“I feel like a hitchhiker in a Texas hailstorm. I can’t run. I can’t hide. And I can’t make it stop.”¹ That was how Lyndon Johnson described to press secretary Bill Moyers how troubled he felt while making the agonizing decisions over U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Since ascending to the presidency in 1963 Johnson had solicited the advice of many on Vietnam, and by 1968 the results of the decisions he made over the intervening five years left him frustrated and exhausted. By August 1968, as Soviet tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia, the Johnson administration, although the president himself had already abandoned a reelection bid, found itself in the middle of a floor fight over Vietnam policy at the tumultuous Democratic National Convention in Chicago. The president still held out hope for negotiations with the North Vietnamese, the Vietcong, and an increasingly difficult South Vietnam. Two of the chief architects of his Vietnam policy, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and General William Westmoreland, had been relieved. A full 78 percent of Americans believed that the United States was not making any progress in Vietnam.² Johnson indeed could neither run nor hide from the Vietnam War, and even though it appeared that negotiations might begin to bear fruit in 1968, he couldn’t stop the war.

From 1965 onward, as George Herring and other historians attest, U.S. military policy in Vietnam had been improvised rather than carefully designed. Initially, the administration went to war to prevent the collapse of South Vietnam. From 1965 to 1967, Johnson gradually escalated the bombing of North and South Vietnam and slowly but surely increased the number of ground forces. By 1968 the number of U.S. forces reached well over half a million, and the United States had dropped more bombs on Vietnam than they had on all their enemies in World War II. None of these actions stopped the North Vietnamese from bringing troops into the South or weakened the resolve of the southern-based National Liberation Front, or Vietcong. The increasing bombing of the south and the bloody U.S. strategy of attrition did the opposite of winning the “hearts and minds” of the people the United States was trying to save from communism. Similarly, no amount of military action or monetary aid could create a popular government in Saigon.

Though Johnson did, indeed, improvise in the formulation and execution of his Vietnam strategy, the gradual nature of the president’s escalation was deliberate. He always chose a middle course between the military and their champions in and out of Congress, and the political left, who eventually advocated U.S. withdrawal. He did this for a number of reasons. First, Johnson’s championing of his Great Society social reforms necessitated limiting the commitment to the war so as not to anger liberals who would support these programs. Second, while keeping the military commitment limited, at the same time he needed to prove to conservatives that he remained committed to decisive military action that would find Ho Chi Minh’s “breaking point” so as to not provoke a “right-wing backlash” which also would kill his domestic programs and his presidency. Third, Johnson followed a policy of gradualism in Vietnam because of his fear of provoking the Soviet Union or China into military intervention.³

By indirection and public deception, Johnson was able to continue his policy of gradual escalation unabated throughout 1966 and 1967. Even though public discontent grew over these years, resulting in many street protests, the majority of Americans supported the war. Then came the Tet Offensive, which, though militarily disastrous for the Vietcong and North Vietnamese, shattered the illusion broadcasted throughout 1967 by Johnson and Westmoreland that the United States and South Vietnam were on the brink of winning the war. Despite the great American public relations disaster that was the Tet Offensive, Johnson, even after his 31 March speech limiting the bombing and inviting negotiations, kept the pressure on the Vietcong and North Vietnamese, particularly in light of their great losses during Tet. In addition, while welcoming negotiations, Johnson did not initially compromise on fundamental issues once the talks began.

The administration also used every means at their disposal to strengthen the position of South Vietnam during the summer of 1968. While reducing the bombing in the north, Johnson greatly stepped up the air war in the south. Planes attacked infiltration routes, lines of communications, and suspected enemy base camps. The number of B-52 missions tripled, and ground troops conducted the largest search and destroy operations of the war. In addition, the United States and South Vietnam initiated an accelerated pacification plan with such programs as the Chieu Hoi and Phoenix to try to control as much of the countryside as possible. The Americans also aided the South Vietnamese in increasing their force levels. However, all these were long-range undertakings that could not erase years of neglect or mismanagement. None of these measures won many hearts and minds. These efforts certainly weakened, but did not destroy the Vietcong organization or many North Vietnamese main units. Furthermore, the rampant corruption of the South Vietnamese government didn’t endear the South Vietnamese to their leaders.⁴

Adding to Johnson’s difficulties was the intransigence on both sides of the peace talks in Paris. By August, the time of the tumultuous and divisive Democratic National Convention and the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, the negotiators in Paris had still not agreed on the shape of the table from which they would negotiate. Though the talks looked increasingly hopeful in the fall, South Vietnam balked at the initial agreement. The Johnson administration failed to get a peace settlement in time to deliver the White House to Democratic presidential nominee Hubert Humphrey.⁵ Johnson in his last months in office was a “prisoner of the White House,” increasingly isolated and beaten down by dissent from many sources. He had been politically destroyed by Vietnam. Whether or not the United States should have been involved in the war is a matter beyond the scope of this chapter. What is irrefutable is that Johnson’s Vietnam policies came under increasing attacks from both hawks and doves.

The president tried not to offend either extreme by choosing a middle course and pleased neither side. And though in America many voices expressed their discontent with Johnson and Vietnam, it was the public opposition of several southern members of the United States Congress, who collectively, in the words of historian John Fry, took “center stage” on foreign policy matters over Vietnam, that both helped influence and also reflected the opinions of a majority of Americans. In congressional hearings and through other acts and statements, southern members of Congress expressed diverse opinions on Johnson and Vietnam. This diversity of opinions among southern leaders in part helped shape the debate over the war and added to the difficulties encountered by the Texas president to prosecute the war.

According to a number of polls, a majority of ordinary Southerners supported a more aggressive military strategy in Vietnam which was more in line with military officials. Southerners supported and southern leaders protected military leaders in part because of the great financial benefit their states enjoyed from military spending. As one scholar described it, “[the South] paid homage to and reaped benefits from the defense establishment.” In addition to defense spending, one out of every three soldiers in Vietnam came from the South, a region that represented only 25 percent of the population of the United States. Furthermore, the South had a large share of military retirees as well.⁶ Therefore, a significant number of southern legislators became the most fervent hawks on Vietnam, advocating increasingly aggressive measures.

Examples of Southern “superhawks” included Senator J. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, Representative L. Mendel Rivers of South Carolina, and Senator Russell Long and Representative F. Edward Hebert of Louisiana. All served on the Armed Services Committees of each house, with Rivers and Hebert both serving as chair at various times during the Vietnam War. All of them also consulted regularly with top military brass, who were increasingly frustrated with the limits both Secretary of Defense McNamara and President Johnson put on the U.S. forces in Vietnam. Though many of these leaders were in the loop regarding American military forces and operations, some made irresponsible statements as if they were, in the words of Joseph Fry, “less well informed” on Vietnam.⁷ For instance, in 1966 and 1967 Rivers, the chair of the House Armed Services Committee, Hebert, ranking member and later chair, and Thurmond, former member of the reserves, all advocated the use of nuclear weapons if it were necessary to produce victory in Vietnam. “We must stand ready to offer our lives on the altar of freedom,” Hebert declared when announcing his support of a possible nuclear attack in Vietnam. “If we do not,” he continued, “we are not worthy of being called Americans.”⁸

Not all southern hawks made statements that extreme. Senators Russell of Georgia, chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and John Stennis of Mississippi, head of the Senate Armed Services Investigating Subcommittee on Military Preparedness, and eventual chair, had agonized privately over Johnson’s Vietnam policies before unleashing hawkish public criticisms in 1966 and 1967. In 1954, both Russell and Stennis had spoken out forcefully against U.S. military intervention to try to save the French forces at Dien Bien Phu. Moreover, both made Johnson aware of their hesitation in supporting the escalation of the war early on. Transcripts of Johnson’s White House phone conversations in 1964 and 1965 include many heartfelt conversations with Russell over Vietnam, mainly because of the president’s long-time association with Russell in the Senate (Johnson considering Russell to be a mentor) and because of Russell’s long experience on military and foreign policy matters. There are many quotes suggesting Russell’s continuing frustration with the conflict. In a phone conversation with Johnson in mid-1964, Russell declared that the Vietnam conflict was the “damn worst mess I ever saw.”⁹ From the beginning of U.S. involvement, Russell had little confidence in U.S. military intervention and, at one point in 1965, suggested that the Domino Theory did not apply to Vietnam.¹⁰ Nevertheless, once Johnson committed troops, Russell said U.S. honor was at stake, and he urged Johnson to “go all the way” militarily to win.¹¹

Stennis held similar views. Though the Mississippi senator voted enthusiastically for the Gulf of Tonkin resolution in 1964, Johnson’s gradual escalation increasingly concerned him. In a joint Senate Armed Services/Foreign Relations Committee hearing in early 1965, Stennis said that the Congress should be consulted before Johnson sent in more troops. However, once Johnson began major escalation of the war, Stennis advocated using “every weapon we have” against the North Vietnamese and Vietcong.¹² Both Russell and Stennis, due to their significant seniority in the Senate and positions of considerable power within the Senate Armed Services Committee, became important spokesmen for the hawks who grew disenchanted with Johnson’s gradualism.

