OLD
SOLDIERS
"Embattled,
Scrutinized, Powell Soldiers On," read the headline on the
front page of The New York Times, as if the writer were rather
astonished to find Colin Powell still at the State Department,
despite his disagreements Secretary Powell with some of the more
overweening members of the present administration. Somehow, despite
his defeats in various different policy debates, we were informed,
the secretary of state kept "doing his best to justify the
administration’s view to often-critical allies around the
world."
No
one familiar with Secretary Powell’s character or his record
of public service should be surprised that he values the welfare
of his country over all. And contrary to what the media likes
to believe, disagreement and debate at even the highest levels
of a functioning democracy is refreshing, even vital.
Much less invigorating has been the whispering campaign that blames
Powell for the decision not to go "on to Baghdad," when
he was chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Gulf War in
1991. It is unclear whether this is simply another, crude attack
on the secretary of state by his enem ies, or a more subtle, pre-emptive
attempt to clear Bush pere and his civilian underlings of the
time—such as then-secretary-of-defense Dick Cheney—of
any blame for those casualties that may be incurred in a renewed
conflict against Saddam Hussein. It is, in any case, a calumny,
one that > badly misrepresents both the facts on the ground during
the Gulf War and the way our constitutional system is designed
to work.
It
has also been tried before, and against no less an American than
Dwight D. Eisenhower.
We
are, after all, a nation of devoted second-guessers, eager to
grace everyone from CEOs to baseball managers with the privilege
of our hindsight. Revisionism is a necessary part of the historical
process, and from Washington on down, we have regularly hauled
our military commanders up for target practice once the fog of
battle has lifted.
Yet
the whispering campaign that threatened to engulf Eisenhower—like
that directed against Secretary Powell—was a much smarmier,
and more dangerous thing. The charge was that, as supreme commander
of the Allied forces in Europe, Ike had deliberately failed to
take Berlin ahead of the Soviet Red Army, during the closing days
of World War II. The implication—sometimes stated outright—was
that Ike was at best a Communist dupe or at worst a traitor.
"The
major myth in regard to Berlin is that if the Americans had captured
the city they would have held it and there would be no Berlin
problem today," Stephen Ambrose wrote in an early essay,
Eisenhower and Berlin, 1945, published just a few years after
the German capital nearly became a flashpoint in the Cold War.
"It
is impossible to work out the origins of the myth," Ambrose
complained. "I have never seen it in print. Yet nearly everyone
to whom I talk, be he a veteran who fought under Eisenhower or
a college student who was not even born at the time, believes
that if Eisenhower had taken the city the Americans would have
full possession of it today."
Whoever started it, the myth got a key boost from Drew Pearson
in the Washington Post, on April 22, 1945, when he wrote that
"Though it may get official denial the real fact is that
American advance patrols on Friday, April 13…were in Potsdam,
which is to Berlin what the Bronx is to New York City…[but]
the next day withdrew from the Berlin suburbs to the River Elbe
about 50 miles south. This withdrawal was ordered largely because
of a previous agreement with the Russians that they were to occupy
Berlin and because of their insistence that the agreement be kept."
Pearson the journalist was often, shall we say, factually challenged,
and this was certainly the case here, despite his blatant attempt
to inoculate himself from any "official denial." By
late March of 1945, U.S. and British troops were over 200 miles
from Berlin, while the Red Army was within 35 miles of the German
capital. A surge by General William Simpson’s 9th Army did
establish an American bridgehead over the Elbe at Magdeburg, on
April 14, but this was still 50 miles from Berlin—hardly
Potsdam.
General
Simpson did ask Ike, through Omar Bradley, for permission to try
to beat the Soviets into the city—and was denied. Eisenhower’s
longtime friend and subordinate, George Patton, was infuriated,
as were our British allies, Field Marshal Montgomery and Winston
Churchill, who wanted to "shake hands with the Russians as
far to the east as possible."
Ike
held firm, and for the best of reasons. Simpson had only 50,000
men available to take the Nazis’ last redoubt, and they were
already beyond effective fighter support. The Soviets, meanwhile,
had some 1.25 million men and 22,000 artillery pieces poised to
encircle the city. And while there was no secret plan to "give"
Berlin to the Soviets, there was an agreement that both Germany
and Berlin would be divvied up between all the Allied powers.
Gen. Bradley, assessing the situation for his chief, estimated
that taking Berlin would cost some 100,000 casualties—"A
pretty stiff prize to pay for a prestige objective, especially
when we’ve got to fall back and let the other fellow take
over."
