New Policy, New Broom

(See Cover)

Over Jupiter Island, north of Palm Beach on Florida's east coast, a stiff wind was blowing. It rattled the palm trees with a sound like distant machine guns, piled huge stacks of cumulus clouds in front of the sun. From the sea, a salty film of spindrift swept over the cluster of snug beach houses. In one of them last week, sitting intently by his radio, Under Secretary of State Robert Abercrombie Lovett listened to the President's undramatic announcement of a dramatic new turn in U.S. foreign policy.

For the moment, there was nothing he could do but listen. Four days before, on the express orders of Secretary George Marshall, Bob Lovett had been banished from Washington for a much-needed rest. Under the eye of his wife Adele, he was going through the motions of a holiday.

But he was in regular touch with Washington. Each morning he slipped away to the telephone for an up-to-the-minute briefing on the State Department's incoming cables. What he heard last week was the succession of hard facts which precipitated the President's call for universal military training and selective service, his plea for speed on ERP.

The Final Pressure. The facts he heard made Lovett restless to get back. At the State Department the lights burned late all last week. On the heels of Jan Masaryk's suicide in Czechoslovakia (TIME, March 22) had come urgent requests for help from Finland. Norway soon followed. What was the U.S. prepared to do if either took a firm stand against Russia? Then Ambassador Bedell Smith cabled from Moscow: Could not Congress be made to realize the imperative need for some action which the Russians would understand? Smith urged a soldier's solution: immediate enaction of U.M.T.

On top of that had come the report of Defense Secretary James Forrestal. Returning from his conference with top military strategists in Key West (TIME, March 22), Forrestal had gone to the White House to present two sober conclusions, which added up to one & the same conclusion: the U.S. must arm.

The other conclusion was that even U.S. support of the Brussels pact (see INTERNATIONAL) would not prevent the rape of Western Europe unless U.S. military strength were increased sharply. Like Smith, Forrestal urged passage of U.M.T. He added a request for selective service, to fill the ranks until U.M.T. could get under way.

Forrestal's urgent report was the final pressure behind the President's call for selective service and U.M.T. The decision had been taken after long consultation between White House, State Department and Defense heads. The decision was to commit the U.S. to full military support of Western Union--even if that should mean, in event of war, a military retreat from the Mediterranean. To make the guarantee effective, the U.S. needed, in one of Marshall's favorite phrases, "the military posture" to lend its words authority.

Risks & Limitations. The decision to re-establish "military posture" was a decision that involved risks and limitations. The chief limitation was that the U.S. as yet had no global foreign policy. There were hosts of issues as yet unresolved. What was to be the future U.S. policy towards Korea and Japan? Was the U.S. to abandon Korea and cling grimly to Japan? Even more important, what would the U.S. do about the front in China?

Secretary Marshall, recalling World War II, talked in terms of theaters, choices and priorities. On China, his attitude had always been colored by the one failure of a distinguished career. He clung firmly to his stubborn belief that China could now rate no more than the attention of a holding action. This re-opened the question of whether the enemy should be continuously engaged on two fronts or be permitted to concentrate forces.

The chief risk was that no military half-measures by the U.S. could now check the momentum of the Soviet Union's advance. But to a man like Lovett there could be no alternative. The Administration's drift, indecision and timidity had encouraged Russia's step-by-step advance ever since the wartime days when U.S. policy was determined by a mixture of military strategy and "liberal" illusions about Communism. At last the U.S. Government was through with its paralyzing illusions and the time had come for decisive action.

From Illusion to Reality. The U.S. record since V-J day was a record of failure to seize & hold the initiative. Next to Marshall himself, there was no one better qualified to understand that record, and explain it, than Bob Lovett. As Under Secretary, he had been for the past nine months the prime executor of U.S. policy. As Marshall's second-in-command, and Acting Secretary for the 129 days that Marshall had been away from his post, Lovett had also carried the load of day-to-day decisions. His career as Under Secretary of State spanned three stages in the evolution of U.S. policy.

One stage had ended just a week after Bob Lovett was first approached last March for the Under Secretary's job. Those were the bewildering days of false hopes and gradual disillusion in the face of Russian obstruction. This short and costly era was ended somewhat hysterically by the Truman Doctrine, the first official recognition of the cold fact of Russian aggression, and the first official evidence of U.S. determination to meet it.