At the same time, however, there was a small, less connected, but still influential number of southern members of Congress who served as some of the most prominent congressional doves, questioning the wisdom, legality, and eventually the morality of U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Democratic senator Albert Gore of Tennessee and Republican senator John Sherman Cooper of Kentucky had expressed their doubts to both Kennedy and Johnson through 1965, usually in private, about the wisdom of American involvement in Vietnam. By 1966 and 1967, respectively, these private doubts became public advocacy of withdrawal from Vietnam. Though Gore and Cooper did much to emphasize their dissent over Vietnam, the most influential southern “dove” on Vietnam, arguably the most important “dove” in Congress, was J. William Fulbright of Arkansas, chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Fulbright, to his lasting regret, had been Johnson’s floor manager for passage of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in the Senate. From mid-1964 through early 1966, Fulbright watched as Johnson slowly but surely escalated the war. The Arkansas senator became increasingly concerned that Johnson was leading the United States into a full-scale war to defend a South Vietnamese government that did not have the backing of its own people. As early as December 1964, Fulbright staked out his position on the escalation that at that point was only beginning. The senator, during questioning in Foreign Relations Committee hearings of Maxwell Taylor, then American ambassador to South Vietnam, said in early 1965, “If you want to go to war, I don’t approve of it…. I am not going to vote to send 100,000 men, or it would probably be 300,000 or 400,000.”¹³ Over the next year, he continued to voice his concerns as Johnson, his friend and former Senate colleague, increased troops levels and bombing targets. Fulbright greatly angered the president in a foreign policy speech in the Senate on 15 July 1965 in which he proposed that the administration’s policy should be to bring an “end [to] the war by seeking a negotiated settlement involving major concessions on both sides” (emphasis added).¹⁴

In January 1966, Fulbright’s break with the administration became total when, as chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, in response to a bill providing for a supplemental appropriation to fund the war, he opened full-scale nationally televised Vietnam hearings, in fact debating with Johnson administration officials the wisdom of continuing the war as the war raged on in Vietnam. Fulbright and Gore had been the only southern senators and some of the first legislators in all of Congress to officially break with Johnson over the war. In these hearings, both southern senators grilled Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Ambassador Maxwell Taylor, and others under the lights of the television cameras.

Fulbright began the hearings stating that he and others had been “deeply troubled about our involvement in Vietnam and it seems to us… that now is an appropriate time for some examination of our involvement there for the clarification of the people in this country.” The committee challenged or questioned almost every aspect of U.S. policy decisions regarding Vietnam. When Rusk suggested that the United States fought in Vietnam to ensure that South Vietnam could make their own decisions regarding their future, Fulbright shot back, “Do you think they can be a completely free agent with our occupation of their land with 200,000 or 400,000 men?” Fulbright and Gore went on to assert that by voting for the Gulf of Tonkin resolution they did not intend to give Johnson a blank check to engage in a full-scale war.¹⁵

The hearings included experts such as George Kennon, the father of U.S. containment policy, who advocated liquidating the U.S. presence in Vietnam. It also explored such questions as what defines an atrocity and what is an acceptable military action. The hearings also brought out some of the confusion over Johnson’s Vietnam policies. When Ambassador Taylor suggested that U.S. military objectives were to convince the North Vietnamese and the Vietcong to stop their aggression in the South, Fulbright responded, “This is just another way of saying ‘unconditional surrender’… The idea of negotiating a compromise, which is something less than we want, seems to me to be consistent with a limited war. But if they give up and come to our terms, this is what I would call unlimited commitment… using whatever we need to bring about the result.” He drove the point home in a colorful fashion, “Maybe I’m too stupid to understand what it means when you say, ‘We are going to do what it takes to make them come to the conference table.’ This to me means they are going to have to, as they used to say in the Ozarks, holler ‘Enough’ or say ‘calf-rope.’”¹⁶

One of the most controversial debates of the hearings involved the question of what constitutes an atrocity in war. Senator Russell Long of Louisiana, a confirmed hawk, defended the war effort, the U.S. and South Vietnamese military, and the Domino Theory against what he considered unfair attacks that gave aid and comfort to the enemy. While many on the committee took the opportunity to make speeches in front of the television cameras, Long seemed to make more of them than most committee members, save possibly Fulbright.

In a rambling opening statement, Long remarked that Communists, and some senators, had charged that the United States, by its actions in Vietnam, was an “international criminal.” The senator appointed himself as defense attorney to “plead my nation Not Guilty.” After asking Ambassador Taylor to attest to the excellence of several U.S. military units, he contrasted the U.S. efforts with the brutal tactics of the Vietcong, who he claimed had killed 50,000 civilians, including, “in one year alone, 456 mayors in little villages.” Taylor suggested the numbers were probably far higher. Long then challenged the senators and the television audience members to consider “how we would feel if that many mayors or officials in our community had been destroyed.”¹⁷

“War is inherently a rather atrocious activity, is it not?” Fulbright observed when his time came around again to speak. The ambassador agreed. “If we are to talk about such things,” Fulbright continued, “we are reminded about air raids on Tokyo, or Hiroshima, or Nagasaki.” When Taylor protested, saying that Japan used ruthless tactics treating prisoners and attacking Pearl Harbor, the Arkansas senator observed, “Isn’t it true that each country always believes the other one commits the atrocities, and that God is on their side? Isn’t this typical of all wars…. What difference, really, morally or any other way, do you see between burning innocent little children and disemboweling innocent citizens? Isn’t it only the means you use?”

The purpose of his questioning, Fulbright insisted, was not to justify the heinous acts of the Communists. He was attempting to debunk one of the chief tenets of U.S. society, American exceptionalism, that inspired U.S. involvement in Vietnam. “We sometimes think we’re the only good people, and I certainly don’t think we are bad people. But I don’t see any great distinction between using the weapons we happen to have to kill innocent people [when our enemies do the same]. I don’t think we should claim great superiority because we happen to have nuclear bombs and other side doesn’t.”¹⁸

The 1966 Vietnam hearings solved little, but they still had a significant impact on U.S. attitudes about the war in Vietnam, at least in the short term. After the hearings, Johnson’s approval ratings on Vietnam plummeted from 63 percent in January to 49 percent in February. Pat Holt, a Texan and a member of the Foreign Relations Committee staff, believed that, because of the hearings, some Americans realized that “the dissenters were no longer a bunch of crazy college kids invading dean’s offices and so on; they were people of substance.”¹⁹ Although Americans’ public support of the war wouldn’t effectively wane until after Tet, the work of Fulbright, Gore, and others in a large sense made Vietnam dissent respectable.

Johnson also responded to the hearings and attempted to steal the thunder of Fulbright by hastily arranging a meeting with the South Vietnamese leadership at a conference in Honolulu. On a few occasions, the networks preempted television coverage of the Vietnam hearings to carry statements from Johnson and South Vietnamese leaders Nguyen Cao Ky and Nguyen Van Thieu. The president also instructed the FBI to monitor all future Foreign Relations Committee hearings to determine if Fulbright, Gore, and other doves were receiving information from Communist sources. He also ordered the Bureau to monitor activities of committee members and record if they made any contacts with foreign, particularly Communist, government officials. In a meeting with Assistant FBI Director Cartha DeLoach, the president belittled Fulbright, his former friend and colleague, saying that he did not “know what the smell of a cartridge is,” and that the senator was a “narrow minded egotist trying to run the country.”²⁰

Fulbright followed up these hearings with several lectures and a book entitled The Arrogance of Power, in which he argued that U.S. arrogance led the country’s leaders to believe that its military could “go into a small underdeveloped nation and create stability where there is chaos, the will to fight where there is defeatism, democracy where there is no tradition of it, and honest government where corruption is a way of life.” Calling upon the region of his birth, Fulbright suggested that the Vietnam War, contrary to the administration’s claims, was not unlike the American Civil War. What were the North Vietnamese doing, he wrote, “that is different from what the American North did to the American South a hundred years ago, with results few of my fellow southerners now regret?”²¹

As Johnson continually increased the troop levels and bombing targets, Fulbright, now completely estranged from the administration, did not hold anything back when consulting with the president. In a 25 July 1967 meeting between Johnson and the Senate committee chairs, the president outlined several of the difficulties he faced both on foreign and domestic matters. Fulbright responded bluntly, “Mr. President, what you really need to do is stop the war. That would solve all your problems.” Labeling the war as a “hopeless adventure,” Fulbright contended that Vietnam was “ruining our domestic and foreign policy.” After previously supporting foreign aid measures that facilitated U.S. involvement in Indochina, the foreign relations chairman, a sworn internationalist since the 1940s, insisted he might vote against the legislation “and may try to bottle the whole bill up in committee.”

