Book Review

Freedom's War: The American Crusade Against the Soviet Union
By Scott Lucas
New York: New York University Press, 1999

Reviewed by Marc Selverstone, Ph.D., For Intelligence Forum

Scott Lucas, who chairs the Department of American and Canadian Studies at the University of Birmingham (UK), has written widely on various aspects of U.S. and British diplomacy in the postwar period. With Freedom's War, he sets out to construct a history of U.S. foreign policy during the years 1948-1956 which transcends mainstream accounts of Soviet-American antagonism. Eschewing what he regards as the limitations of the "National Security" framework, with its focus on "the elite's of Presidents, diplomats and generals," Lucas explores the ideological and cultural bases of U.S. diplomacy. Such a focus, he argues, reveals American Cold War practice to have been both aggressive and messianic. Not content merely to "contain" the spread of communism, U.S. policy came to be marked by the desire to "liberate" those nations trapped behind the Iron Curtain-a policy which sprung from an intensely ideological approach to international affairs and which, according to Lucas, emerged with the Truman Doctrine of March 1947. From that point forward, he maintains, U.S. policymakers began to promote a policy of "liberation" over that of "containment," taking the offensive in an effort to roll back Communist gains in Europe.

Aside from recasting the orientation of U.S. policy, Lucas charts the emergence of what he calls the "public-private network," a tacit alliance between the U.S. government and the private sector which would fight the ideological battles of the Cold War. According to Lucas, this network swung into action in 1947 with groups such as the Advertising Council and the Committee for the Marshall Plan mobilizing the nation in support of administration policies. In time, organizations such as the National Committee for a Free Europe, the Committee on the Present Danger, and the Fund for a Free Russia, in conjunction with various branches of the U.S. government, would take their "informational" offensive abroad as "an essential part of the American defense of the Free World."

That offensive, however, never materialized to any great degree. Wrangling between the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency for control of such initiatives was partly to blame, but behind that bureaucratic turf war lay real policy differences on how best to force the pace of change in Eastern Europe, with the CIA and the Psychological Strategy Board (PSB) recommending immediate action and the State Department advocating a more patient approach. Unable to reconcile those competing visions, and powerless to end the Cold War on terms acceptable to the United States, the Truman administration bequeathed to its successor the challenge of liberating those peoples trapped behind the Iron Curtain. The Eisenhower team resolved to pursue that very agenda-rolling back Soviet gains-creating a more institutionalized, systematic structure for doing so. It would call on C.D. Jackson, the newly created special assistant for psychological operations, to aid in that task.

Yet the incoming administration proved no more capable than its predecessor in designing and implementing a policy of liberation. Its inability, even reluctance, to promote the fragmentation of the Soviet bloc became manifest within two months of taking office when an allegedly ideal moment for inciting revolt-the death of Josef Stalin in March 1953-presented itself. According to Lucas, Eisenhower himself deserves much of the blame for that failing. Displaying few traces of leadership, Eisenhower equivocated when faced with such opportunities, paving the way for continued strife between C.D. Jackson's activist agenda and the more cautious approach of the State Department. Instead of bold ventures abroad, the administration responded with a mundane bureaucratic shake-up, replacing the PSB with the Operations Coordinating Board (OCB), and providing the agency with an increasingly wide mandate. Still, the OCB would run into many of the same philosophical and institutional roadblocks as its forerunner. By the end of Eisenhower's first term, then, the administration was no closer to liberating captured peoples than it was when it entered office.

In an effort to explain why this was so, Lucas makes heavy use of sources from the Declassified Documents Reference System, the National Archives, and the relevant presidential libraries. The result is a study chock-filled with examples of the public-private network in action; indeed, it is a valuable primer on the role played by extra- and quasi-governmental agencies in fighting the Cold War during some of its chilliest days. This book is loaded with numerous tales of derring-do and amply demonstrates the involvement of government agencies in the work of nominally independent, freedom-fighting organizations. Readers will no doubt benefit from the breadth and scope of its coverage.

Unfortunately, this study suffers from a variety of problems, the most basic of which involve matters of documentation. For starters, Lucas often substitutes retrospective judgments for contemporary appraisals of events, without indicating that a gap exists-in some cases, decades-between the occurrence of those events and comments made about them. In addition, Lucas often inserts quotes into his narrative without attributing those remarks to any particular individual, leaving the reader to flip back and forth between endnotes and text just to see who is speaking. Of lesser concern is his reliance on secondary works as sources of record for public remarks made by government officials-a disconcerting habit for a publishable monograph. Overall, Freedom's War could have benefited from additional rounds of editing; the text is dotted with numerous missing words, misspelled words, irregular punctuation, inadequate introductory sentences, and garbled sentences in general. Several chapters lack any clear conceptual focus-more often than not, the chronology itself seems to function as an organizing principle-and most are of highly arbitrary length, ranging from four, to seventeen, to thirty-four pages.

