad. Seeking to fulfill John Kennedy's pledge in Southeast Asia, LBJ constructed a fatal coupling of the Great Society and the anti-Communist imperative. Pay Any Price is Lloyd Gardner's riveting account of the fall into Vietnam; of behind-the-scenes decision-making at the highest levels of government; of miscalculation, blinkered optimism, and moral obtuseness. Blending political biography with diplomatic history, Gardner has written the first book on American involvement in the Vietnam War to use the full resources and newly declassified documents of the Johnson Library, and to tell whole the story of Johnson and Vietnam. The book is filled with fresh interpretations, brilliantly incisive portraits of the president and his men, and new perspectives on America's most divisive foreign war. Gardner describes for the first time how, as tragedy swirled around the deliberations in Washington, Clark Clifford and Dean Rusk struggled for the president's soul, culminating in the bombing halt of 1968 and the Johnson decision not to run. The war finally sundered the liberal cold war consensus, Gardner argues, and brought to an end the New Deal politics that had dominated American political life since 1933. Pay Any Price is a major work of history by one of our most distinguished historians.

Communism, Peace Activism, and Civil Liberties: From the Waldorf Conference to the Peekskill Riot

In 1950 the Justice Department indicted W.E.B. Du Bois, then director of the Peace Information Center, on the grounds that he had failed to register as a foreign agent. In his account of these events a few years later, Du Bois wrote: Blessed are the Peacemakers for they shall be called Communists. Is this shame for the Peacemakers or praise for the Communists? Accursed are the Communists, for they claim to be Peacemakers. Is this shame for the Communists or praise for the Peacemakers? This is the paradox which faces America (160). This article addresses part of the process by which the cause of became associated with Communism in the early years of the Cold War, resulting in violations of the civil liberties of those who continued to speak out for peace. The attacks on both the Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace (March 1949) and the Paul Robeson concert at Peekskill (August 1949) are the focal points. These attacks helped cement the association of with Communism, while illustrating the weakness of the pro-Soviet left, and highlighting points where the United States cold war claims to stand for were vulnerable, namely its limits on for those who opposed the cold war consensus and the lack of basic civil rights for African-Americans. The concern is less with the details of the attacks than with their significance. The Communist Party U.S.A. (CPUSA) reached its peak of popularity during the Popular Front period of the late 1930s and during World War II, when its policies were in accord with the government. But the public's relative tolerance toward the Soviet Union and the CPUSA rapidly diminished after World War n. as the Cold War took hold. As E.P. Thompson suggests, the causes of and freedom broke apart, with the Soviet Union claiming and the United States claiming freedom (158-60). By 1948, American Communists, convinced that their own government was preparing for war with the Soviet Union, accused the United States of being the biggest threat to world peace. Conversely, the U.S. government argued that Communism, at home and abroad, was the biggest threat to freedom. Proponents of the cold war consensus in the United States argued that Americans must live in crisis--prepared for war. At the same time, they sought to undermine the Communists' claims to be the defenders of (Arms We Need 209; Schlesinger). Thus the United States government worked to discredit the international Communist peace offensive, which sought to mobilize public opinion against war and atomic weapons. American Communists continued to argue that U.S. warmongers had to be stopped, assuming that winning the for all humanity depended on defending the interests of the Soviet Union (How America's 4-5). Thus two different means to peace--emphasizing military preparedness, anti-Communism, and the defense of versus emphasizing the abolition of atomic weapons and preventing war against the Soviet Union. The Communists had lost the debate about the means to by the time of the 1948 presidential election, in which they supported Henry Wallace's third party candidacy. In that election, the bipartisan cold war consensus built around containing the Soviet Union trounced the Progressive party's notion of peaceful coexistence. The campaign spelled the beginning of the end of Communist influence in the United States and contributed to the marginalization of the movement. Historians have written about 1949 as the year of shocks: the Soviets exploded an atomic device, China fell to the Communists, and the Alger Hiss trials raised disturbing questions about espionage (Goldman, ch. 5). As standard accounts have it, these events increased the fear of Communism and the determination to contain it, at home and abroad. But by 1949 the Truman administration had already launched its attack on domestic Communists and other alleged subversives; Communists, activists, and civil libertarians were already on the defensive. …

