Realpolitik versus Ideals at the U.N.’s Creation

 [In this entry my father offers a jaded critique of the politicking going on at the United Nations Conference on International Organization, more commonly known as the San Francisco Conference. The conference ran from April 25 to June 26, 1945, and culminated in the founding of the United Nations. Delegates from 46 countries attended the conference, but four men conducted the bulk of the negotiations: Edward Stettinius, U.S. Secretary of State; Anthony Eden, British Foreign Affairs Secretary; V.M. Molotov, the USSR’s Minister of Foreign Affairs; and T.V. Soong, China’s Minister of Foreign Affairs.

My father’s main interest here was in the realpolitik nature of the horse-trading, specifically as it related to votes for including additional U.N. members. Ultimately, four more nations were added to the U.N.’s membership by the date of its launch: Denmark, Argentina, and the Soviet Socialist Republics of Ukraine and Belarus. Poland, which my father viewed much more sympathetically than the Axis-leaning Argentina, didn’t make the initial cut, but was later admitted as the 51st founding member. Post war, of course, Argentina would become a notorious safe haven for many Nazi SS members seeking to escape prosecution.]

May 2, 1945 (Ft. Jackson, S.C.)

The world which the United States seems to be sponsoring at San Francisco has little in it either brave or new. The other day Ed Stettinius demanded that Argentina be admitted to the Conference, and Molotov countered with the proposal that the Lublin Poles be admitted. The representatives of the nations promptly voted for Argentina and against Poland. Now it’s a plain fact that during most of the course of the war Argentina has been sympathetic to the Axis cause, and, until diplomatic pressure from the US and Britain became too heavy, openly allowed, and perhaps aided, German espionage and propaganda activities. It was only last month, when German defeat was an all but accomplished fact, that Argentina made its declaration of war on the Axis. This was obviously a last minute bid to cash in on the fruits of a victory which it had officially opposed, until it appeared inevitable. And now the United Nations, with the exception of the few states under Russian influence, have been cowed by the United States into condoning this bald-faced opportunism. But Poland, which was the first country to resist German aggression in this war, and the immediate cause of bringing England to war, is refused representation at the Conference.

The ostensible reason for this anomaly, of course, is the fact that there are two Polish governments, one favored by Russia, one favored by the US and Britain, and neither side yet willing to compromise with the other. Of the several interested parties, it seems that the Poles themselves have the least to say about their predicament. Thus the issues at stake obviously transcend the wishes and interest of the Polish people, and are only incidentally concerned with the “democratic” basis of the Polish government. If this were the main consideration, there would be no insurmountable difficulty in the interested powers setting up a provisional government pledged to hold free elections within a stated period.

Apparently the major issue in British political philosophy, at least, is the European balance of power, which, in British eyes, is seriously threatened by the westward expansion of Russian political and economic influence. And the US, so far as it is able to define its own interests in Europe, feels that they will best be served by backing up Britain. Though the foreign offices of both nations must have admitted privately that Russia must eventually have her own way in Poland, they figure that they had better make a strong show of opposition at this point, both to discourage Russia from moving on further, and to raise their prestige among the Western European states which make up their own sphere of influence. But this is an old story, and there’s no assurance that whatever compromise is eventually settled on will be a real solution to the problem. The jealously-guarded sovereignty of the contesting states is the real stumbling block, insofar as each state proposes its own national solution to situations which are international in scope. Of course the various statesmen of the states are aware of this contradiction of means with ends, and San Francisco is a first attempt to remedy it. But the tenor of the discussions, as reported in the press, has not been encouraging. The impression is encouraged that decisions are being made which are advantageous to one state at the expense of another. There’s too little concentration on what might be advantageous to the people of the whole world, at a certain price, in loss of sovereignty, to every one of the states.

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War’s Brutality, and Americans’ Smug Self Image

 [Often in his journal entries about World War II, my father exhibited an empathy for our German and Japanese enemies — especially the civilians in each country who he understood weren’t all that different from America’s citizens. His ability to see the world clearly, and to avoid being swept up in the sloganeering and mob-think of the moment, was a trait he exhibited throughout his life. Thus his later dismay at the Bush Administration’s fear mongering and demonizing, which it used in its successful post-9/11 efforts to push our country into the unnecessary and misguided Iraq war.]

April 23, 1945 (Ft. Jackson, S.C.)