One week after Lovett's appointment "was confirmed by the Senate, Marshall made his Harvard speech on European recovery. That promise and suggestion regained the diplomatic initiative for the U.S. The initiative lasted just long enough to prove that Communism could not be stopped by dollars alone. At the London conference of foreign ministers last November, George Marshall wrote the end to that chapter himself. He stripped Russia's policy down to its bare essentials: the wreckage of Europe in preparation for Russian seizure.

What, then, could the U.S. do? Against Russian fifth columns, against sabotage and debilitating strikes, against the seizure of a country by its "own" Communist Party, the U.S. had as yet no effective weapon. The fall of Czechoslovakia four weeks ago, was final proof of that.

The only answer left was to meet force with the threat of force, wherever the U.S. could best apply it. The U.S. would have to underwrite Europe's economic recovery with military force. The area which the U.S. policymakers had chosen for the main effort, the most probable route of the enemy's advance, was the rich industrial heartland of Western Europe. That was why the U.S. was prepared to back Western Union all the way.

Clearing the Decks. Before the week was out, as a more energetic approach began to take hold, there were other diplomatic moves. In the U.N., the U.S. took a humiliating step to reverse an inept, unworkable policy in Palestine (see above). In Turin, Foreign Minister Georges Bi-dault, as spokesman for the West, proposed the return of Trieste to Italy. That was a sound effort to prevent a Communist victory in the Italian elections next month, to draw a non-Communist Italy into the orbit of Western Union. Still further bids to the Italian voters were in the works. One prospect: a U.S. proposal that Italy be admitted to the U.N.

At week's end, Secretary Marshall appeared in the open-air theater at-the University of California, to present the case before the U.S. Looking back on the tortuous road the world had traveled since V-J day, he said: "Rule based on threats and force must not be allowed to spread further unchecked. . . . The situation is the duplication of the high-handed procedure of the Nazi regime."

Next day, in Los Angeles, Marshall stated a truth of which many Americans had become more or less keenly aware. Said Marshall: "No nation in modern history has ever occupied a position of responsibility comparable to that of this country today nor has any country had such vast responsibility thrust upon it in so short a time." How well would the U.S. carry out its responsibility?

It was, first of all, the constitutional duty of the President of the U.S. to develop and propose a suitable policy. It was then up to the people's representatives in Congress. They would have to affirm, reject or amend the policy the Administration proposed. The next move was up to the Administration's operating heads in Washington. In the long run, the success of any foreign policy depended on its imaginative and energetic execution. As chief operating head of the State Department, execution was Bob Lovett's job. It was the job for which George Marshall had hand-picked him just a year ago.

Fifth-Grade Arithmetic. To most Washington officials, Bob Lovett is the near-perfect example of the perfect executive. He made his mark in the business world. He succeeded so well during the war as Assistant Secretary of War for Air that ex-Secretary Robert Patterson once remarked: "The fact that our Air Forces achieved their huge expansion in time was due more to Bob Lovett than to any other man."

Since he came back to Washington, Lovett has even wrung some words of praise from New York's terrible-tempered Congressman John Taber, the brass-lunged dragon of Capitol Hill. Said Taber: "He makes sense. Understands fifth-grade arithmetic. Very rare in Washington."

Lovett himself would be the first to admit that that rare understanding does not extend throughout the State Department.

Though the department had moved from its fusty old headquarters on Pennsylvania Avenue to a shiny new home on Washington's Foggy Bottom, had grown in the last ten years from 5,400 employees at home & abroad to 21,400, there was still some question about its capacity to do its job.

Help Wanted. Over the years, the department's relations with Congress had so deteriorated that Congress' first thought about ERP was to get it out of State's hands. There was a mutual, and justifiable, lack of confidence between Congress and the State Department. State's personnel could often, with justice, blame political leaders for major U.S. failures in foreign policy. But State could not deny that its execution of policy often lacked aggressiveness. Sometimes, as when Hungary went behind the Iron Curtain, the diplomatic experts seemed content to forecast, and not to forestall, disaster.

