From War Times to Treaty Times, a U.S. Correspondent Comes Home

Packing up to move back to the United States after 43 years in Europe seems like sorting out all the characters and subplots in Tolstoy’s “War and Peace.”

When I arrived in Liverpool as a war correspondent in February of 1945, aboard the Cunard troopship Mauretania with 7,000 American soldiers packed like sardines from the hold to the sun deck, the Allied armies had not yet reached the Rhine and Hitler’s V-1 buzz bombs and V-2 rockets were still falling on England. Now as I leave Europe, the latter-day nuclear descendants of that early Nazi rocketry, the American cruise and Pershing missiles and the Soviet SS-20s, will soon also begin to leave, turning a page of history--hopefully for good.

At the end of 50 years of daily journalism, of a crowded, colorful, action-filled parade of men and events, the events are pasted up in more than 30 scrapbooks with names from Roosevelt to Reagan and datelines from Washington to Moscow and well beyond.

Memory turns mainly to the men, not the events--men like Jean Monnet, Dean Acheson, Anthony Eden, John Foster Dulles, W. Averell Harriman, Gen. George C. Marshall, Konrad Adenauer, David Bruce, Charles de Gaulle, Harold Macmillan and Henry A. Kissinger--an almost endless list of movers and shapers .

Of all those I have known or covered, Monnet, that great Frenchman, stands out in memory in a particular way--unusual because I cannot recall ever writing a headline story out of the many conversations that I had with him across more than a quarter of a century. Monnet left headline-making to others. He dealt in ideas, concepts, analysis, thought, in influence rather than power, in progress rather than playing politics.

To spend an hour with Monnet was intellectual stimulation and conversational delight--the beautiful clarity with which he organized his thoughts and the light that he could shine into dark corners of what was going on in the world. In all the years I knew him, he was always “Monsieur Monnet.” He was not in the least forbidding or imperious and he was totally without pomposity. Yet it always seemed that it would be as improper to call him by his first name as it would be to call the Pope “Jack.”

You always came away from Monnet with a clearer sense of what was important and what was not, with a sense of how history was moving, of the future shaping of events. I recall going to see him in Luxembourg during the early 1950s, when he had just set up headquarters of the European Coal and Steel Community, his great creation that changed the political and economic outlook for all of Europe. Looking for a headline story, I tried to question him on some problem of tariff harmonization in the steel industry that was holding things up in those early days of building Europe.

After some back-and-forth on the subject, Monnet grew a little impatient and said: “Look, my friend, this is a process in which we are involved--not a tariff negotiation. We are building a market for all of Europe. We are at the beginning of a process, and this problem you are talking about will be solved because there is no other way, because the process is much greater than the problem.”

When I was in Brussels two months ago, covering my last European Community summit meeting, I thought back to that conversation when heads of the 12 community countries had at last reached agreement after a year of wrangling on a package deal to curb European agricultural spending. Once again Monnet’s “process” was greater than the problem.

De Gaulle of course detested Monnet’s ideas about a federated Europe. He even had Monnet’s telephone tapped, but Monnet simply dismissed a warning about this with the remark: “Well tant pis, perhaps he’ll learn something.”

Once when I raised some point with Monnet about “negotiating” with De Gaulle, he got that slightly pained looked on his face and said: “My friend, you do not negotiate with Gen. De Gaulle. He does not negotiate once his mind is made up. What you have to do is set up hard facts, confront him with truths that he must take into account. Then he can be very flexible. But he does not negotiate.”

How many leaders had to live through how many confrontations with the general to find out that basic truth.

The most absorbing diplomatic story for me, as well as dramatic and historic, was the Geneva conference of 1954 when the French disengaged from their unwinnable Indochina war.

Negotiations lasted from early April to the end of July; it was absorbing not only because of the issue of war and peace, but because of the high quality of the leaders and diplomats involved, and the East-West complexities of China’s presence at a conference for the first time.

John Foster Dulles saw the French efforts to end their involvement in Indochina as a sell-out to communism, and another Munich in the making. He failed in his efforts to keep China away from Geneva, and he misjudged the French bargaining position. He packed up when he saw the way things were heading, left Geneva and flew back to Washington.