The war with Japan has been waged with relentless ferocity from the very beginning. Every battle has been one of annihilation; the fact that the battlefields have been isolated islands may explain this. Whichever side happens to be losing has no hope of escape and has been convinced that death is a better choice than capture by the enemy. We have now broken deep within Japan’s defenses, and are plastering the home islands daily with our big bombers. Thus it happens that the Japs are catching the hell they hoped to pour on us. Fair enough, we say. They asked for it, and now we’re giving it to them. But sometimes I wonder at the feelings this brutal conflict stirs in us. We read of the flattening of whole square miles of Japanese cities with considerable satisfaction, – Serves them right! the dirty bastards! Yet in those ruins there must be the mangled bodies of thousands of ordinary Japanese people, inoffensive, hard-working people, proud of their country, no doubt, as we are proud of our country. This is obviously the same ruthlessness bombing of civilian populations which we damned when the Germans did it all over Europe, and the Japs in China. War, after all, moves ahead by destruction, and the more destruction the better. But in smugly believing that the Jap people somehow morally deserve their agony, which was an inhuman crime when the British and the Chinese were suffering it, simply highlights the easy habits of self-deception by which nations can allow themselves to condone war in the first place. War is convenient in that it allows us to direct all our fury against an enemy for faults which in peacetime we sometimes have the candor to see exist in ourselves. Now that we’re coming head on against the problems of peace, which demand the constructive qualities we’ve assumed we possess in unusual degree, as opposed to our enemies, we’ll find just how far our assurance was justified.

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Worry and Uncertainty Following FDR’s Death

[This conversational entry is interesting as a snapshot in time, given that it depicts the reaction by my father and a couple of his Army buddies upon receiving the news of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s death (on April 12, 1945). The concerns they raise reflect the magnitude of FDR’s unequaled position on the national and global stage, and include even the possibility of domestic revolution. The trio also expresses what were probably widely held doubts about his successor, Harry S. Truman. Truman would go on to prove most of those doubts unwarranted.]

April 13, 1945 (Ft. Jackson, S.C.)

Cunningham and I were sitting on the ground near our tent, talking a little, and taking it easy in the afternoon heat. Pearson came down through the woods and stopped over us. “I’ve just heard some very bad news,” he said.

“What’s that,” we said, thinking, I suppose that he was going to tell us we were stuck on some special detail.

“President Roosevelt is dead,” he said.

Somehow I knew that he was speaking the truth, yet the words wouldn’t sink in, and automatically I said, “You’re kidding.”

“No,” he said, “it’s true. I’ve just been listening to it over a radio. He was at the place of his in Georgia –“

“Warm Springs,” Cunningham said.

“Yeah, I guess that’s it, the little White House. He was sitting having his portrait painted. All of a sudden he fainted, and that was all. Cerebral hemorrhage.”

“Truman!” Cunningham said. That was what had immediately flashed to my mind, too. Harry Truman was now President of the United States.

We three fellows talked together for half an hour before it was time to fall out for the evening formation. We were struggling to fit this almost incomprehensible event into our minds, and see what meaning it had for us. Some of our remarks were purely emotional; others we tried to think out.

“God!” We’ll never get out of the Army now,” Cunningham said.

But I didn’t think that the President’s death would have much effect on the actual course of the war. We agreed that it might have some immediate effect on the men at the front, but we couldn’t decide whether it would more inspire or discourage them. Also, it seemed likely that Germany and Japan would attempt to gain a psychological advantage from his death, but we weren’t really worried about their success.

Then we wondered if there was any danger of an internal revolution. “Watch and see,” Cunningham said. “The Communist[s] will really make a big bid to take over the country now.” Pearson and I didn’t think this possible, but we all began to see some danger of a military clique installing itself in power, and I thought the threat of some form of Fascism was more dangerous than that of Communism.

“Can you imagine Harry Truman sitting down with Churchill and Stalin!” Cunningham said.

“That sounds ridiculous,” I said. We all mentioned Truman many times, but had nothing kind to say about him beyond a vague hope that he might somehow rise to the occasion. We all thought that either Wallace or Dewey would have been preferable to Truman. “Maybe he’ll die of the shock,” I said.

“That would give us Stettinius,” Pearson said. But we couldn’t feel enthusiastic about the Secretary of State, either. In short, try as we might, we could think of no man now in public life sufficient to take his place. Thus we began to realize the true enormity of the risk we had taken upon ourselves by making Franklin Roosevelt almost an indispensable man in our national affairs. Once there was Willkie, at least, to stand beside him in stature, but Willkie, too, was dead now. “What’s going to happen to us now?” This thought seemed uppermost in the mind of almost everyone.

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Knowledge versus Wisdom, and Faith in the Crosshairs

[In this long and “heavy” journal entry, my father starts by discussing the distinction between knowledge and wisdom, but then moves into an assessment of religion as a particular — and at-risk — form of wisdom. His attribution of the 1940s information explosion to the availability of high-speed printing and cheap paper seems incredibly quaint when viewed from our Internet-powered age of instant access to almost any “fact,” scholarly paper or book. If anything, however, the adage he cites “that the modern age has more knowledge and less wisdom than all others which have preceded it,” seems more on target today than ever.