Some of State's failings could be attributed to the fact that the U.S. has never offered adequate salaries in the foreign service. Too often the prime career posts have been filled by political hacks. But often the department has failed to use effectively the reservoir of special talents it possesses. Ambassador Lew Douglas, for example, is so often called home for extra assignments that a Londoner last week remarked: "Never has the Court of St. James's been so long without a U.S. Ambassador." In the formation of China policy, the cables of Leighton Stuart from Nanking were largely ignored.

The Soldier & the Civilian. These shortcomings were not the fault of Bob Lovett; he had inherited them. Of Lovett himself, the worst anyone could find to say in Washington last week was the capsule judgment of one career official. Said the anonymous handicapper: "If a man from Mars were to meet George Marshall and Bob Lovett for the first time, and knew nothing of their backgrounds, he would take Marshall for the lifelong civilian and Lovett for the career Army officer."

But Lovett is neither a stuffed shirt nor a martinet. Though essentially serious and a worrier, he has a corrosive sense of humor which eases office tension, is most often expressed in a talent for devastating mimicry. One friendly target: his old boss, Henry Stimson.

At 52, Lovett is a tall, impeccably dressed product of Yale, Harvard and New York society, with the craggy head of a bald eagle and what a friend calls an "elegant drawing-room slouch." A terrific worker, he has rarely spent a Sunday away from his Washington office. He swears smoothly, competently and often. He has an aversion to exercise. Says Lovett : "I don't have time for it and wouldn't exercise if I did."

His principal relaxations are going to the movies and listening to swing music, a hobby which once gained him the awed respect of G.I. airmen during a wartime broadcast. After Lovett had neatly ticked off a list of songs and soloists, one of them proclaimed: "He's the first guy from Washington I ever saw who ever knew anything."

The Uses of Success. Lovett came to the State Department with the traditional background of a successful banker: wealth, education, position. He was born in Huntsville, Tex. in 1895, the only son of the general counsel for the Union Pacific (who later became its president). He went to The Hill School before entering Yale, where he became one of the first members of the famed Yale Unit of the Naval Reserve Flying Corps, formed in anticipation of U.S. entry into World War I. He returned from overseas as a lieutenant commander in naval aviation (wearing a Navy Cross). By 1926 he was a partner in Brown Brothers, five years later helped organize the merger of Brown Brothers Harriman & Co.

Those were the years when Lovett earned his reputation as "the success boy." But success did not put blinkers on him. As the firm's foreign-exchange expert, he made frequent trips to Europe, sniffed out what was brewing in Germany. In 1938 he began boning up on technical aviation problems. The report he wrote two years later on U.S. plane production got him the job as Assistant Secretary of War for Air. After V-J day he resigned, seriously ill, underwent a gall bladder operation.

He was still convalescing when Marshall asked him to take over the Under Secretaryship. As Lovett explained at the time: "There are three people to whom I can never say no--my wife, Henry Stimson and George Marshall."

"I Often Ask Myself." Not long after Lovett started in, the phone rang in his office. The caller, mistaking Lovett's voice for that of a coworker, jovially demanded: "You bald-headed old bastard, what are you doing in the Under Secretary's office?" With perfect aplomb, Lovett replied just as jovially: "I often ask myself that question."

Actually, Lovett had a driving sense of just what he was there for. One part of his mission was to sweep the cobwebs out of the department's archaic organization, step it up to the kind of tempo U.S. foreign policy now demanded. He already has one sweeping reorganization plan ready. But so far he has been too busy with the rest of his job. Until U.S. policy is geared to events in the world, there will be no time for housecleaning at home. First the world, then the cobwebs. Said Lovett last week: "You don't operate on a man while he's carrying a trunk upstairs."

True as that was, the U.S. could not wait much longer for the surgery which would fit State for its increasing tasks. Most of the U.S. could agree on the nation's long-range objectives. But those objectives would have to be realized by the daily action of U.S. diplomats at home and abroad.

The prospects for success that Bob Lovett could see last week were neither completely reassuring nor completely depressing. They would be considerably more reassuring when U.S. policy had matured beyond the stage of crisis statesmanship. They would also be more reassuring when the U.S. Government had more men like Lovett himself to keep it clicking.

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