CONTENTS LIST OF WITNESSES Fleming, D. F., Professor Emeritus, Vanderbilt University-. Schlesinger, Arthur M., Jr., Schweitzer Professor of the Humanities, Mark, David E., Deputy Director, Bureau of Intelligence and Research, Morse, John H., deputy assistant Secretary of Defense for Inter- Barnet, Richard J., codirector of the Institute for Policy Studies---- Von Borch, Herbert, correspondent of the Sueddeutsche-Zeitung of 122 Grossmann, Robert, president of the National Association of Young 194 STATEMENTS AND MEMORANDUMS SUBMITTED Article submitted by Prof. Adam Ulam, entitled "On Modern History-Re- Statement by W. Averell Harriman, before the Committee on Foreign Rela- Page 22 85 101 APPENDIX Article submitted by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., entitled "Origins of the 213 230 THE COLD WAR: ORIGINS AND DEVELOPMENTS Historical Perspectives on the Cold War MONDAY, JUNE 7, 1971 HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, The subcommittee met at 10 a.m., pursuant to call, in room 2172, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Benjamin S. Rosenthal (chairman of the subcommittee) presiding. Mr. ROSENTHAL. The subcommittee will be in order. This morning we are starting a series of very important hearings. In war and in uneasy peace, Europe gave birth to the cold war. The pattern of mutual antagonism which has characterized AmericanSoviet relations for 25 years began before guns were stilled against Hitler and his allies. As an analysis and as a steady policy based on the facts analyzed, the cold war shows a durability in American foreign policy matched perhaps only by the Monroe Doctrine. A policy so constant, in a world which changes even against our will, must have its assumptions challenged regularly and vigorously. What factors in the Second World War split that conflict's most powerful victors? Was the cold war simply a reversion to the antagonism which had set American capitalism firmly against Soviet communism from its moment of victory in 1917? Or was the post-war period a series of miscalculations seeking rationality in a name? These questions must be asked by a Congress which is today unwilling to accept uncritically the traditional responses to foreign policy concerns. They are appropriately raised, I believe, in this subcommittee whose geographical jurisdiction covers both Western and Eastern Europe and whose concerns must turn increasingly to independent analysis of the urgent problems affecting American-European relations. In the next 2 weeks we will review both the events and the policies since World War II which describe those relations. We will consider the forces which made a new Europe from the battered remnants of 1945 and which formed new alliances of both old friends and old enemies. We will see, in this broad context, some of the specific elements in this new Europe which Congress must now begin to study before the crises arise. Our hearings must ultimately serve these two purposes: First, they must provide the Foreign Affairs Committee and the Congress with an opportunity-under congressional control-to reassess the course of U.S.-Soviet relations, including the military alliances each has assembled during the past 25 years. Second, the hearings should identify specific problem areas, including aspects of NATO and the growing unification movement within Europe, which we will want to examine in much greater detail in subsequent hearings before this Congress. We will begin, properly, I hope, with a review of the historians' estimates. We will hear also from both present and past policy-makers. We will continue with the views of several Europeans whose countries and whose continent remains the scene in which the cold war is enacted. Finally, we will hear several estimates of what the future might bring to that continent which is bound so closely by history, culture and common interest to our own. We are honored this morning to have four very distinguished American historians who we will hear in turn and then together in an informal discussion with members of the subcommittee: Prof. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., of the City University of New York; Prof. Adam Ulam, Russian Research Center, Harvard University; Prof. William A. Williams, Oregon State University, and D. F. Fleming, Professor Emeritus, Vanderbilt University. We will proceed with Professors Schlesinger, Ulam, Fleming, and Williams, each of whom will make an initial presentation in that order. Then we will open a dialog and invite comments among each other on what each of you had to say, and then the subcommittee will commence engaging in that dialogue by way of questions. Mr. ROSENTHAL. You may proceed. Dr. Schlesinger. STATEMENT OF ARTHUR M. SCHLESINGER, JR., PROFESSOR, CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK Writer, educator. B. Columbus, Ohio, Oct. 15, 1917. A.B. summa cum laude, Harvard, 1938, member Society of Fellows, 1939-42; Doctor of Letters, Muhlenberg College, 