In France, they called Danny Cohn-Bendit and the other leaders of the May 1968 student uprising the soixante-huitards -- or, simply, the '68ers. Now, it seems, American liberals are engaged in a conversation about our own quarante-huitards -- our '48ers, or the men who formed the nucleus of thought and action for postwar liberalism.
It's great that this is happening. I've felt for a long time that these men -- and they were all men, except for Eleanor Roosevelt, which is a reasonably big "except" -- weren't getting the due from contemporary liberalism they deserve. Liberalism today tends to celebrate the 1930s, because of the New Deal, and the 1960s, because the civil-rights, anti-war, and personal-liberation movements of the day were within the living memory (or in many cases were the formative youth experiences) of many people who today run organizations, issue groups, nonprofits, and so on.
That generation rejected the '48ers, and for reasons that at the time were sound. The '48ers, as I mentioned, were chiefly elite, white men, and by the late 1960s, awareness among women, African Americans, and others of the fact that white men chairing meetings was not necessarily part of the natural order of things produced a healthy tendency toward diversity. The '48ers were also, certainly by late '60s standards, hawks. One of the great achievements of the '48ers was the Truman Doctrine, which contained communism in Turkey and Greece. (There was, in the spring of 1947, when the doctrine was put forth, a very real threat that Greece might fall to communist insurgents; to the youth of 1968, that didn't sound like such an awful thing, but I hope we can agree today that it would have been.) But it was the language of the Truman Doctrine, with its rhetoric about the universal defense of “subjugated peoples,” that locked the United States into “defending” Vietnam. That war was a catastrophe, of course; the lineage of destruction was traced back to the Cold Warriors, and in many ways, the tracing was fair.
But not in every way. The liberal '48ers were reacting to the world that confronted them (it's always a fraught experiment to apply contemporary mores to an earlier generation), and they did some great things. And now that we're able to recognize that the '68ers, too, had their own blind spots and excesses, we should be able to put the accomplishments of the '48ers in a truer perspective.
Yes, they were forcefully anti-communist, and yes, men like Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and Reinhold Niebuhr declared that opposition to communism must be an organizing principle of liberalism. That view was very unfashionable in the '60s, and it probably remains so among some liberals today. It should not be. Communism, among other sins, was highly illiberal, and liberals were right to oppose it. Today, we can't really imagine what it must have been like to have a major presidential campaign infiltrated by communists who did in fact take their orders from Joseph Stalin's Kremlin, as Henry Wallace's was. Pausing to appreciate what that must have been like can help us see why Schlesinger, Niebuhr, and others felt compelled to act and speak so vigorously; imagine today, a third-party candidate who had operatives who were in communication with Tora Bora.
(And yet: Everything's complicated. Go read Henry Wallace's platform. It's amazing -- a plank supporting equal rights for women, and one objecting to the British presence in Northern Ireland, both decades ahead of public opinion. Further, Wallace made a point of traveling across the South, where he was detested, and refusing to speak to segregated audiences, which made him even more reviled. But Wallace's naïveté about the Soviet Union was fatal.)
As for the “wise men” themselves, they, too, were staunch anti-communists. Led by Dean Acheson, they authored the anti-communist Truman Doctrine, as noted above. Another of their number, George Kennan, wrote the influential Foreign Affairs article that laid out the containment strategy. They were not peaceniks by any stretch of the imagination.
But -- and this is the important point for the current conversation -- they were not warmongers. The Truman Doctrine, though it had a tragic application two decades later, was above all a piece of diplomacy. It said to the Soviet Union, “OK, just so we're clear about things, the line is right here, in Greece and Turkey; don't cross it.” That was brinkmanship, and it would have forced the United States to fight if Russia had gone into one of the countries. But it forced the U.S.S.R. to make the first move, and the U.S.S.R. never did. The Truman Doctrine also offered $400 million to the two countries in economic and military aid. That's around $3 billion in today's dollars, and the money helped build both nations into more or less well-functioning democratic states (with, in Greece, the one terrible exception of its late-'60s fascist interregnum).
Further, the '48ers were forever making alliances in the name of their containment strategy; and if anything should stand today as their hallmark, it is not their urge toward militarism but their instinct for diplomacy. This is when NATO was founded, and also the United Nations, into which the '48ers threw every ounce of America's support and commitment. They initiated dozens of other organizations to improve the collective security, in all senses of the word, of the free world. They, led by Mrs. Roosevelt, achieved the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Finally, they understood the concept of consequences. They did not believe it was the United States' business either to remake the world unilaterally or to run it. Intelligence operatives begged Acheson and Truman to OK coups in Iran and Guatemala, where socialists governed. They refused, noting quite presciently that if the United States started doing that, it would soon find itself the enemy, not the friend, of people in the emerging world aspiring to nationhood. All that changed when Dwight Eisenhower became president, and John Foster Dulles signed off on both coups. Soon enough, the United States was indeed remaking the world and running it. But that was the work of '50s Republicans, not of the Democratic '48ers.
In other words, the '48ers would not have supported the war in Iraq under any conceivable circumstances. Yes, they would have called for a clear-eyed response to fundamentalism and terrorism; but not for war against a country that had little to do with Salafist terrorist networks, especially when doing so meant diverting troops from the task of capturing the man who orchestrated an attack on the United States and then laughed about it.
If we had had Truman and Acheson's equivalents in the White House and at Foggy Bottom since September 11, there's no doubt in my mind that we'd be witnessing a great effort -- flawed, perhaps containing seeds of future tragedies, but great nevertheless -- to roll back terrorism, to strike at its training camps, to surround it and isolate its sponsors diplomatically, and to try to neutralize its popularity by understanding its causes and offering decent Muslim people an alternative. We would not -- absolutely not -- have seen a war in Iraq.
And if there's a heaven, Acheson is gazing down aghast that his old office is about to be occupied by a woman who lied to America about impending mushroom clouds emanating from Iraq, and that the senators from his own party lack the gumption to oppose her. Acheson's memoirs, and the magisterial biography of him by the late James Chace, show clearly how he wrestled with his conscience over the stark language of the Truman Doctrine. But he didn't lie to his fellow countrymen, and the thought horrified him.
Let's re-examine and revive men like Acheson, and let's celebrate Schlesinger and Niebuhr. But let's do so remembering clearly that the catastrophe in Iraq would have been an outrage to them.
Michael Tomasky is the Prospect's executive editor.