Questioning Cold War Fundamentalism

In playwright Lillian Hellman's 1976 memoir of the events surrounding her defiant 1952 testimony before the House Committee on Un-American Activities at the height of the McCarthy era, she suggested a poignant connection between what could be termed the closing of the American mind during the years immediately following World War II and the subsequent course of U.S. foreign policy. Writing of a familiar cohort of liberal journalists and commentators Hellman reckoned that of those many and distinguished individuals none had even by the mid-1970s yet found it a part of conscience to admit that their Cold War anti-Communism was perverted, possibly against their wishes, into the Vietnam War.' Hellman was touching on a larger Cold War truth. After the late 1940s there no longer remained any influential intellectual position in the United States from which to criticize the nation's by-then established hard-line policy toward the Soviet Union. To do so was to risk being regarded a fool at best, or, more likely as time went on, a subversive and traitor. Individuals with critical inclinations buried tlhem, perhaps even forgot them, and in the process contributed to the advent of what some have characterized as the cold war consensus. It is possible, however, that what existed was less a consensus, which implies a full and open discussion of alternatives, than a preclusion of such discussion. Debate over foreign policy in the United States was constrained within a very narrow conceptual rut that led to McCarthyism as well as to Korea and Vietnam.2 During the 1960s American intellectuals, notable among them the historians of the Left, began restoring a wider range to the historical discussion of U.S. international relations. Despite such efforts the discussion has remained constrained, particularly on strategic issues, and above all regarding that mantra of strategic national security, deterrence theory. Even among those thoughtful Americans who were influenced by New Left revisionism and ascribed to the United States at least some culpability for problems with the Soviet Union, there often remained the unspoken assump-

The revolutions in Eastern Europe and the redefinition of Europe: A new social contract?

This paper is an exploration of the socio-cultural cohesion of Europe in the context of the end of the cold war. The eastern European revolutions of 1989/90 undermined the cold war consensus of east and west both in the global and in the European contexts. Since the Second World War western Europe had been shaped in the image of the United States just as eastern Europe was shaped in the image of the USSR, The question now is whether there is a new European cultural identity given the obsolescence of the old dichotomy. Is it really meaningful to speak of the socio-cultural cohesion of Europe at all in the sense of an underlying European political culture, which provides legitimating norms capable of embracing west and east, and which is not reducible to the ethos of capitalism? I should like to formulate this in terms of the possibility of European identity itself being a significant cultural identity sui generis. I am emphasizing, then, the eastern European revolutions as European revolutions and asking the question: exactly what was European about them?

Presidential Support in Congress: Conflict and Consensus on Foreign and Defense Policy

In a recent article appearing in The Journal of Politics, McCormick and Wittkopf (1990) argue that the Vietnam War did not exercise a significant impact on bipartisan presidential support in the U.S. Congress and that a bipartisan Cold War consensus on foreign policy and defense issues in the House and Senate was not as prominent as many had assumed. I develop a comprehensive model of bipartisan congressional support of presidents from 1947-1988 on foreign policy and defense roll-call votes in the House and Senate that test the impact of many factors, such as presidential influence and legislative processes not accounted for in McCormick and Wittkopf's analysis. Using probit analysis of individual roll-call votes, I show that before the Vietnam War, substantial consensus existed in both the House and Senate and after this conflict, such consensus has become much more infrequent. In addition, I find that forces originating in Congress exercise much more influence over the incidence of bipartisan support than presidential resources.

An Interview with Edward Dorn

was saying, many explicitly called themselves anarchists. Among poets there seemed to be this sense that capitalism was obviously no good, but if the two alternatives were going to be American capitalism and Stalinism, they weren't buying either one. Yet at the same time you get a mainstream cold-war consensus version of this with the idea of the end of ideology. Did the Daniel Bell notion make sense to you as an expression of your sense of beyond ideology, or was it something else? ED: Well, I know what you're talking about, but not so much, because I never really had an ideology in the first place, so I Edward Dorn was born in 1929 and grew up in the farm country of eastern Illinois. He found his way to Black Mountain College in the fifties, where he came across writers like Jonathan Williams, Robert Creeley, and, most importantly, Charles Olson. Dorn first received national recognition as one of the poets of the Black Mountain School with the publication of Donald Allen's The New American Poetry in 1960. Since then, he has taught at universities throughout the American West as well as at the University of Essex in England and has produced a remarkably varied body of work in his poetry, prose, and translations. His books of poetry include Hands Up!, Geography, The North Atlantic Turbine, Recollections of Gran Apacheria, Gunslinger, Hello, La Jolla, Yellow Lola, and Abhorrences. For a number of years, Dorn assisted his wife Jennifer Dunbar Dorn, in editing Rolling Stock, a feisty journal of politics and the arts. This year, Black Sparrow Press will publish Dorn's Way West--Stories, Essays, and Verse Accounts, 1963-1993. The interview takes place at Dorn's home in Boulder Colorado, on 4 September 1990. John Wright, whose adopted home is northwest Washington, begins by asking about Dorn's early years in the Skagit Valley and his novel By the Sound. Later, Jennifer Dunbar Dorn joins them and the conversation for a while. John Wright: You found your way to the Skagit Valley early on in your career, and it was there that you wrote your novel By the Sound. Tell me about your time there. Edward Dorn: Well, I went to the Skagit Valley before I was even married. I was working in the timber, and that was when I was still in the middle of my Black Mountain years. But before that, when I was at the University of Illinois, I had known older students who had connections for summer work in Seattle, so I worked a couple of summers at Boeing. That's when they kept records by hand. This would have been '49, '50, along in there. There were whole rooms of people just transferring parts and keeping them on 5 x 6 cards. It was all intensive hand labor entry. It was very boring and so forth, but the pay was pretty good. I made my tuition doing that, and we'd rent rooms together to keep costs down, one time on Queen Anne Hill and one time in the Ballard District. JW: Seattle was still a pleasant, fairly funky town, even ten years ago. It's all cleaned up now. ED: Californians always dehumanize places. They're the lemmings of the real estate group. They just rush to the next cheaper place. JW: And it's an exchange of different kinds of dirt. The streets are cleaner, but the air's filthy because of all the cars, and people are campaigning for mayor on the traffic issue because the freeways are unbelievably gnarled up. It's becoming like L.A. in that sense, while the rest of the city still feels like what San Francisco might have felt like long ago. ED: Well, they bring all that with them. But Seattle was a very liveable town, actually. It was human. JW: And you went up to the Valley after Black Mountain? ED: Well, when I got married, my first marriage, we lived in San Francisco for a while after Black Mountain, and then I needed work. I was an itinerant worker in those days, and I went back to the woods because I knew how to do it, and it was easy to get a job in those days because there was no ecological movement stopping clear-cutting or anything. …