Bradley’s
estimates—and Ike’s decision—were dead on. The
final battle for Berlin was a bloodbath, with the Soviets losing
at least 100,000 men. And when it was all over, Stalin (for once)
lived up to an agreement and ceded roughly three-quarters of the
city and the country to the Western allies, as previously agreed.
Yet
the idea that the U.S. had "handed" Berlin to the Russians
continued to flourish, given new life by the 1948 Soviet blockade
of Berlin. It became an adjunct myth, to the enduring shibboleth
that Stalin had been "handed" all of Eastern Europe
at Yalta; a lingering and poisonous contention that America had
somehow been betrayed from within.
Initially,
these charges centered on the late FDR—conveniently no longer
around to defend himself—and other veterans of the Roosevelt
and Truman administrations. Eisenhower’s emergence as a presidential
candidate in 1952, however, soon drew the fire to him. As historian
Jeff Broadwater notes in Eisenhower & the Anti-Communist Crusade,
pamphlets from far-right fringe groups labeled the victor of Normandy
"a crypto-Socialist who turned ‘the best part of Germany
over to the Russians.’" The campaigns of his leading
rivals for the Republican nomination, Robert Taft and General
Douglas MacArthur, eagerly spread these "charges" around
the country.
At
first, Ike responded to these "charges" with appropriate
contempt. None of his critics, he pointed out, had been around
in 1945 "to go out and choose the ten thousand American mothers"
whose sons would have died to take "a worthless objective."
Yet
the 1952 campaign was conducted during the nadir of McCarthyism,
and Eisenhower was soon reduced to his own version of revisionism.
Candidate Eisenhower had supposedly entered the race in good part
to preserve the bipartisan, internationalist foreign policy he
had had such a hand in making after the war. Yet out on the hustings,
he blasted almost every aspect of it, including the "loss"
of China to the Communists, the Yalta accords—even the decision
not to race the Soviets to Berlin, which he himself had made.
The Korean War, then still raging, might never have happened,
"if we had been less soft and weak." The war itself
was practically a conspiracy: "The Democrats could purchase
full employment only at the price of dead and mangled bodies of
young Americans."
All
of this was too much for President Harry Truman, who as a newly
minted chief executive had left decisions on whether to beat the
Soviets to Berlin and Prague strictly to Eisenhower, and who had
consulted with him on virtually every aspect of his policy to
contain the Soviets since then. Ike’s 1952 campaign cause
a rift between the two men that lasted for years.
Eisenhower
himself, perhaps driven by guilt, would continue trying to rewrite
the past during his retirement. His 1967 memoir, At Ease, recalled
two different wartime warnings against the Soviet threat, but
as Ambrose points out, Ike "may well have uttered such warnings,
but he did not mention them in Crusade in Europe, written almost
two decades before At Ease, nor did he ever write anything during
the war to indicate that he was fearful of Russian intentions…The
truth was that he may have wished by 1952 that he had taken a
hard line with the Russians in 1945, but he had not."
He
had, instead, saved those tens of thousands of American mothers
their sons, and had avoided what could have been a horrendous
clash with Soviet troops in the rubble Hitler’s capital.
Nor did things work out so badly in the end. East Germany—which
the Soviets would have created in any case—proved a useful
display window for the many charms of communist life, and while
it was a shame that any people had to endure them it was perhaps
only dividing Germany for a generation that enabled it to be reincorporated
into a peaceful, democratic Europe.
Ike
was right the first time—and our Gulf War revisionists might
take note. Nice as it would be to have already consigned Saddam
to the trashbin of history, things were not so simple back in
1991. The U.N. coalition that liberated Kuwait had no mandate
to push on to Baghdad, nor is it at all clear what would have
happened if they had. The first Bush administration had legitimate
concerns that a leaderless Iraq would fall prey to the radical,
Shiite regime next door in Iran. Ten thousand American boys might
have been sacrificed merely to empower the heirs of the Ayatollah
Khomeini. Whatever happens in the future, it’s impossible
to say that that would have been a better alternative.
Of
course, General Powell had an advantage over Eisenhower at the
time. Unlike Ike, he was not under the command of a brand-new
president, barely getting a grip on the enormity of the task before
him. Regardless of what advice Colin Powell did or did not give
President George H.W. Bush, had the president so ordered, Powell
would have pushed on to Baghdad or anywhere else. Observers should
not be surprised that he now offers his advice to George W. Bush
and then, even when it’s rejected, follows the president’s
orders and works as hard as he can for his country. It’s
what a good soldier—and a good American—does.