Johnson remained calm and said that if Congress “wanted to tell the rest of the world to go to hell,” they could do it. Fulbright stood his ground, “My position is that Vietnam is central to the whole problem. We need a new look. The effects of Vietnam are hurting the budget and foreign relations generally.” “Bill,” Johnson replied testily, “everybody doesn’t have a blind spot like you do. You say don’t bomb North Vietnam on just about everything. We haven’t delivered Ho yet.” Johnson concluded, as he always did when challenged by members of Congress on Vietnam, that Fulbright at any time could introduce a resolution to repeal the Gulf of Tonkin resolution. Johnson, knowing Fulbright had never forgiven himself for acting as floor leader for the resolution, baited him further: “[Y]ou can tell the troops to come home. You can tell General Westmoreland that he doesn’t know what he’s doing.”²² Fulbright, saddened by the exchange, remained silent. Everyone in the room knew full well that his silence did not mean consent.

The chairman continually fought from 1966 to 1968 for some sort of congressional effort to slow down the pace of escalation. Of major concern to Fulbright and other Southerners, both doves and hawks, was the seeming irrelevance of the legislative branch in determining the course of the war. In late February 1967, the senator supported a nonbinding “sense of the Congress” resolution introduced by Senator Clifford Case of New Jersey that proposed limiting troop levels to 500,000 and stopping the air war unless there was a declaration of war. Fulbright used the measure as another opportunity to debate the war in the Senate, this time with his southern colleague Richard Russell. Though Russell disagreed with Fulbright on Vietnam policy, he did agree that the exercise on executive power in Vietnam, along with the growth of executive power elsewhere alarmed him enough to want to have a “review” in order to “take this country back to the proper separations of powers and the proper weighing of our system of checks and balances.” The resolution was later watered down considerably, and despite Russell’s eventual opposition, it passed. Though nonbinding, it was the first time the Senate had officially acted to provide a general framework for ending the war and bringing U.S. troops home. It would act as a precedent for later actions.²³

Fulbright’s and Gore’s dissent, along with the lack of a coherent military policy in Vietnam, also led to other southern defectors in 1967. In the summer of that year, Congressman Claude Pepper of Florida, a former senator and member of the Foreign Relations Committee in the 1940s, and a former law professor of Senator Fulbright’s at the University of Arkansas, withdrew his support for Johnson’s Vietnam policy because of the lack of a foreseeable end to the conflict, a refusal of the United States’ major allies to help shoulder the burden of war, and the apparent unwillingness of the South Vietnamese army to fight.²⁴ On 27 July 1967, Republican Senator John Sherman Cooper of Kentucky, the soft spoken, well-respected former U.S. ambassador to India and newest member of the Foreign Relations Committee, advocated publicly the unconditional cessation of bombing in North Vietnam as an incentive to convene a peace conference.²⁵

Thruston Morton, the other Kentucky senator, had a much more dramatic change of heart on Vietnam. Morton, a former assistant secretary of state for Congressional Affairs and a former Republican Party national chairman, turned, almost immediately, from a hawk into a dove. As late as June 1967, the junior senator from Kentucky scolded the Johnson administration for not instituting a naval blockade of the port of Haiphong. By August, Morton publicly turned against the war in a speech to the National Committee for Business Executives for Peace in Vietnam. Over the past three years, he began, the United States had “witnessed a disastrous decline in the effectiveness of our foreign policy.” The root cause, he asserted, was “the bankruptcy of our policy in Vietnam.” In 1965, Morton continued, he supported President Johnson’s escalation of the war. The senator paused and added, “I was wrong.” Suggesting that the president had been “brainwashed” by the military industrial complex, Morton proposed several options including the cessation of all U.S. bombing of North Vietnam, the end to “search and destroy” missions conducted in South Vietnam by U.S. soldiers, the concentration of U.S. soldiers in coastal and populations centers of South Vietnam, the heightening of pressure on the Saigon government to enter into negotiations and institute internal reforms, the implementation of an internal and regional settlement probably decided by an all-Asian peace conference, and a communication to Hanoi that the United States’ “honorable disengagement” deserved an appropriate response. Morton’s abandonment of U.S. military action could not have been more complete or stunning in its scope. As one reporter observed, Morton had moved from “the sword to the olive branch.”²⁶ Fulbright, therefore, had some new southern allies in the fight to bring the war to a close.

That month Fulbright again called on his colleague Senator Russell to define further the constitutional responsibilities of the legislative branch in shaping foreign policy. The Arkansas senator asked for Russell’s support for another resolution that would assert congressional participation in the making of national commitments. With Russell’s promise of support this time, Fulbright proposed a “sense of Congress” resolution that declared it unconstitutional for the executive branch to enter into executive national commitments with foreign nations without some legislative action.²⁷

On 16 August 1967, Fulbright opened public hearings to consider the matter. Undersecretary of State Nicholas Katzenbach testified for the administration and against the resolution. Katzenbach aggressively defended Johnson’s actions in Vietnam and outraged committee members Fulbright, Gore, and Cooper by stating that, though the Congress still had the constitutional right to declare war, in such a fast moving modern world the term “declare war” was outmoded. He stated that the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution acted as “a functional equivalent of the constitutional obligation expressed in the provision of the Constitution with respect to declaring war.”²⁸ Given the diplomat’s reasoning, senators could neither extricate themselves from culpability nor find a way to change the course the administration steered.

The committee, livid at Katzenbach’s statement, continued the hearings to highlight what the chairman, Gore, Cooper, and others felt was a constitutional imbalance in foreign affairs. They called upon another long-time southern senator and constitutional scholar, Sam Ervin, chairman of the Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on the Separation of Powers. Ervin complained of a “marked departure during the last 25 years from the balance struck by the Constitution between the Congress and the Executive branch in matters of foreign policy.” He said the trend would have to be “arrested if we are to avoid the fear of the Constitution’s framers that unchecked executive power might develop along tyrannical lines and pose the greatest threat to our democratic government and to the liberty of our people.” With regard to Vietnam, Ervin repeated the contention that he expressed earlier in the year—the United States had no legal or constitutional authority to intervene militarily in Vietnam. The North Carolina legislator said a distinction should be drawn between offensive and defensive war. The president, he reasoned, could use the armed forces to defend United States territory in the event of a sudden attack on United States territory. Any other use of the armed forces could be taken “only upon congressional authority.” The senator also challenged the administration’s invocation of the SEATO treaty as justification for intervention. In addition to opposing the Johnson administration’s interpretation of the constitution and SEATO treaty, Ervin also rejected the theory of containment. “I have never favored the idea,” he declared, “that democracy is so very good that we should try to give it to everybody on the face of the earth, even those people who don’t know what democracy is and have no experience in exercising it.” Ervin’s statement reveals the diversity of opinion of southerners on Vietnam, even among hawks.

Though disavowing the legal and ideological justification for war, Ervin still disagreed with the doves. Like the majority of southerners, he supported fighting the war “with sufficient force to either win it or to bring the enemy to the conference table.” After offering his comments, the senator said further that he was unhappy with Johnson’s half measures. “I think some in authority would do well to read a little Shakespeare,” he mused. “Shakespeare said, ‘Beware of entrance to a quarrel, but, being in, bear it, that the opponent may beware of thee.’” The United States, Ervin suggested, ignored the Bard’s advice on both counts. It rushed into “quarrels” such as South Vietnam, Korea, the Congo, and Rhodesia. Once in, however, the United States did not make their opponents beware of them. After his eloquent argument, his conclusion echoed a familiar refrain: “I think we ought to turn over the fighting in South Vietnam to the admirals and generals, and see if they can’t win the war.”

Ervin’s hawkish stand seems puzzling in light of his rejection of the administration’s justifications for war. He, like other southern congressional hawks, suggested that the time had passed for arguing the wisdom of getting into war in Vietnam. “We are faced with a condition and not a theory,” he said, quoting Grover Cleveland.²⁹ Having rejected the theories that created the condition, however, it seems puzzling that the senator could advocate escalating the war in order to defend both the theories of containment and the belief in the necessity to export the United States’ brand of democracy. Perhaps Ervin, also a member of the Armed Services Committee, had been convinced by his southern hawkish colleagues or military officials of the necessity to fight to win in Vietnam. The frustration of the war along with the lack of a cogent “honorable” solution in Vietnam sometimes created strange and conflicted arguments in the halls of Congress. The members of the committee, perhaps sensing their own logic just as tortured in regard to the conflict, did not press the North Carolina senator on the point.

Johnson, though still feeling betrayed by the public dissent of the doves within his own party and region, had said previously that he would be more concerned with the defection of the hawks than the doves. The president, who remembered vividly the disastrous political effects of the right-wing reaction to President Harry Truman’s China policies, worried that a similar thing would happen over Vietnam. By 1966 it appeared that the president realized another one of his major fears.

As the number of U.S. casualties grew significantly, southern hawks became increasingly impatient with Johnson’s gradual escalation. In the 1966 Vietnam hearings, Russell Long expressed discontent with the fighting of a “limited war” in Vietnam that resonated throughout the South. An opinion poll in June 1966 revealed that southern whites and, to a somewhat lesser extent, southern African Americans, were more inclined to believe that the United States would secure an “all out victory” in Vietnam.³⁰ Long, in his 1966 comments in the Vietnam hearings, concluded with a warning to the Johnson administration: “If the 1st Division has to pull Old Glory down on a flagpole it is going to be because somebody over here made a mistake not somebody over there.”³¹ Increasingly for southerners, those “somebodies” were Lyndon Johnson and his chief Vietnam advisor up to that time, Robert McNamara.