Later in the entry, my father explores the collision between intellectual speculation and inquiry and the institutionalized wisdom, or faith, of religion. This analysis is just one of the internal debates my father depicted in many of his early journal entries, as he sought to define and adopt a “personal faith” of his own.]

March 20, 1945 (Ft. Jackson, S.C.)

I think I remember it being said by someone who should know that the modern age has more knowledge and less wisdom than all others which have preceded it. There is a certain charm in the facility of this statement, and perhaps a certain amount of truth in it. At any rate, it needs considerable dissection into its roots before it can have much meaning.

The profession of scholarly research, with its offspring of popularized writing, has reached a proportion in our day sufficient to keep the book and magazine markets flooded with discussions, analyses, expositions, and criticisms of the details of life and thought in every culture which has preceded our own. Probably this phenomenon is due to the development of high-speed printing, combined with the mass production of cheap paper, but the cause doesn’t interest me as much as the effect.

This research ranges all the way through the mechanic trades and arts to the religious beliefs and practices of former civilizations, and while one individual will usually be interested only in a small segment of the whole span, these studies are easily available to almost anyone with the interest and the time to consult them, and this availability is common knowledge. People today live in a house in which the back door is perpetually wide open on all that has gone before, and there is no selectivity in displaying this vista of the past. People no longer look back through the carefully-oriented lens of myth and tradition, but through the clear, indiscriminate glass of historical fact. Though the many histories written from a nationalist bias must modify this analogy, it is not particularly such works which I have in mind here, but rather the objective studies of scholars in the myriad fields now open to research.

Apparently, then, there has been a vast and accelerating increase to common knowledge in our era. The popular quiz programs on the radio attest to a mania for the acquisition of diverse and often unrelated items of information. But whether wisdom has decreased in proportion to this increase in knowledge is another question, if we mean by wisdom the ability of a human mind to correlate the facts of experience and of history into meaningful patterns which may serve as a reasonably dependable guide to future action. When a certain pattern of wisdom comes to dominate a whole community, it may be called a religion, or, at least, an ethical system, if the ceremonial and supernatural accoutrements usually associated with a religion are lacking. We see that most communities in the past have, each in itself, been dominated by one special religion or ethical system, accepted without question by the majority of its members, and, furthermore, denying the right of all rival religions or ethics. Catholicism, for instance, held a practically exclusive grip on the peoples of Western Europe during the Middle Ages. It acted as a mold, determining the directional flow, within narrow bounds, of even the brilliant minds of the period. To all men it was both a discipline and a bond. It undoubtedly quickened the communal spirit, but it also bound society to the status quo by putting penalties on the speculative mind. The powerful predisposition to faith all but annihilated the habit of inquiry which had gained great strength in the classical civilizations. So if faith is equivalent to wisdom, the former faith-cultures have been wise far beyond our own, for faith and inquiry tend to exclude one another and ours is predominantly an inquiring culture, at least in those realms where faith has formerly held the upper hand; namely, in religion and ethics.

Even the Catholic church, which still adheres to the medieval insistence on the unity of faith, has many members who are beset with doubts. As for members of the Protestant sects, they have so long enjoyed the privilege of the individual interpretation of their faith that the discipline of communal faith has disintegrated in their churches to the vanishing point. There has probably never before in any civilization been so universal a disrespect for the exclusive claims to right which one faith makes over another. And no searching into religious faith, no reexamining of religious faith can hope to restore its former force in society, for the critical analysis of a faith is tantamount to an admission of its inadequacy under conditions of the present. If it filled the human need for faith, there would be no need to question or examine it. A living faith quite subconsciously determines the lines of intellectual development and material operation in the society of which it is the organic foundation; when a given faith must be submitted to objective study, it’s either dead or dying.

That there is a definite human need for faith is illustrated by the preoccupation of many of the best minds of our day with the formulation of a personal faith. First comes the feeling of estrangement from the traditional faiths of the past which are still artificially imposed on the majority of children at the same time that their secular schooling inculcates in them the rudimentary habits of inquiry and scientific skepticism, which, whatever their ultimate value, are consistent with the conditions of twentieth-century life. The average child, perhaps, comes to see the discrepancy between his imposed religious faith and his naturally-acquired habit of inquiry, but he pushes his discovery no further than the mediocre compromise which results in a dormant intellect and a sentimentalized faith. Those who are compelled to push on farther will almost inevitably run into a period of cynicism in which all values are questioned. Finally, the man whose creative impulses are thwarted by the sterility of cynicism, brings himself to the point of making a definite choice between scientific skepticism and traditional religious faith. It is now an exceptional case when the latter is not discarded in favor of the former. We are indeed a civilization between faiths, but not a civilization without faith, nor yet a civilization without wisdom. Widespread industrialization has long demanded a new faith, which has meant the spreading discredit and slow crumbling of the old faith, with all its giant reverberations in institutional life. Therein lies the high drama, both tragedy and comedy, of our times.

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