1950. LL.D. Bethany College, 1956; New School of Social Research, 1966; L.H.D., Tusculum College, 1966; Doctor of Civil Law, Univ. N.B. 1960. With Office of War Information, 1942-43; Office of Strategic Services, 1943-45; associate professor of history, Harvard, 1946-54; professor, 1954–61; Consultant, Economic Cooperation Administration, 1948; Mutual Security Administration, 1951-52; Member, Adlai Stevenson campaign staff, 1952, 1956; special assistant to President of U.S., 1961-64; Schweitzer professor of humanities, City University, New York, 1967 to present. Member of Board of Trustees of the American Film Institute, also trustee of Twentieth Century Fund. Served in U.S. Army, 1945. Recipient Pulitzer prize for History, 1945. Guggenheim Fellowship, 1946. American Academy Arts and Letters grant, 1946. Francis Parkman prize, 1957. Bancroft prize, 1958. Pulitzer prize for biography, 1965. National Book Award, 1965. Member, Massachusetts Historical Society, Colonial Society of Massachusetts, American Historical Association, American Veterans Committee, National Institute of Arts and Letters, Americans for Democratic Action (vice chairman), Phi Beta Kappa. Democrat. Unitarian. Author: Orestes A. Bronson: a Pilgrim's Progress, 1939; The Age of Jackson, 1945; The Vital Center, 1949; The General and the President (with R. H. Rovere), 1951; The Crisis of the Old Order, 1957; The Coming of the New Deal, published in 1958; Co-editor: Harvard Guide to American History, 1954; Guide to Politics-1954, 1954; The Politics of Upheaval, 1960; Kennedy or Nixon, 1960; The Politics of Hope, 1963; A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House, 1965; The Bitter Heritage: Vietnam and American Democracy, 1966; and Contributor to magazines and newspapers; film reviewer Show Magazine, 196264; Vogue, 1967—. Mr. SCHLESINGER. I am a writer and historian. I have served the U.S. Government at various times in connection with European affairs-during the Second World War with the Office of Strategic Services and the United States Army; in the first year of the Marshall Plan as Special Assistant to W. Averell Harriman; in 1961-63 as Special Assistant to President John F. Kennedy. From 1947 to 1961 I was a member of the history faculty at Harvard University, and since 1966 I have been Schweitzer Professor of the Humanities at the City University of New York. I have written a number of books and articles in the field of American history. In view of the subject of this hearing, I would mention especially an article "Origins of the Cold War" which appeared in Foreign Affairs, October 1967. I am attaching a copy of that article to this statement and hope that it might be incorporated in the record of this hearing. (Appendix, p. 213.) My remarks today will deal with the historical origins and contemporary meaning of the cold war. In my view, the basic circumstance leading to the cold war was the condition of international disorder left by the Second World War. With the Axis States eliminated from the power equation, Europe battered and exhausted, the colonial empires in process of dissolution and the underdeveloped world in tumult, great gaping holes appeared in the structure of world power. Only two states-the United States and the Soviet Union-had the political, military, and ideological dynamism to flow into these vacuums of power. Both, moreover, had grown accustomed during the war to thinking and acting on a world scale. They now appeared in the years after 1945 as the first truly global powers in history, exerting influence everywhere around the planet, encountering no serious opposition, except from each other. As the power vacuums in the postwar structure drew these two ambitious and energetic states into competition and collision, each advanced its own clear-cut conception of the way the postwar world should be organized. The Americans were true to the old Wilsonian faith that "there must be, not a balance of power, but a community of power; not organized rivalries, but an organized common peace. Returning from the Crimea Conference in February 1945, Roosevelt expressed the hope that Yalta would spell the end of the system of unilateral action, the exclusive alliances, the spheres of influence, the balances of power, and all the other expedients that have been tried for centuries-and have always failed. By this universalist view, all nations had an equal interest in all the affairs of the world-except Latin America, where the United States deemed itself more equal than the rest-and the security of each nation was to be provided for by a universal peace organization, the United Nations. The Russians, on the other hand, declined to place confidence in the United Nations and saw the world only in balance of power and spheres of influence. Their physical safety, as they read their historical experience, demanded the absolute guarantee that all states along the Russian border should have "friendly governments," by which they meant governments subservient to Moscow. |