McNamara prompted the sharpest criticism among southern hawks. It did not sit well with Russell, Stennis, Thurmond, House Armed Services Committee Chairman Mendel Rivers and ranking member F. Edward Hebert, and several less prominent legislators that a civilian systems analyst wanted not only to revamp the Defense Department, but also, in reality, served as the architect of Vietnam military polices. Southerners on both House and Senate Armed Services committees detested McNamara’s perceived arrogance and his attempts to quantify every military question in his management of the war and the Defense Department. Rivers went out of his way to rankle McNamara, instructing his committee’s chief council to get Navy workmen to make a plaque and place it in the front of the rostrum where it would face the secretary. The plaque read:

Stennis was not prone to personal attacks, but he was no less disturbed by McNamara and his prosecution of the war. He called for an “all-out assault” by air on strategic targets in North Vietnam. Russell agreed.³³

In August 1967, just as Fulbright convened hearings on his commitments resolution, John Stennis of Mississippi held hearings of his own to suggest more hawkish policy alternatives. In August 1967, Stennis, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Preparedness Investigating Subcommittee, convened seven hearings to discuss conflicting reports between civilian and military authorities as to the effectiveness of the bombing campaign. The prime “target” of these hearings was, predictably, Robert McNamara. The defense secretary had just sent a memorandum to Johnson suggesting no amount of bombing would force the North Vietnamese to negotiate. Members of the Joint Chiefs, who consulted regularly with Stennis and other military commanders, completely disagreed with the secretary, and the Mississippi senator set out to hear their side of the story. As historian Michael Scott Downs asserts, the hearings “had all the quality of a wild west lynching party, with Robert McNamara as a guest of honor.”³⁴ Besides the defense secretary, only one nonmilitary man, a retired general, testified.

The hearings began with testimony by several top military officials who were allowed to make a formidable case against the administration’s bombing policies. They revealed that sharper more effective air attacks had been refused by the administration. They also asserted that any reduction of or suspension of the bombing would increase U.S. casualties and also result in the deployment of additional combat troops. On the other hand, the military officials concluded that if the administration allowed the Air Force to bomb Hanoi, Haiphong, and all the restricted targets, the North Vietnamese would surrender. The committee treated the military with the utmost respect when they testified.³⁵

The attitude of the senators changed when the troubled McNamara sat down to testify before the committee on 25 August 1967. The secretary had to endure a six-hour grilling from a hostile subcommittee. Thurmond, as usual, attacked the secretary in the most strident fashion. He suggested that the secretary cared more about North Vietnamese civilian casualties than U.S. casualties in South Vietnam. He also accused the secretary of placating and appeasing the Communists. “It is a statement of no win,” he continued. “It seems to me that if we follow what you have recommended that we ought to get out of Vietnam at once, because we have no chance to win, and I deeply regret that a man in your position is taking that position today.”³⁶

In the end, the subcommittee report, which Chairman Stennis quickly made public, made explicit both his and his constituents’ frustration with the concept of limited war:

The president did add a number of bombing targets during the hearings to thwart the publicity of the hearings. Overall, however, he did not fully follow the advice of the subcommittee. Nevertheless, Stennis did illustrate the increasing divide between Johnson and the hawks, and in so doing, he expressed the opinion of, if not a majority of Americans by 1968, at the very least a majority of his fellow Southerners.

Despite the mounting criticism from congressional and other sources, the president, Secretaries McNamara and Rusk, and General Westmoreland had convinced most Americans that U.S. forces would prevail soon. The Tet Offensive in late January 1968 changed considerably both the course of the war and the length of Johnson’s presidency. On 31 January during a bombing halt to mark the Vietnamese Tet holiday, the Vietcong attacked almost every major city and provincial capital in South Vietnam, including Saigon. In the capital city they assaulted both General Westmoreland’s headquarters and, as U.S. television cameras recorded the event, the American embassy in Saigon. Though the Vietcong lost every battle, Tet shattered the illusion of the immanent victory that Johnson and the military had preached for quite some time. In the wake of Tet, Johnson’s approval rating on Vietnam dropped to 26 percent.³⁸

Southern members of Congress, as always, did not speak with one voice in response, but most believed that changes needed to be made in Johnson’s policies. “How is it that the Viet Cong [sic] could mount such a series of coordinated attacks against American bases and provincial capitals?” queried Senator Harry Byrd Jr. of Virginia. “Is it now not time,” he continued “for a reappraisal of our policies and procedures for obtaining our objectives?”³⁹ Richard Russell, while publicly calling for increased attacks on the Vietcong and approval of additional bombing targets in North Vietnam, privately communicated to the administration his doubts on continuing the war. Hearing of Westmoreland’s pending request of up to 200,000 more troops, the Georgia senator advised the president that he should not grant the request “until there was a complete reappraisal of Vietnam, primarily on the will and desires of the people of South Viet Nam.” His comments centered mainly on his doubts of the will of the South Vietnamese to fight. “If they did not show more interest to defend [South Vietnam] we should consider getting out.”⁴⁰

Even southerners who had enthusiastically supported Johnson’s prosecution of the war harbored doubts after Tet. In a presidential briefing of some leaders of Congress on 6 February 1968, Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia charged that the administration had poor intelligence and was not prepared for the attacks. Furthermore, he felt the Americans both underestimated the “morale and vitality” of the Vietcong and “overestimated the support of the South Vietnamese government and its people.” When Johnson disagreed and insisted that the administration knew the Vietcong had been planning a general uprising, Byrd did not back down. “I have never caused you any trouble on this matter on the Hill,” he reminded the president. “But I do have serious concerns about Vietnam.” Johnson continued his denials, saying that he did not underestimate North Vietnamese and Vietcong strength. “Something is wrong over there,” Byrd accurately observed and pointed out that the Vietcong had achieved their objective. The Communists wanted “to show that they could attack all over the country and they did.” Johnson still dismissed Byrd’s criticism and said that he took more stock in the opinions of the military and diplomatic men than congressional carping. “Anybody can kick a barn down,” he said, quoting former Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn from Texas. “It takes a good carpenter to build one.” Byrd stood his ground. “I do not want to argue with the President,” he said. “But I am going to stick to my convictions.”⁴¹

The Tet offensive marked the final straw for Stennis. Though, like Russell, he had publicly called for increased efforts to win the war, he had never attacked Johnson’s overall policy. In the aftermath of the Vietcong offensive, the Mississippi senator made a final break with the administration. Under Johnson’s policies, Stennis observed, the U.S. action was contained “by the boundaries of Laos, Cambodia, and North Vietnam.” At the same time, the enemy used the port of Haiphong and several other ports restricted from U.S. bombs to resupply and rearm its troops. Under those circumstances, Stennis reasoned, the United States could expect to wait a long time and lose more men in order to “force an honorable and effective solution” to the conflict. With the realization that after years of war Vietnam was no nearer to an acceptable settlement, Stennis posed a question: “Is it more men that we need for the present policy? Or is it more men that we need for a new policy?… In short, it is clear to me that we are now compelled to choose between a hard-hitting war or no war at all.”⁴²

To southern doves, Tet stood as further proof of Johnson’s duplicity and the moral bankruptcy of U.S. policy. Gore repeated calls for a negotiated settlement and posited that the war had both drawn Russia and China together and increased the danger of Chinese intervention. Cooper captured the attitude of a growing number of Americans when he questioned the purpose of the United States’ utter destruction of South Vietnam as a result of the war. The Kentucky senator quoted reporter James Reston, who questioned how the United States could win a military victory in South Vietnam without “destroying what we are trying to save.” Cooper continued, “Is it not time for us to ask whether we are crossing that line, when South Vietnam’s major cities, such as Hue and parts of Saigon, are systematically reduced to rubble and dust?”⁴³

In the aftermath of Tet, William Fulbright continued to push for a clarification of the administration’s objectives. On 5 February, he put into the record an article by columnist Tom Wicker on the differences between the statements of the U.S. military and civilian officials in Vietnam, who were encouraged to be optimistic, and the more realistic accounts of the reporters who traveled with ordinary troops. A few days later, the Foreign Relations Committee voted to ask the president again, as they had over the past few months, to allow Secretary of State Rusk to testify publicly in order to explain the current situation in Vietnam. In a letter to the president, Fulbright observed that some members, presumably including the chairman himself, “felt strongly that what is now at stake is no less urgent a question than the Senate’s constitutional duty to advise, as well as consent, in the sphere of foreign policy.”⁴⁴

