Free Memories of The Great and The Good by Alistair Cooke Page B

the European policy of the Truman administration was put down by a young generation of historians and columnists as a calculated effort to police the world and so bring on all our present woes. It is never possible, either when you’re looking back on history or living it, to say for sure that B happened on account of A, simply because B followed A.
Post hoc, propter hoc
was called, by the old Romans, the grossest error of elementary logic. Unfortunately, it is one of the axioms that most of us live by. Nobody knows this better than politicians, and while they dread having it used against them, they leap to the chance to use it against the opposition. Next year, a presidential year, we shall certainly be hearing again from the Republicans that they are and always have been the true “party of peace.” Because, when America went into the First World War and the Second World War, and into Korea, and into Vietnam—there was a Democrat in the White House. Ergo, the Democrats are the war party.
    Dean Acheson was alive and well while a new generation was becoming articulate—verbose, anyway—and looking back in anger to the Truman-Acheson years. I cannot forget the first time I felt the blast of this new indignation. It was the late 1960s and I was up in Minnesota during its perishing winter, dashing out of twelve below zero into the ninety-degree oven of a university auditorium. I was to talk to an audience of a thousand or more students. They were polite and even cordial until I started to recall the years just after the Second World War, the threadbare years when Europe was an invalid and a total dependent of the United States, an invalid greatly alarmed by the Soviets’ pressure first in northern Iran, then down in the Mediterranean, then during one terrifying summer in Berlin. I was not proposing a thesis, or even thinking to defend such blessings as we had come to take for granted: the Marshall Plan or the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
    What I was appalled to discover was that the great majority of these students had apparently never heard of the Marshall Plan. There was, however, a minority that knew of it and were pretty cynical about it, as about the first grand installment of an American insurance scheme: I realized, a little late, that when the Russians had been huffing and puffing, when all these great and awful things were happening, these students were unborn, and therefore Azerbaijan and the siege of Berlin and the Marshall Plan lay, for them, in that dead zone that exists in every mind between what is too late to get into the books and what is too early for you to have lived through. From hot little speeches masquerading as questions, I learned two separate and opposing prejudices about Truman and Acheson. One, they were sleeping partners of the late Senator Joseph McCarthy, quick to see Communism under every bed and reacting in panic with billions for arms. This opinion came, obviously, from students inclining visibly to the left. The other complaint came from the fewer leaners to the right: that on the contrary, both the president and his secretary of state were shameless “coddlers” of Communists. This charge sprang from the disdain that both men expressed for loyalty oaths, and for McCarthy’s trembling assertions that there were scores of Communists on active undercover service inside the State Department. In the presidential election year of 1952, the Republicans found this propaganda line too tempting to resist and, mostly actively, one Richard M. Nixon pictured Acheson as something very close to a traitor if not an underground Communist agent. There was a shabby scene at the Republican Convention in 1952 when somebody unfurled a banner inscribed with the legend: “Acheson—Twenty Years of Treason” and there was a thunderclap of cheers.
    It would have been easy, it would have been forgivable self-protection, for Acheson to throw a few sacrificial