General Discontent

“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.