Air University Review, May-June 1967
Brigadier General Noel F. Parrish, Jr., AFRes
In 1958 James P. Warburg did not publish a book criticizing the foreign
policy of the
It would be wrong to list statesman-at-large James Warburg among these lethal burdens. He is not a bitter or a carping critic but a sprightly and enthusiastic one. Nor is it his fault that for generations our secretaries of state have served as whipping boys.
The founding fathers considered the senior secretarial post a stepping-stone to the Presidency. Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, and John Quincy Adams followed the Supreme secretarial route to the supreme office, and they were soon followed by the less distinguished Van Buren and Buchanan. That was the end of it. Since the Civil War no Secretary of State has become President, though several have been candidates.
Not since Imperial Rome has any nation been as successful in its foreign
policy as the
Having exercised his critical faculties by some twenty books, plus many pamphlets, public letters, and public appearances, Mr. Warburg remains a polite critic, relatively speaking. Acheson had his McCarthy and Rusk his Schlesinger, Jr., but character assassination is not Mr. Warburg’ s forte. He treats harshly only the deceased James F. Byrnes, whom he calls a “white-supremacist and apostate Roman Catholic.” Of the prominent personalities since the last great war, Warburg reveals in his latest book* an aversion only for Adenauer, Chiang Kai-shek, Churchill, the Diem brothers, and the Dulles brothers. For the presidential advisers on foreign policy whose work he has been criticizing all these years, Warburg has no personal antipathy, other than for Byrnes. He voices only the popular notion that they are Ivy League aristocrats, Europe-oriented and not particularly well informed on other parts of the world. On the theory that “it takes one to know one,” Warburg is something of an authority on Ivy aristocracy. He was an honor graduate of Harvard at nineteen and knew many of the future diplomats when they were international bankers on Wall Street.
Warburg thinks his former colleagues such as Acheson, Dulles, Harriman, Lovett, McCloy, and Forrestal were not well acquainted with “the hewers of wood and the drawers of water” in their own nation and around the world. His own understanding of the common man is indicated in some degree by his former prediction that Germans would not long support Adenauer and by his present contention that Americans would accept a much larger foreign aid appropriation if only President Johnson would insist.
No one could write as much as Mr. Warburg without being wrong and being proved wrong from time to time. On the other hand he has frequently been proved right, more often because his recommendations were not adopted than because they were, which is the easiest way to be proved right. Some of his recommendations have been followed, perhaps for other reasons and in modified form, but followed nevertheless. These, too, are mentioned throughout the book. There are advantages to having your writings published in books, your letters in the New York Times, and your statements in the Congressional Record. The things you want remembered can always be cited, while as for those you would as soon forget, who is going to look them up unless you run for office?
Whether or not he understands the world’s common men better than his fellow financial and intellectual aristocrats, Warburg has managed to express fairly consistently the uneasy conscience and the well-meant hopes of the more-or-less educated American who feels a responsibility toward the less fortunate parts of the world. Such a man no longer feels the weight of the traditional “white man’s burden.” He has lost the urge to direct the governments of Asian, African, and Latin peoples, and he is not too optimistic about trying to convert them to liberal Christianity.
For a full half-century, since the age of empire and foreign missions, the economic interpretation of history and government has predominated. The way has been paved for liberal technicians, economists, and financiers such as Warburg to show us how to keep the new and more sophisticated faith of the economic revolutionist. Repeatedly he speaks of the “revolution of rising expectations,” by which he means economic expectations. He bestows his highest praise on “men such as Chester Bowles, J. K. Galbraith, Walt Rostow, David Bell and Richard Goodwin, whose hearts were in the job of aiding and guiding the revolution of rising expectations.”
Certainly it is reasonable to hope that nations which have failed to accept our forms of religion in decisive numbers and have failed to make a success of the democratic form of government may at least enjoy the products of our science and technology, especially since these things are what they now demand exclusively. The hope that we can influence and help people most by giving them what they want has inspired our massive commitment to more than one hundred billion dollars in foreign aid during the postwar period. Yet there are already signs of disillusionment with the results of this great effort. The men Warburg commends have come to disagree among themselves as to the feasibility and even the wisdom of stimulating these “rising expectations.” It appears in some cases that catering to economic desires only whets an understandable but, under the circumstances, insatiable appetite. Aiding the economic and social revolution in some turbulent areas may mean absorbing the disappointment and even the violence that results when the revolution fails to meet its own exorbitant demands.
In an almost pathetic addition to his chapter on “Aid to Economic Development,” Mr. Warburg deplores “a most unfortunate development. Those members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee who have most consistently favored increased and improved foreign aid have suddenly reversed their position. . . .” While he agrees with most of the committee’s criticism of our foreign policy, “emasculation of foreign aid” seems to him a strange way of working toward a better one. Warburg cannot even bring himself to mention the names of the lost leaders—Fulbright, Morse, Gruening—or to recognize that these senators have proved themselves agile fence-jumpers in the past and are not in the Senate from guessing wrong. Doubtless they agree with the leader of the Swedish Liberal party who said that the essence of liberalism is the ability to change one’s mind.
