Table of Contents
Jean Monnet, David Bruce, William Tomlinson
( Theo Mey, courtesy of the Fondation Jean Monnet pour LEurope)
To
Rozanne L. Ridgway and
the late Andrew J. Goodpaster
Public Servants, Teachers, Atlanticists
PREFACE
THE ORIGINS OF THIS BOOK appear between the lines of its dedication. In 1992, just after the final collapse of the Soviet Union, I arrived in Washington, D.C., and began work as an intern in a small policy organization called the Atlantic Council of the United States. It was located in the Grange Building on H Street, where some of its members had offices. My own was tiny, barely as wide as my desk, with a view overlooking the slate roof of the old Decatur House next door. The internship turned into a job that lasted through the end of the decade. By then we had moved to the more spacious Barr Building on Farragut Squarealthough the quarters were still more shabbily genteel than grandiose, the Barr being the only building in the city with manually operated elevators, run by kind old ladies who read Bibles and sold Avon cosmetics, and chosen for the council because its president insisted that we not be more than six blocks from the Metropolitan Club.
Like many Washington institutions, the Atlantic Council foundered after the Cold War. It struggled to find a new mission for itself and to retain financial backers. Today the organization is prosperous, but back then it just barely survived, thanks only to the reputation of its superannuated leadership. When I arrived, the council was chaired by the two people named abovethe former supreme allied commander and White House staff secretary, General Andrew Goodpaster, and the retired ambassador and assistant secretary of state, Rozanne Ridgway. They were, as a council director once put it, the two most respected people in Washington among the still relatively intimate foreign policy nomenklatura. For a young person to learn the ropes from them and to be exposed daily to their circle of friends and like-minded colleagues was an education of which the value is impossible to measure. Not only did it open a window onto a fading world but it also conveyed a style of thinkinghard, lucid, self-confident yet practical, conscientious, consensual, and persistently creativethat itself came to seem like a relic of the past.
As those who experienced it will recall, Washington became a less happy place as the 1990s wore on. Demoralized, I moved, first to London and then to Harvard, determined to learn the craft of history so as to be able to record some of the things I had learned, too few of which appeared in the books I had read. But where to make the most useful mark? It was another teacher, Ernest May, who suggested in Sever Hall one cold November morning that I focus my dissertation on the Bureau of European Affairs in the State Department. How did it prevail for so long? Tackling that subject seemed obvious. I had known or heard of many of its officers, but at a distance safe enough to assert objectivity and, of course, had never been one myself. I could sympathize, perhaps overly so, but not empathize. The latter would need to be done with the eyes of the trained historian I hoped I would become.
That this study came to be much more than an institutional history or an loge was, I think, always the hope of Professor May. He and my other advisersWaldo Heinrichs with his wise and subtle insight into the natural lives of bureaucracies, and Akira Iriye with his gentle yet compelling insistence upon an expansive view of international societyas well as my own interest in mental geography, dating back to my education at the hands of Professor Alan Henrikson at Tufts, gave it shape. Thus, in addition to being dedicated to two master practitioners, this book is also devoted to the hope that policy history and the study of the diplomatic art may be resurrected with a more symbiotic and multidimensional emphasis than has hitherto been the case. To understand these public servants and to see their world through their eyes, moreover, I pray will inspire others to discover, admire, and emulate their example, any and all warts notwithstanding.
I end here with a caveat lector. One of the frailer people interviewed for this book left me with a modest request: Please dont write anything that wont sit easily upon my lap. The chronology covers nearly the entire twentieth century, but the main story centers on the period from the end of World War II to the early 1970s. The reader will note a tapering off at both ends, for reasons both thematic and logistical. The middle decades demonstrate the peak of Atlanticism in American foreign policy; the years that came before and after them are handled, respectively, as prologue and epilogue to the central action. Because this book is less a straightforward narrative than an episodic reconstruction of the collective mind and method of its subjects, I decided that it would be better to devote the bulk of attention to the period that typified their spirit.
As the story goes, the early 1970s saw the quiet reassertion of Atlanticism that put its adherents in an excellent position to seize upon the finale of the Cold War a decade later. Some, notably former Secretary of State James Baker, have urged that I take the story through the demise of the Soviet Union itselfthat is, until 1992. Under ideal circumstances, this would have been the case. But at the time this book was researched, there was simply not enough material declassified, catalogued, and available to warrant an exhaustive analysis of those years. Any further treatment would have meant either a much heavier book or a more economical account of the most salient, middle period. So, the 1980s appear here as almost an Indian summer, just as the 1910s and 1920s present a tentative dawn before our subjects had planted their feet firmly in the bureaucracy. A full history of the transatlantic era and its political achievements, from the Balkan crises at the outset of the twentieth century to the wars of Yugoslav succession ninety years later, and written from the entire range of perspectives on both sides of the Atlantic, awaits its Gibbon. For now, I merely hope I have done a few of its American protagonists due justice.
K. W.
San Domenico di Fiesole, Italy
February 2009
THE SETTING
Early American ideas about Europenineteenth-century legacies of nationhoodold and new diplomatsshaping of the transatlantic mindsignificance of Atlanticism
I CALLED THE NEW WORLD into existence, to redress the balance of the Old. Those famous words spoken by Britains foreign secretary, George Canning, in 1826 do not sound very American. America has generally suggested a departure, a renunciation, a protest against Europe. The Old World ought to be left to its own devices. The New World was not made to be shackled to it, let alone become its source of salvation.
The reality was different. Ever since Europeans gave America its name and colonized it, there could be no real or permanent separationpolitical, cultural, or intellectualdown the middle of the Atlantic. Whether they liked it or not, the transplanted Europeans now calling themselves Americans, as well as the people they conquered, brought, or otherwise enticed to settle with them in the New World, were linked by a large web of direct and indirect ties to the lands they left behind. As distinct as their civilization may have become after three centuries, it could not escape the burden of having originated in Europe.