Before he departed, however, Dulles found himself in a men’s room of the Palais des Nations with Chinese Foreign Minister Chou En-lai. The American press was quickly assured by a State Department spokesman that neither man had acknowledged or recognized the presence of the other, and certainly had not exchanged greeting or--God forbid--shaken hands. Dulles was taking no chances with the U.S. China lobby.

Despite, or more probably because of Dulles’ opposition to the very idea of a deal with communists, American correspondents in Geneva were briefed with remarkable candor by French and British diplomats from the top down. We regularly saw Premiers Georges Bidault and, later, Pierre Mendes-France, as well as British Foreign Secretary Eden. So each day, after tennis along the shores of Lake Geneva, we were weaving together a complexity of diplomatic and political maneuvering as the French and British fought hard and skillfully with little or no help from the Americans to wrestle a settlement agreement out of Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav M. Molotov and Chou En-lai. No television cameras could poke into reporting and writing this history.

In the end, of course, Indochina was partitioned on the 17th Parallel, with Hanoi going to the communists and Saigon to the West. It was a far better settlement than Dulles believed possible for the French. America’s Vietnam War might have been avoided had Washington been prepared to learn from the French experience.

Of all the American diplomats I have known across the years, Charles E. (Chip) Bohlen stood out for his high professionalism, his vast experience, common sense and his wit, charm and personality. I first met Bohlen during a London “Big Four” foreign ministers meeting in those dark postwar days of December, 1947. We saw each other regularly, if intermittently, across the years and then intensively when he became ambassador in Paris during the De Gaulle years from 1963 to 1968.

Bohlen enjoyed food, drink, conversation and poker. His great love was poker, and God knows how many games I survived at the American Embassy residence. Once I got a summary telephone call from his secretary that “the ambassador wants you to play poker tonight.”

When I arrived the game was already in progress, with the usual cold buffet and drinks laid out on a table in the embassy library. Joining Bohlen at the round table were Ambassador Llewelyn E. Thompson Jr., our wonderful man in Moscow at the time; Cyrus L. Sulzberger of the New York Times; Charles Collingwood of CBS, and a businessman friend of Chip’s. I took a seat on Chip’s right and soon began to hit a run of good hands.

Then at around 10:30 the library door opened and in walked Secretary of State Dean Rusk, fresh from a formal dinner of foreign ministers. Rusk’s visit was the reason Bohlen had organized the game; the secretary dropped into a chair on my right.

With the secretary of state on my right and the ambassador on my left, my winning streak soon dropped off. Rusk began drawing my cards. I suspect that this may have been the last time an American secretary of state ever sat down to a poker table with a mix of ambassadors and journalists. Some things just aren’t done any longer.

I think Dulles was the first secretary of state to make a major effort to “use” the press. I do not say this resentfully But I never felt this to be the case with Acheson or Rusk. On the other hand, Kissinger carried it to a remorselessly fine art--with the added advantage of keeping a lock-hold on correspondents traveling with him on his Air Force plane.

With Dulles (as with Acheson and Rusk) a reporter with his feet on the ground always had other contacts or sources. But with Kissinger you were all but imprisoned, up in the air.

Sitting in the secretary’s cabin 36,000 feet high, being told what he had just done and was now about to do, I always felt rather like one of those Strasbourg geese being stuffed with corn in a pen, nowhere to move or turn. But when you landed there was not much choice but to tell it the way Henry told it, and, as a reporter, resent it.

If there has been one basic theme running through reporting from Europe for the last 43 years, it has been confrontation with the Soviet Union. America’s involvement in Europe from the Marshall Plan to the tedious diplomatic reporting from Helsinki and Geneva and Vienna and Belgrade and Madrid--all of it was part and parcel of the ups and downs of East-West confrontation.

But what an enormous success these postwar years have been for the West. Containment of the Soviet Union has worked, more or less as George Kennan foresaw. A Soviet leader has at last emerged who is pragmatic enough and strong enough to choose a course of domestic reform rather than another futile round of pseudo-conflict with the West.

The real significance of the impending withdrawal of missiles from Europe is the tacit admission on the part of the Soviet Union--40 years after the Berlin blockade--that war against Western Europe is not an option in the exercise of Soviet power.

So I depart from Europe at a time when confrontation is no longer going to be the theme of history. It is a good time to be going home.