While waiting on a response, Fulbright convened hearings to study the incidents that prompted the passage of the Gulf of Tonkin resolution. Since early 1966, Fulbright, in light of other inconsistencies in Johnson’s statements, had begun to question the administration’s conclusions about what happened in the Gulf of Tonkin in early August 1964. He had never consulted the logbooks of either the Maddox or C. Turner Joy, but a retired navy admiral had commented to him that the events “sounded unrealistic.” In the wake of Undersecretary of State Nicholas Katzenbach’s insistence that the chairman knew the full implications of the 1964 resolution when he convinced questioning senators to vote for it and the undersecretary’s characterization of the resolution as a “functional equivalent of a declaration of war,” Fulbright instructed his staff to investigate the Gulf of Tonkin incidents. They uncovered several facts inconsistent with Defense Secretary McNamara’s explanations in August 1964. The South Vietnamese “OPLAN34” raids on the North Vietnamese coasts, and the U.S. “Desoto patrols” had been related. In other words, the U.S. ships had acted provocatively and almost invited attack. In addition, doubt still remained as to whether the second incident, in which the Maddox was allegedly attacked, had ever occurred. Fulbright called for hearings. McNamara, now out of office and by some accounts at the point of a nervous breakdown, reluctantly agreed to testify.⁴⁵

The former secretary continued to claim that the Maddox and C. Turner Joy had no knowledge of the OPLAN-34 attacks. Fulbright then read a cable sent from the Maddox at the time that referred to the operations. McNamara’s response seemed like pure nonsense. “We can find no basis,” he declared, “for the commander making that statement.” Eventually McNamara confirmed the commander actually sent the cable, but he disagreed with its conclusions. Fulbright quoted another cable from a naval commander who reviewed the second incident and cast doubt on whether the North Vietnamese ever fired torpedoes at the Maddox. McNamara stood by his convictions, saying he was convinced the attack had taken place.

Fulbright could not contain his contempt and despair. He exclaimed that if he had knowledge of the full story he would not have pushed for quick passage of the resolution. “We accepted your statement [in 1964] completely without doubt”:

McNamara, in response to the hearings, released a twenty-one page statement saying that Johnson and he had acted responsibly in August 1964. It further condemned Fulbright, Gore, and others for impugning his and his administration’s integrity. Fulbright retaliated. He insisted that the administration misled Congress in 1964 and continued to cover up its duplicity. He revealed that when a navy commander contacted the committee in November 1967 to provide information on McNamara’s lack of candor immediately after the Gulf of Tonkin incidents, Pentagon officials confined him to a mental ward for a month. Fulbright, to complete the public humiliation of the administration, released the full transcripts of the hearings. Americans now knew that their president had lied to them about Vietnam.⁴⁷

The president himself, though publicly declaring throughout February and March that the United States would win in Vietnam, began to doubt the prospects of continuing to fight to win the war or to extend his presidency. The war, the sluggish economy, and the riots in the cities also diminished his personal approval rating to the all-time low of his presidency. An unexpectedly strong showing by Democratic presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy in the New Hampshire primary and the subsequent entry of his old nemesis Robert Kennedy into the race added to his personal pressures. Senator Russell, his close confidante throughout his presidency, dreaded meeting with Johnson during this period because the president often cried uncontrollably. Having also lost key hawks such as Stennis on the war, Johnson gradually came to the conclusion that he should begin a de-escalation of the conflict. On 31 March 1968, he proposed a halt in the bombing of North Vietnam north of the Demilitarized Zone. The president would not grant Westmoreland’s request—he would only send 13,500 more troops over the next five months. Johnson also promised to reduce “substantially the present level of hostilities.” The president hoped that the moves would encourage the North Vietnamese to begin peace negotiations. At the end of the speech, he dropped a bombshell—in order to concentrate on ending the war he would not seek or accept the Democratic nomination for president. About a month later formal peace negotiations between U.S. and North Vietnamese officials began, which were to bog down a few weeks before the November general election.⁴⁸

One of the last public debates the Johnson administration had to endure over Vietnam came at the tumultuous Democratic National Convention in Chicago in August 1968. As usual, southern legislators commanded the spotlight. As Mayor Richard Daley’s police force attacked protesters outside the convention hall, a ruinous and vitriolic debate erupted on the floor over Vietnam policy. On one side stood the chairman of the Platform Committee, House Majority Whip Hale Boggs of Louisiana, a staunch Johnson ally. Predictably, Boggs followed the administration’s line of continuing the fighting and bombing as well as peace talks. On the other side, Tennessee senator Gore, the maverick Democrat who a growing number of Tennesseans considered too liberal for the state, helped lead a spirited fight to adopt a more dovish Vietnam plank within the Democratic platform. Gore took the podium and proposed a Vietnam platform that advocated an unconditional ending to the bombing of Vietnam, a mutual phased withdrawal of U.S. and North Vietnamese troops, and direct negotiations between Saigon and the National Liberation Front. In an impassioned speech, he also criticized the continuation of the status quo as represented in the administration’s Vietnam platform proposal and lamented the result of what he considered the United States’ tragic involvement in Vietnam:

What harvest do we reap from this gallant sacrifice? An erosion of the moral leadership, a demeaning entanglement with a corrupt political clique in Saigon, disillusionment, despair here at home, and a disastrous postponement of imperative programs to improve our social ills.

The American people, in my opinion, and overwhelmingly in that regard, think that we made a mistake. And yet, read the proposed platform. We’re called upon not only to approve the disastrous policy, but even applaud it. I wonder if the American people are applauding it—they want to change it.

His state’s representatives at the convention, however, did not agree. The Nashville Tennessean reported that while he received “rousing cheers from other delegations, his own was silent during this appearance on the platform.” In fact, they voted against Gore’s proposal, forty-nine to two.⁴⁹ Since the senator would not face reelection until 1970, he may have figured that he could recover whatever ground he might lose by his participation. He never did.

With the election of the new Republican president in November 1968, the United States had thoroughly rejected Lyndon Johnson’s Vietnam policies. The attitudes of southerners who voted to repudiate Johnson had been greatly influenced by the hawks. Despite the efforts of Fulbright and Gore in particular, southerners still supported the move for a military victory, as evidenced by their enthusiastic support of George Wallace for president. Southern hawks, on the other hand, by their refusal to actively support Humphrey, enabled Nixon’s victory.

Johnson’s rejection also had much to do with the “middle course” he steered in Vietnam between hawks and doves. He stood more with the former, wanting to escalate the war enough so that the North Vietnamese would surrender. He was more influenced by his old friend Richard Russell, and his former colleagues John Stennis and Mendel Rivers, as evidenced by his approval of additional bombing targets as the air war hearings began. Though he viewed his “former friend” William Fulbright’s dissent as more a nuisance than a threat, he could not ignore the mounting criticism and “responsible” protests which the Vietnam hearings had, in part, inspired. The strength of the antiwar movement, as evidenced by the early success of dovish candidate Eugene McCarthy, played a part in Johnson’s decisions to refuse renomination and to halt the bombing of North Vietnam. As he left office, the proud but broken Texas politician still harbored resentment for the Arkansas senator. They never reconciled.

The debates that raged within Congress did not fully change Johnson’s mind, but they did add to his difficulties in prosecuting the war. The president left office, in one sense, a casualty of the war his administration escalated beyond anyone’s anticipations. The year 1968 became his administration’s breaking point, and southern members of Congress, though not the first to publicly break with Johnson’s Vietnam policies, lent credence, weight, and influence to the many voices of dissent. Johnson’s preoccupation with Vietnam and its dissenters possibly could have limited his attention to the August 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. That invasion came during a Democratic Convention that showed the political leaders of Johnson’s region, Johnson’s party, and the United States in general at one of its most divided and preoccupied periods in history.

NOTES

1. “LBJ Goes to War (1964–1965),” Vietnam: A Television History, 1983, American Experience Series, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/vietnam/104ts.html (accessed 14 June 2008).

2. Joseph Herring, America’s Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950–1975, 4th ed. (Boston: McGraw Hill, 2002), 243.

3. Several sources describe both Johnson’s strategy as “improvised” and provide reasons for the stated reasons for his gradual escalation. See Herring, America’s Longest War; James Olson and Randy Roberts, Where the Domino Fell: America and Vietnam, 1945–1990 (New York: St. Martin’s, 1991); William Conrad Gibbons, The U.S. Government and the Vietnam War: Executive and Legislative Roles and Relationships, Part IV: July 1965–January 1968 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995); and many others.

4. Herring, America’s Longest War, 252–59.

5. Herring, America’s Longest War, 262–68. See also Olson and Roberts, Where the Domino Fell, 199–206.

6. “Southern Militarism,” Southern Exposure 1 (Spring 1973): 60–62. Bruce J. Schulman, From Cotton Belt to Sunbelt: Federal Policy, Economic Development, and the Transformation of the South, 1938–1980 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 146.

7. Joseph Fry, Dixie Looks Abroad: The South and U.S. Foreign Relations, 1789–1973 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2002), 285.

8. Mark D. Carson, “F. Edward Hebert and the Congressional Investigation of the My Lai Massacre” (master’s thesis, University of New Orleans, 1993), 6.

9. Michael Beschloss, ed., Taking Charge: The Johnson White House Tapes, 1963–1964 (New York: Touchstone, 1997), 363.

10. Face the Nation, Transcripts of Television program, Columbia Broadcasting System, 1 August 1965, Richard Russell Senatorial Papers, hereafter referred to as Russell Collection, Richard B. Russell Library, Series, Athens, GA, IIIZ, Box 84.

