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Ronald W. Pruessen
conviction that atomic bombs and long-range bombers had ended the days in which
the oceans had served as great protective barriers for the United States. As he once
lectured Congressional leaders:
“Today those barriers no longer exist and Germany and Japan have become the two
great anchors in the defense of freedom, the two great prizes that the Communist
world is seeking to attain (...) we must keep on our side the great industrial potential
of Japan and Western Europe. We must keep them from falling into Communist
hands.” 46
Dulles would have agreed wholeheartedly. He had been personally responsible
for negotiating the Japanese Peace Treaty in 1950-51 and had been intensely concerned
about transatlantic relations since the days of Woodrow Wilson. 47 In 1953
and 1954, he regularly underlined EDC’s value for safeguarding crucial European
interests against Cold War dangers. “The big prize the Communists were after was,
above all, Germany,” he told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Failure to
ratify EDC – failure to “consolidate the position in Europe” – would create dangerous
Kremlin opportunities. The Russians would be able to offer the Germans “so
much (...) East Germany, restoration of the Polish boundary, trade” – and then “the
first thing you know, Germany is going to be stolen right from under our noses.”
French obstreperousness was staggeringly dangerous as a result: “The trouble is,”
Dulles argued, “when France drifts, Germany goes over the abyss.” 48
But Eisenhower and Dulles were more than Cold Warriors. As expanding archival
sources have generated more scholarly work on the 1950s, a consistent analytical
theme has been the presence of complexity beyond the ken of the two leaders’
contemporaries. The struggle for EDC certainly substantiates such a perspective.
Both the President’s and the Secretary of State’s commitment to “dual containment”
had been demonstrated even before 1953, for example. In Dulles’s case, particularly,
the advocacy of both using and controlling Germany had remained a
steady ingredient in his policy advice after its first appearance in 1947. EDC
became one component of a valuable cluster of mechanisms for generating the
“centrifugal forces” he wanted to have acting on Germany – forces needed to counteract
the “centripetal” ones that had kept it isolated and dangerous in the past. As
he put it during the tense weeks just preceding the fateful French vote of August
1954, “It would be an incalculable disaster if there was a failure” of the policy
designed “to ally Germany with the West and to prevent the revival of German militarism.”
49
Eisenhower was in full agreement. He had been so, in fact, since the summer of
1951, when his own advice along “dual containment” lines had helped persuade
Truman and Acheson to rally behind the plans that ultimately produced EDC. His
46. R. FERRELL, ed., The Diary of James C. Hagerty: Eisenhower in Mid-Course, 1954-1955, Bloomington,
Indiana 1983, 140.
47. PRUESSEN, John Foster Dulles: The Road to Power, Chapters 3, 5-7, 12-13, 16-17.
48. July 16 and July 22, 1954 transcripts, Executive Sessions of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee
(Historical Series).
49. FRUS, 1952-1954, V, 1051.