The Cold War Consensus: Did It Exist?

A bipartisan consensus about the means and ends of American foreign policy is generally thought to have been part of the American political environment during the Cold War era. This consensus is al...

Eleanor Roosevelt and the Cold War Consensus

Popular awareness of Eleanor Roosevelt the historical figure has increased considerably since the publication of Joseph Lash's two-volume biography1 and its subsequent adaptation for television. Lash's excellent work is based on both a personal acquaintance with Mrs. Roosevelt and access to her papers at the Roosevelt Library in Hyde Park, New York. Historians, however, have yet to go beyond these biographical volumes to attempt to place Eleanor Roosevelt in a larger historical context, to compare her ideas to her contemporaries, or to study her within the framework of the major social and political movements in which she participated. This article represents an effort to define Eleanor Roosevelt's responses to the developing consensus that characterized American foreign policy during the cold war. The development of that consensus—that the United States must contain Soviet expansion—coincided with Mrs. Roosevelt's early years as a member of the American delegation to the United Nations. The death of Franklin D. Roosevelt left his successors a batch of unsolved problems that had been postponed during the war. His death also left them groping for FDR's answers to those problems. As Alonzo Hamby has suggested, several factions within the Democratic party attempted to define and to identify with FDR's legacy. The conflict over whether the Truman administration or its critics truly represented Roosevelt's policies split the liberal movement at least until 1948, when acceptance of the Marshall Plan and Truman's election restored a general unity.2 Many liberals resented Truman's “get tough” attitude toward the Russians and tended to believe that if Roosevelt had lived he would have effectively maintained Big Three unity and prevented the cold war. Hamby has cited a number of points that liberals considered the bases for a peaceful postwar world. They hoped for a continuation of the anti-fascist alliance to permit nations “to concentrate on constructive programs for international democratization and economic development.”3 They sought an end to imperialism and alignments with reactionary governments, such as Franco's Spain, Chiang Kai-shek's forces, or former Nazis in Germany. They tended to be skeptical about the use of force as a tool of American diplomacy, preferring negotiation and compromise. Most importantly, liberals did not view the Soviet Union as a real threat to American interests immediately after the devastation of the war years. Rather they conceded that the Soviet Union had real security interests. Even if the Russians were not models of international virtue, the success of the United Nations would depend upon Big Three cooperation. Liberals often believed that Truman, contrary to these principles, was “carping at the Russians and doing little constructive.”4

Politics Through Tinted Glass (Brightly)

AbstractWhat should have been the Soviet Union's great lesson—that beautiful Socialist dreams can easily turn into something far worse than a repressively tolerant bourgeois society, while those with eyes to see refuse to look—is an example that many with eyes to see and ears to hear have yet to consider. The prevailing cold war consensus was responsible for policy errors and misapprehensions of serious consequence, but its perception of Stalin's Soviet Union as an evil and dangerous despotism was correct. Those who had thought otherwise before Khrushchev's famous speech of 1956 were wrong.Hard facts and disturbing clues were available long years before Stalin's fans flip-flopped on cue. The more sophisticated had deliberately refrained from looking at the ugly truth, or had looked and were not repelled. But a majority simply were incapable of assimilating information incompatible with their political mindset, unless it was directly related to matters of personal concern.