11. Robert Mann, A Grand Delusion: America’s Descent into Vietnam (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 480.

12. Congress, Senate, Committee on Foreign Relations (hereafter referred to as SFRC), vol. 17, The Situation in Vietnam, 89th Cong., 1st Sess., 2 April 1965, 366–67, 393–403.

13. SFRC, vol. 16, The Situation in South Vietnam, 88th Cong., 2nd Sess., 3 December 1964, 369–70.

14. Congressional Record (hereafter referred to as CR), 89th Cong., 1st Sess., 15 June 1965, 13656–58.

15. SFRC, Senate, Foreign Supplemental Foreign Assistance Fiscal Year 1966—Vietnam, 89th Congress, 2nd Sess., 28 January 1966, 9, 14–15.

16. SFRC, Senate, Foreign Supplemental Foreign Assistance Fiscal Year 1966—Vietnam, 90th Congress, 2nd Sess., 17 February 1968, 454–55, 496–98, 545.

17. SFRC, Senate, Foreign Supplemental Foreign Assistance Fiscal Year 1966—Vietnam, 90th Congress, 2nd Sess., 462–66.

18. SFRC, Senate, Foreign Supplemental Foreign Assistance Fiscal Year 1966—Vietnam, 90th Congress, 2nd Sess., 498–99, 544–45.

19. Mann, Grand Delusion, 497.

20. Mann, Grand Delusion, 496.

21. William J. Fulbright, The Arrogance of Power (New York: Vintage, 1966), 15, 18, 106–8.

22. David M. Barrett, ed., Lyndon B. Johnson’s Vietnam Papers: A Documentary Collection (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1997), 451–53.

23. CR, 90th Cong., 1st Sess., 28 February 1967, 4715–16, 4718. See also Gibbons, The U.S. Government and the Vietnam War, Part III, 585–602.

24. “Pepper Stands Up—Any One Else Care to Be Counted?” Miami News, 9 August 1967, 16A.

25. CR, 90th Cong., 1st Sess., 27 July 1967, 20379–81.

26. William Greider, “Morton Modifies Vietnam War Views: ‘I Was Wrong,’” Courier-Journal & Times Bureaucrat, 8 August 1967, John Sherman Cooper Collection (hereafter referred to as Cooper Collection), The Wendell H. Ford Research Center and Public Policy Archives, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY, Box 548. See also “Address of Senator Thruston B. Morton, R.-KY before the National Committee of Business Executives for Peace in Vietnam,” Cooper Collection, Box 569

27. Gibbons, The U.S. Government and the Vietnam War, Part III, 808–11.

28. SFRC, U.S. Commitments to Foreign Powers, 90th Congress, 1st Sess., 16, 17, 21, 23 August and 19 September 1967, 79–81, 89–90.

29. SFRC, U.S. Commitments to Foreign Powers, 90th Congress, 1st Sess., 16, 17, 21, 23 August and 19 September 1967, 189–95, 197–99, 205.

30. Fry, Dixie Looks Ahead, 269, 279.

31. SFRC, Supplemental Foreign Assistance Fiscal Year 1966—Vietnam, 598.

32. Will Huntley, “Mighty Rivers of Charleston” (Ph.D. diss., University of South Carolina, 1993), 264.

33. William Peart, “Stennis Says Army Doesn’t Have ‘Green Light’ to Win,” Jackson Daily News (Jackson, MS), John Stennis Collection, Mitchell Memorial Library, Mississippi State University, Starkville, MS, vertical file, Stennis Collection. See also “Senator Russell on Vietnam: Go in and Win or Get Out,” U.S News and World Report, 2 May 1966, pp. 56–57.

34. Michael Scott Downs, “A Matter of Conscience: John C. Stennis and the Vietnam War” (Ph.D. diss., University of Mississippi, 1989), 87.

35. Senate, Armed Services Committee (hereafter referred to as ASC), Preparedness Investigating Subcommittee, Air War against North Vietnam, Part 1, 90th Congress, 1st Sess., 23 August 1967, 57–65.

36. Senate, Armed Services Committee, Preparedness Investigating Subcommittee, Air War against North Vietnam, Part 4, 90th Congress, 1st Sess., 25 August 1967, 294–97.

37. Downs, Matter of Conscience, 93.

38. Mann, Grand Delusion, 570–75.

39. Speech before Marian, VA, Chamber of Commerce, 8 February 1968, Harry Byrd Jr. Papers (hereafter cited as Byrd Jr. Papers), Special Collections, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, Box 55. See also “The Mood of Virginians,” transcript of senate speech, Box 55, Byrd Jr. Papers.

40. Notes of conversation between Richard Russell and Robert McNamara, 12 February 1968, Russell Collection, Box 200.

41. Barrett, Lyndon B. Johnson’s Vietnam Files, 584.

42. Downs, Matter of Conscience, 100.

43. CR, 90th Congress, 2nd Sess., 7 February 1968, 2445–47, 2494.

44. CR, 90th Congress, 2nd Sess., 5 February 1968, 2080–85. See also J. William Fulbright to Lyndon Baines Johnson, 7 February 1968, J. William Fulbright papers, University of Arkansas, University Libraries Special Collections, Fayetteville, AR Series 1:1, Box 4:1.

45. Mann, Grand Delusion, 577–79.

46. SFRC, Gulf of Tonkin, The 1964 Incidents, 90th Congress, 2nd Sess., 20 February 1968, 53–53, 76–80, 101–2.

47. Mann, Grand Delusion, 580–81.

48. Mann, Grand Delusion, 600–604.

49. Robert Clyde Hodges, “Senator Albert Gore, Sr., and the Vietnam War” (master’s thesis, University of Kentucky, 1989), 83–85.

The United States did not directly intervene during any Cold War crises in the Eastern Bloc after Soviet military actions in its sphere of influence. In spite of President Dwight D. Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles’s vigorous “liberation of captive peoples” rhetoric, Washington reluctantly refrained from supporting the people’s uprisings in the German Democratic Republic and Hungary in 1953 and 1956. The administrations of President Lyndon B. Johnson and Ronald Reagan also remained passive militarily, following the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and the turmoil produced by the labor union Solidarity in Poland 1980–1981. While Washington supported the East Germans with food parcels and encouraged the rebels with vigorous U.S. propaganda campaigns in Hungary as well as Poland, Washington refrained even from a crusading propaganda campaign in the case of the invasion of Czechoslovakia. While the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was active in 1953, 1956, and 1980–1981, it maintained more of a role of distant analytical observer in 1968. During the Hungarian crisis in 1956 and the Czech crisis in 1968, Washington’s arms were tied. Moreover, by having to deal with parallel crises in Suez and Vietnam respectively, as well as presidential election contests at home during those crisis years, chances for a U.S. intervention were minimal.¹

This then raises the question: why was the Johnson administration so passive after the Warsaw Pact intervention, which stopped the flowering of a daring Communist reform movement during the “Prague Spring”? Was it the fear of going down the escalatory ladder toward nuclear war in case of a U.S. military response to the invasion as in Hungary 1956? Was it the reluctance of committing to a second military conflict given the full U.S. military engagement in the deepening Vietnam quagmire? Did Johnson’s “bridge building” policies vis-à-vis Eastern Europe and his vigorous search for détente with the Soviet Union prevent him from reacting more strongly to the Warsaw Pact invasion? Was it the deepening domestic turmoil at home, spawned by broad popular resistance to the Vietnam War, the assassination of leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, and the contentious presidential election campaign of 1968, which bogged down the Johnson administration?² Or was it all of the above? This chapter will try to provide some answers to these significant historical issues concatenating during the global crisis year of 1968.