Of course the greatest cause of disillusionment, and the decisive obstacle
to the realization of “rising expectations,” is ballooning population growth in
precisely those countries that are incapable of feeding the population they
already have. Warburg recognizes that world population will double before the
end of this century, but it is characteristic of his irrepressible optimism
that he airily assumes the problem can be solved simply by increasing food
production. Ignoring geography, he compares wheat production in
Near the end of his book Warburg attempts to come to terms with this neo-isolationist “new Left” that has already enlisted some of the more flexible of the intellectuals and pseudointellectuals in academic and governmental circles. He thinks the new Leftists are “neither pacifists nor super patriots” and that they are more interested in justice than in peace because they are “not yet fully aware that justice and peace are indivisible.”
A number of word combinations such as this make Warburg sound like a
doctrinaire pacifist, yet he is not. Strange as it seems in the context of his
book, Warburg says with approval that “Khrushchev and the whole world learned
that Kennedy would not shrink from nuclear conflict—no matter what the cost—if
the interest of the
Except for occasional aberrations such as this one, Warburg employs the
familiar phraseology of what he calls the “traditional Liberal Left,” which he
admits is now under attack by the new Left for being interventionist abroad and
“the advocate of an ever more powerful paternalistic welfare state at home.” He
quotes the dean of left-of-left radicals, I. F. Stone, and manages even to
believe Fred Cook, author of the wildly antiestablishment book The Warfare
State. Warburg goes so far as to condemn President Truman for being a “typical
American” and to castigate American society as self-centered and parochial for
living in “unrestricted luxury” after World War II. He says fear of communism
led the United States to “the debasement of such international law as existed”
and to “the prosecution of a brutal war against a small, underdeveloped country
armed with little more than infantry weapons and an indomitable desire for
independence and self-determination.” (In case there is some question, he means
It is also true that Warburg labels the recent American intervention in the
Dominican Republic as a “disaster,” that he considers South Korea untenable and
“strategically irrelevant,” calls Chiang Kai-shek’s government “at least as
anti-democratic and oppressive” as the Chicoms, and
favors “liberating” the Formosans by leaving them to the tender mercies of Mao
or his replacement. He claims that against the pro-Communist government of
Most of these positions are old and familiar to those who have encountered, in this country and elsewhere, the views of the hopefully antimilitary, mildly anti-Communist and optimistically pro-neutralist wing of the “traditional Liberal Left.” Irritating as these positions may be to those whose responsibility it is to meet Communist aggression head on, it is possible to recognize that such expressions of dissent, when genuine, may serve a useful purpose which it is not necessary to examine here. Of more interest at this point is the curious conflict revealed in The United States and the Postwar World between the old Left and the new.
To the extent that it is sentimentally pacifistic, doctrinally noninterventionist, and universally “humanitarian,” the new Left was inspired by some of President Kennedy’s attitudes and actions. It has been greatly reinforced by the growing Kennedy legend which emphasizes attitudes and actions along these lines to the exclusion of others which were contradictory. Warburg ends his chapter on Kennedy by praising him as “a statesman who recognized that the problems of survival and peace were not soluble by far-flung legions.”
Despite this timeless bit of rhetoric, Warburg elsewhere says Kennedy, McNamara, and Taylor deserve credit for improving the inadequate military establishment they inherited from General Eisenhower and for rapid progress in “reorganizing and re-equipping the armed forces and providing them with adequate air transport.” (Possibly the air transport was for bringing the far-flung legions home.) He praises Kennedy for renouncing “a Pax Americana enforced on the world,” yet he condemns President Truman who “permitted the great armies of the United States to be demobilized, the fleet to be put in mothballs, and the American military machine to be dismantled” at a moment when “the United States was actually in a position to impose a Pax Americana.” Warburg complains, with justification, that “the moment was lost. . . . It was not until two years after the war ended that Truman began to think of a Pax Americana.”