Errors of fact also mar the narrative. For instance, Lucas wrongly claims that George Elsey, an assistant to Clark Clifford, was the "only" official who warned of the dangers inherent in the rhetoric of the Truman Doctrine. In addition, and on more than one occasion, he locates the December 1947 Conference of Foreign ministers in Moscow rather than in London. At another point, Lucas has Churchill delivering the "Iron Curtain" speech at "Fulton" College in "Westminster," Missouri, rather than at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri. Moreover, he suggests that the United States in March 1946 was acting according to a "well defined doctrine of 'containment'"-a charge that, while not factually erroneous, is, at the very least, highly debatable and worthy of citation. At a minimum, it cries out for some attempt at clarification.

Compounding these problems-some of which, arguably, are cosmetic-are those which cut to the substance of the book. Lucas takes Eisenhower to task for the president's poor leadership on the "liberation" front, a charge which, given Eisenhower's management style, is neither surprising nor difficult to make. What is remarkable, however, is that Lucas criticizes Eisenhower for failing to transform a rhetorical policy into a concrete one-especially since that policy is one which Lucas himself implicitly condemns. Would Eisenhower have exercised greater leadership if he had sanctioned many of the proposed initiatives, inciting tensions and increasing the chances for more serious East-West confrontation in the process? Perhaps it was his equivocation-his maintenance of the rhetorical offensive and simultaneous wariness of its practical application-which put the brakes on potentially foolhardy measures, and perhaps his administration, with the noted exception of C.D. Jackson, responded in kind. A demonstration of leadership? Quite possibly. Regardless, it would have been helpful if Lucas had probed deeper into the meaning of Eisenhower's hedging. Aside from this issue, however, lies a more problematic one. According to Lucas, it was the public-private nexus-that link between government agencies and allegedly non-governmental organizations-which institutionalized "freedom's war" in American culture and carried it abroad. Indeed, Lucas does an admirable, even exhaustive, job of illuminating both the cozy relationships between those groups and the blurred lines between official and non-official propaganda. But that is as far his argument goes, for he spends comparatively little time discussing the meaning of the public-private nexus or of putting it into a broader context. The reader is left to wonder whether that network was unique to matters of foreign policy or even to the period in question. For instance, his discussion of the Committee for the Marshall Plan to Aid European Recovery (a group which Lucas persists in calling the "Committee to Defend the Marshall Plan"), calls to mind the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies, one of a number of organizations with ties to government officials that were instrumental in putting the country on a war footing years earlier.

What are we to make of those earlier instances of public-private coordination? Did the Cold War merely exacerbate a trend already underway? Did the increasing complexity of modern America and growth of the national state make such networks virtual certainties in postwar life? And if so, how vital was the Cold War to the emergence-or continuation, or expansion, or even diminution-of such networks anyway? While it would be worthwhile to find out how unique such networks were to the United States, Lucas's failure to engage this particular question is understandable; he confines his study explicitly to the American context. But he seems to confine it too tightly, since his study, or at least this dimension of it, is limited to making the case for the existence and extent of a public-private network. Surely, Freedom's War could have been more enlightening had Lucas probed the meaning of that network and provided some frame of reference for understanding it.

To be fair, Lucas does suggest at least one interpretation of why the network became such a prominent, if not wholly effective, instrument of national policy. Those officials who took up the Cold War crusade, Lucas argues, were acting well within an ideological framework shared by most Americans; thus, insofar as that network carried out the will of the people, it served, rather, than subverted the public interest. It is an interesting argument, and one that probably has substantial merit, but Lucas offers no evidence to that effect-neither through primary research nor through a citation of secondary sources. If he is trying to say something about the nature of "freedom's war," in addition to documenting the ploys, schemes, and plots used to fight it, then he needs to do more to prove his case.

This is especially so given his interest in an American Cold War "ideology" and its transformation into a weapon of "cultural" warfare. How are we supposed to understand the nature of that ideology? How deep are its roots? From whence does it spring? Had it always been such a part of the public dialogue? And what of its relation to the national "culture," if it is even possible to speak of such a unified concept? Concepts as weighty as these deserve at least some measure of discussion if we are to believe that American ideology and culture was, respectively, as fixed and as malleable as Lucas claims.

In the end, Lucas has written a useful account of some of the most crucial years of the Cold War. While his approach is hardly as novel as he claims-scholars have been writing outside the "mainstream" of "National Security" discourse for years, now, and interest in fleshing out the offensive side of containment dates back at least to the 1980s-he has compiled a valuable study of American elite's and the policy of "liberation." In all likelihood, that policy, and the ideological and cultural dimensions of it, will continue to fascinate historians for years to come.

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