When the Johnson White House heard about the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in the evening hours of 20 August, its crisis management team sprung immediately into action and worked in high gear during the last ten days of August 1968.³ By early September, however, it had become clear that the United States would do no more than protest meekly in the United Nations and deter a spillover of the crisis to Moscow’s Warsaw Pact ally Romania, and potentially even to Yugoslavia, Austria, and Germany. Washington diplomacy engaged in a frustrating campaign to stop accusations both in East and West of prior “collusion” with the Soviet Union based on respecting “spheres of influence” agreements going back to Yalta in 1945. Washington shrewdly utilized the Czech crisis to both strengthen the floundering North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) alliance and alleviate the pressure from the U.S. Congress to withdraw American troops from Western Europe. The skilled crisis management machinery of the Johnson administration operated smoothly in August 1968. Four days after the invasion, the president went on his scheduled vacation to his beloved Texas Ranch, and by late September the crisis mood had largely dissipated. When Richard Nixon entered the White House in January 1969, he quickly resumed Johnson’s détente policies that had to be discontinued due to the invasion of Czechoslovakia. In the end, the larger mid–Cold War agenda of growing superpower cooperation, bridge building, and peaceful coexistence would not be sacrificed to a crisis within the Soviet Bloc.⁴

THE JOHNSON ADMINISTRATION’S RESPONSE TO THE INVASION OF THE WARSAW PACT IN CZECHOSLOVAKIA⁵

In early May 1968, Eugene V. Rostow, the undersecretary of state, recommended to Secretary of State Dean Rusk to send a strong deterrent signal to Moscow not to intervene in Czechoslovakia. Rostow reasoned: “In retrospect, our failure to deter the Communist takeover of Czechoslovakia in 1948 was one of the most serious mistakes of our foreign policy since the war.” He added: “Firm diplomatic action then—a period of our nuclear monopoly—could well have prevented the Cold War.” Similarly, stating in public that the United States would not intervene during the Hungarian crisis in 1956 “gave the Soviets full license.” What was at stake now was “the process of movement toward detente.” Rostow sternly admonished the secretary of state that the Russians were hesitating: “The moment to give them a deterrent signal is therefore now.” Once they crossed the border it would be too late. Rusk wrote two words on top of the one-page memorandum and initialed them with “DR”: “No action.”⁶ Rusk’s minimal comment indeed characterized the entire response of the Johnson administration to Warsaw Pact pressure and later military aggression against Czechoslovakia during the summer of 1968. Rosy CIA analyses about the Prague Spring tended to predict moderate Soviet behavior in response to the Czechoslovak reform agenda of the Prague Spring. Moscow merely had decided “to do some saber-rattling in order to influence the Czechoslovaks to put a brake on their democratization.”⁷

The State Department expected a Soviet intervention all along and began to coordinate serious contingency planning with the Pentagon in May 1968 by instituting a “EUR[opa] advisory group” under the leadership of Malcolm Toon, the director of Soviet affairs in the State Department.⁸ In June, Secretaries of State Rusk and Defense Clark Clifford both agreed that they wanted “to stay out” of the Czech crisis, hoping that Prague could resolve their differences with Moscow directly. Rusk, like the CIA, was still hopeful that the Czechoslovaks might “get away” with their reform agenda—the U.S. did not intend “tinkering with it in any way.”⁹ Next to the Vietnam conflict, Clifford’s main worry at this time were the efforts by powerful Senators Mike Mansfield, Stuart Symington, and Henry Jackson to withdraw American forces from Europe to limit defense expenditures.¹⁰ Only on 22 July did Rusk warn Soviet ambassador to the United States Anatolii Dobrynin for the first time. Rusk noted that “the USA has been against interference in the affairs of Czechoslovakia from the very start.” In the message summarizing this conversation that Dobrynin sent to the Politburo, Rusk apparently said: “This is a matter for the Czechs first and foremost. Apart from that, it is a matter for Czechs and other nations of the Warsaw Pact” (emphasis added).¹¹ Did Rusk mean to indicate that this was entirely an internal affair in the Soviet Bloc? According to Dobrynin, then, Rusk seems to have indicated that he respected the Soviet sphere of interest in Eastern Europe. Kremlin leaders (especially KGB chief Andropov) took this as a “green light” to the Kremlin to go forward with their plans for intervention.¹²

In spite of a growing number of signals of impending Warsaw Pact action in August, the Johnson administration did not anticipate direct Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia. A daring reform agenda by the Czechoslovak Communists such as allowing free speech and a refining of Czech historical memory by openly criticizing the Stalinist purges of the early 1950s became increasingly intolerable to the Warsaw Pact allies as these changes threatened to spill over into the Bloc and initiate an undermining of their own regimes.¹³ President Johnson himself seems to have recognized the imminent threat of “falling dominoes” in the Soviet Bloc when he wrote in his memoirs in his typically hyperbolic rhetorical style: “If the fire was not stamped out quickly, they might soon face a holocaust.”¹⁴ Warnings about impending Soviet action were coming in from NATO headquarters in Belgium.¹⁵ CIA chief Richard Helms warned the president also on 18 August that something was brewing in Moscow. Helms’s futile warnings met with no success in moving the president toward action (it was like “peeing up a rope,” noted Helms later).¹⁶ The principal reason for this lackadaisical response in the White House clearly was the fact that the United States “obviously was not prepared to intervene militarily” (emphasis mine) in case of a Soviet intervention. All the United States could do was try to intimidate the Soviets by whipping up world public opinion, mobilizing Western European Communist parties to warn Moscow not to interfere “in internal affairs of a brother Communist Party and nation,” and involving the United Nations, noted the Eastern Europe expert Nathaniel Davis. He warned, however, not to make the mistakes of Hungary 1956 again, namely “in creating expectations we are not prepared to follow through on.”¹⁷

The surprising events of 19 to 21 August placed the president on a veritable roller-coaster ride. When the invasion of as many as half a million Warsaw Pact troops finally came during the night of 20/21 August, President Johnson initially refused to accept it. It instantly squashed his ambitious agenda for accelerating détente with the Soviet Union. Soviet Ambassador Anatolii Dobrynin, himself most likely ignorant of the impending invasion,¹⁸ presented a handwritten note to the White House on 19 August for the public announcement the following morning of a summit meeting between President Johnson and the Kremlin leaders in Leningrad in early October.¹⁹ After the signing of the Nonproliferation Treaty in early July, this summit was scheduled to begin talks on Strategic Arms Limitation and the Limitation of Anti-Ballistic Missile Systems. Progress in such negotiations was expected to be the culmination of Johnson’s détente efforts.²⁰ During the regular Tuesday lunch on 20 August, Johnson served a glass of sherry to his principal advisers and toasted the impending summit. He boasted: “This could be the greatest accomplishment of my administration.” Yet the dark clouds gathering over Czechoslovakia were discussed also. CIA director Helms thought that a hastily called meeting of the Central Committee in Moscow indicated Soviet action soon. His gloomy warnings were prophetic.²¹

The evening of 20 August brought shocking news to the White House. At 7:05 p.m. that evening, Ambassador Dobrynin made a rare direct call to the president to ask him for a meeting right away. An hour later, the Soviet ambassador informed the president that the invasion of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact troops was already underway. The intervention was designed to stop the “domestic and international conspiracy” against Czechoslovakia. President Johnson kept blabbering about the summit meeting and seems to have failed to register the full meaning of the dire invasion news. It appears that an embarrassed Walt W. Rostow, Johnson’s national security advisor, set the president straight after Dobrynin’s departure.²²

Rostow and Rusk set the gears of the White House crisis management team into motion and called for an emergency meeting of the National Security Council at 10:15 p.m. Clark Clifford noted in his memoirs how different Johnson’s mood was compared to the giddy lunch meeting earlier that day. Johnson felt doubled-crossed by the Kremlin leaders and reluctantly agreed to cancel the summit meeting. Secretary of State Dean Rusk averred that the United States could do little to help Prague—the Czechs had to help themselves. General Earle G. Wheeler, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, made it abundantly clear that a military U.S. response was out of the question and insisted: “We do not have the forces to do it.” Wheeler confirmed what Rusk had observed after the U.S. invasion of the Dominican Republic in 1965: the United States did not have the military capability to respond to two major international crises at the same time. Vice President Hubert Humphrey, who right away sensed the repercussions of the Czech crisis on his presidential run in 1968, also counseled caution. All that could be done was “giving the Russians hell” by castigating their intervention in the United Nations and registering a formal protest via the Soviet ambassador with the Kremlin.²³ Rusk proceeded to do this by calling Dobrynin to the State Department before midnight. Rusk told him “the Soviet action was like throwing a dead fish in the president’s face.” He told him to call Moscow immediately and cancel all preparations for the planned summit meeting since the United States did not want to condone “the Soviet march into Czechoslovakia.”²⁴ During the same night, the State Department activated a special “Czechoslovakia Task Force” to monitor the Czech crisis and coordinate the crisis response with NATO and principal U.S. allies.²⁵ Bonn was asked to closely observe its borders with Czechoslovakia yet prevent border incidents. The governments of the Federal Republic and Austria were called upon to help refugees coming across the borders.²⁶

On Wednesday 21 August, the president handled the Czech crisis as part of his daily routine. The president got up at 8 a.m. after only three hours of sleep and began working the phones to draft an official statement on the invasion. Since the crisis so far had not been a “sanguinary” one, this statement should not be an “inflammatory” one; he sincerely bemoaned this step backwards after all the progress in East-West relations in recent months. CIA and State Department analysts zoomed in on the repercussions for U.S. and Western European détente efforts.²⁷ George McGhee, who had just finished his tour as U.S. ambassador to West Germany a few months earlier, insisted that the United States must not give the impression that it accepted the status quo and Moscow’s sphere of influence in Europe. He observed prophetically that the Warsaw Pact invasion gave the United States a unique opportunity to strengthen NATO and stop Congressional efforts to withdraw U.S. forces from Europe.²⁸ In a briefing for NATO ambassadors by Charles Bohlen, the undersecretary of state for European affairs, West German ambassador Knappstein expressed his fear that the Soviets might also intervene in Berlin (the West’s “testicles” that could be squeezed at any time, as Nikita Khrushchev had once observed).²⁹ As Melyn Leffler has recently demonstrated again, the divided Germany was still considered the most intractable Cold War issue in the 1960s by both superpowers.³⁰ Johnson read his official statement on the invasion at noon and then proceeded to take his usual hour-long afternoon nap after lunch. He then worked the phones for the rest of the day, keeping the most important members of Congress informed.³¹