While unreservedly condemning both Presidents Eisenhower and Johnson for our
present involvement in Vietnam, Warburg praises Kennedy for declaring with “greater
firmness than the previous administration had shown that the United States
would tolerate no foreign interference and would, if necessary, fight to
preserve Laotian independence and neutrality” and applauds Kennedy’s “coolly
conceived demonstration of conventional air, sea, and land power.” In reality,
of course, President Kennedy removed the power and allowed the Communist
utilization of
In the
Finally, near the end of his book, Warburg attempts a summary of the Kennedy contradictions in relation to the present confusion of the new Left. He explains that “Kennedy had spoken the new language of peace, while feeling compelled to act as if he still believed the clichés of the Cold War.” Matching his gullibility to Kennedy’s public confidence, he adds: “Paradoxically, Kennedy, more sincerely interested in disarmament than his predecessors, proceeded, during 1961-1962, to build up American military power to the point at which he could confidently declare that the United States was ‘ahead’ in the arms race.” To his belief in the miracle of winning an arms race in two years (the years during which the Russians prepared and tested more megatons than in all previous nuclear explosions combined), Warburg adds his own confidence that Kennedy’s proclamation of this hypothetical triumph “liberated young Americans from the paralyzing fear of nuclear attack:’ Small wonder that Warburg cannot “predict how that generation will behave when it becomes exposed to the corruption of power” or that he admits “a certain ambiguity in the rising generation’s inheritance from the President who symbolized and gave expression to most of its ideas and aspirations.”
Even as an advocate, Warburg is compelled to recognize the Kennedy
contradictions, yet he never attempts to resolve his own. Though he utilizes
slogans and assumptions of the old, the new, and the mixed Left, as we have
seen, he also demolishes a few. He recognizes the disaster caused by Secretary
McNamara’s summary rejection of Skybolt, sees through
the fakery of the MLF proposal, understands that
Kennedy’s rapidly mounting commitment to
After this surprise it is perhaps anticlimactic to note that on page
276, following repeated condemnations of the Cold War and its containment
policy, he hopes that our government will have “the wisdom not to embark upon a
second Cold War with
The Alperovitz deduction is unconvincing to most historians, but it has a great appeal for the new Left and its ambitious young writers who are anxious to break into print with various extensions of this idea. President Truman, in their eyes, was illiberal at home and reactionary abroad. He was a victim, as Warburg repeats the theme, of a “devil theory” of history-the devil being Communism or Stalin. Warburg asserts his own devil theory, although he does not call it that.
Warburg’s devil is trinitarian. He says flatly “the
men who were chiefly responsible for starting the Cold War and the
anti-communist crusade were Truman, Byrnes and Forrestal.” Stalin, he thinks,
was reasonable until Truman and Byrnes demanded he loosen his hold on
The little group of “Truman-was-a-fink” historians may be performing one useful purpose. Their argument requires that they first establish beyond a doubt the reluctance of most military men to endorse the targeting of the atomic bombs, and this the historians have done systematically. They show that the two most terrible attacks in all history were engineered and directed principally by scientists, politicians, and lawyers—the military acting simply as messengers. It was in principle an attack by civilians against civilians. This does not keep Warburg from fearing now that a “military juggernaut” has taken control of national policy.
Before losing patience with patient critic Warburg, we might well reflect that only in the quantity of his critical productivity does he stand alone. Those who share most of his views are numerous, especially in the academic world. Their less-practiced statements are often hard to follow, and it is more difficult to believe they mean what they seem to say.
As an appendix to his own work, Warburg provides evidence of this in the
form of a report produced by an “Ad Hoc Congressional Conference on
The conference report goes on to say pleasantly that after a simple
settlement and elections, administered by the International Control Commission,
“all parties must firmly adhere to the results of free elections.” For
In other words, we must insulate the area, promote peace, and insure elections free from outside interference after pulling out troops which are now insufficient for any of these purposes. Meanwhile, some troops must be left behind to absorb the Viet Cong, but this is no problem worthy of consideration by the conference. We should remember that Cold War experts such as these once heard from General Maxwell Taylor and other military stalemate theorists that escalation and de-escalation occur in such a manner as to maintain an automatic balance. The conference members understandably were impatient to reduce the conflict, in theory at least, to economic and sociological questions in which they are more expert. In their minds they construct models of human conflict which seem fantastic to a practical man. To them, “limited” warfare is the most chivalrous game ever imagined. It is a kind of chess game in which you avoid an increase in enemy strength by avoiding any increase in your own, in which each side is exhausted by its own strength rather than by that of the enemy. It is a struggle in which each combatant weakens a politely imitative enemy force by first weakening his own.
This panel, whose work is displayed so proudly by panel-member Warburg, did
not consist of ambassadors from
Reports of conferences and committees such as this one, letters to newspapers, and ads in the New York Times signed by numerous professors (mostly physical scientists), all lack the individuality and highly personal charm one finds in James P. Warburg’s work. In addition he possesses a combination of talents and an uninhibited willingness to contradict himself which is not often found outside committees. He is a combination of old Liberal, hero worshipper, villain denouncer, and reluctant new Leftist such as we shall not see again. For those who bear governmental responsibility and wish to broaden their understanding by disagreeable reading, The United States in the Postwar World is highly recommended. Most of the pills will be hard to swallow, but they come in an interesting array of shapes and sizes.
For all his irritating assertiveness, there is an appealing earnestness
about Warburg. In his last appendix he quotes himself as once recommending the
neutralization and reunification of