After his 21 August statement to the American and world public, the president needed to brief his government and further consult with his advisers about the Czech crisis. He called a meeting of his cabinet for the afternoon of Thursday, 22 August, and left no doubt about his profound disillusionment with the Kremlin. The entire détente agenda was in question, and it was clear that the “Cold War was not over.” The Pentagon’s Clifford and the president agreed that the United States had no obligation to intervene militarily to help the people of Czechoslovakia, who did not seem to demonstrate a strong will for resistance. Rusk made it crystal clear that “if there were military intervention, there would be world war.” The secretary of state expressed his frustration with perceptions around the world that perceived superpower interventionism in Czechoslovakia and Vietnam to be the same thing. Washington continued to show grave concern over the repercussions of the invasion on West Germany and Berlin.³²

On the next day, Friday, 23 August, discussions continued with the president’s principal foreign policy advisers. Secretary of Defense Clifford noted that the Soviet military action was well planned and efficiently executed, yet politically disastrous. CIA director Helms expressed his concern that the crisis could spill over into Romania. The State Department advised putting pressure on Moscow via the United Nations (UN) and not NATO. NATO action would merely confirm the Soviet propaganda line of both NATO and a West German conspiracy against Czechoslovakia.³³ In a meeting with Dobrynin, Rusk calmed him down with the observation that “in the atomic age the President is doing everything possible to diminish the potential for conflict.”³⁴ Discussions in the Pentagon came back to the major conclusion that the Soviet action confirmed the importance of the U.S. presence in Europe. It killed all Congressional efforts to withdraw American forces and offered an opportunity to strengthen NATO. In the Pentagon’s analysis, the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia offered a great opportunity to strengthen the U.S. hegemonic position in Europe and improve NATO military force structures for future negotiations from strength—surely not what the Kremlin had envisioned as the U.S. response.³⁵

“No action”—Rusk’s earlier advice to Eugene Rostow’s entreaties to send warnings to Moscow—also defined the basic posture of the Johnson administration vis-à-vis the Warsaw Pact intervention in Czechoslovakia. Within forty-eight hours it was clear that the Johnson administration would not respond militarily to the renewed rape of Czechoslovakia. Washington never contemplated a military response for just one second and was forced to freeze—quite reluctantly—the entire spectrum of “bridge building” and détente activities with Moscow and the entire Soviet Bloc. Washington had learned the tough lessons of “Hungary 1956,” namely not to encourage premature rebellion with a propaganda onslaught to encourage senseless resistance by the Czechs and the Slovaks against overwhelming odds of crushing military power. Neither was the unleashing of covert operations seriously contemplated. The only pressure that could be exerted on the Soviets was via condemnation by the United Nations Security Council. The Johnson administration was quick to jump on the sudden opportunity to stop all Congressional talk of defense savings via American troop withdrawals from Europe and strengthen NATO and its crisis response scenarios. Washington’s main worry, however, became a possible spillover of the crisis to Romania, and maybe even Yugoslavia and farther into Central Europe.

WASHINGTON’S FEARS OF CZECH CRISIS SPILLOVER

Starting on 23 August, Washington’s growing anxiety that Romania might be next on the list of Soviet interventions captivated policymakers and diplomats for the next week. Nicolae Ceaus¸escu’s Romania had become a thorn in Moscow’s flesh with his growing emancipation from Kremlin control. Romania did not participate in the invasion of the “Warsaw Pact Five” (Soviet Union, Poland, Bulgaria, Hungary, German Democratic Republic); its official protest launched against its allies’ invasion of Czechoslovakia was even more galling.³⁶ On 23 August, CIA director Helms warned against a Soviet troop buildup on Romania’s borders. Rumors of an imminent Soviet invasion seemed to have mainly originated from Romanian sources. The U.S. military attaché in Hungary visited the border areas and could not detect any massive troop build-ups vis-à-vis Romania or Yugoslavia.³⁷ Soviet expert George Kennan, vacationing in Scandinavia, commented on the stark difference between Czechoslovakian and Romanian behavior: while the Czechs had been faithful to their alliance commitments, the Romanians had abused them.³⁸

Secretary of State Rusk worried greatly about an escalating threat toward Romania. He did not want to take any chances and ordered his “Czechoslovakia Task Force” to initiate contingency planning for Romania as well. NATO headquarters, too, monitored Warsaw Pact troop movements toward the Romanian borders and Yugoslavia’s mobilization of reservists carefully.³⁹ Rusk also issued repeated warnings to Ambassador Dobrynin. He warned him that an invasion of Romania would have devastating consequences for U.S.-Soviet relations and world politics. Dobrynin pooh-poohed all the unsubstantiated rumors flying around Washington about Soviet threats toward Romania. On 29 August, Rusk again called in Dobrynin to the State Department after the plot of Soviet troop movement toward and border incidents vis-à-vis Romania seemed to thicken. He warned the Soviet ambassador that an intervention in Romania would produce “incalculable risks” in world politics. Rusk added: “Any move against Berlin would be ‘of utmost gravity’” (emphasis mine).⁴⁰ W. W. Rostow summarized State Department and CIA analyses of a threat to Romania for the vacationing president in Texas. The State Department resident Soviet expert Charles Bohlen and U.S. ambassador in Moscow Llewelyn Thompson calculated that chances for a Soviet invasion were 30 percent for and 70 percent against. The CIA presented an “inconclusive” general picture.⁴¹ President Johnson still took the opportunity to send a clear warning to Moscow in a speech the next day in San Antonio, Texas. He obliquely warned against the prospect of aggression against Czechoslovakia being repeated elsewhere in Eastern Europe, yet put Moscow unmistakably on notice: “So, let no one unleash the dogs of war” (my emphasis). Dobrynin quickly reassured Rusk again that Moscow had no military plans vis-à-vis Romania.⁴² Johnson’s warning clearly registered in the Kremlin. Even though rumors about Soviet movement vis-à-vis Romania continued to persist throughout the entire month of September, frequently stoked by Romanian diplomats, the danger slowly abated in the course of the fall.

Wild rumors also circulated about a Soviet threat toward Yugoslavia at the same time.⁴³ Josip Broz Tito’s Yugoslavia had also officially condemned the Warsaw Pact action against Czechoslovakia and allowed thousands of Czechoslovak vacationers on the Adriatic beaches to stay, some of them free of charge. Soviet counter-propaganda produced “a full-blown war scare” in Yugoslavia. Tito ordered some defensive measures, but did not alarm the world with a general mobilization. Rusk asked the Yugoslav ambassador to keep him informed about Soviet maneuvers and castigated Soviet “black propaganda.” He expressed regrets over the damage done to détente and bridge-building in Eastern Europe by the Warsaw Pact intervention. Rusk assured Ambassador Crnobrnja that unlike Hungary 1956, the CIA had not unleashed any covert military infiltration in Czechoslovakia. Clearly, unlike President Eisenhower’s overheated rhetoric of “rolling back” communism, the Johnson administration practiced a traditional containment policy and respected the Soviet sphere of influence.⁴⁴

The Austrian political class suffered from a bad case of jitters, too.⁴⁵ From Vienna, Austrian minister of defense Georg Prader spread the rumor that Warsaw Pact troops on the Austrian border enabled it to unleash military action against Romania, Yugoslavia, and Austria. Prader expected an invasion of Romania in the week of 2 to 8 September. Unless the West protested such a likely intervention vigorously, an attack on Yugoslavia and an ultimatum against Austria could be next. U.S. ambassador to Austria Douglas MacArthur III felt that Prader’s alarmist defense ministry experts argued from a “visceral feeling,” while Socialist critics like opposition leader Bruno Kreisky saw such Soviet actions as “remote.” The Austrian government was angling for discrete U.S. and NATO guarantees to protect Austria’s vulnerable neutrality.⁴⁶ President Johnson did warn members of Congress that after cleaning up in Romania and Yugoslavia, Austria could be next: “The next target might be Austria.”⁴⁷ The State Department did not want to take any chances and initiated contingency planning for Austria as well.⁴⁸ The Austrian government also had to contend with Soviet black propaganda about harboring U.S. “green berets” in eastern Austria preparing for covert military action into Czechoslovakia.⁴⁹

SUPERPOWER COMPLICITY? THE MYTH OF PRIOR U.S.-SOVIET AGREEMENT

President Charles de Gaulle unleashed a wave of attacks against the Johnson administration that the United States colluded with the Soviet Union not to intervene in case of Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.⁵⁰ Like the Johnson administration, De Gaulle’s government published a communiqué, too, on 21 August. The French statement related the Czech events back to the great spheres of influence agreement at the Yalta Conference in February 1945: “The armed intervention of the Soviet Union in Czechoslovakia is evidence of the fact that the Moscow Government has not abandoned the policy of power blocs imposed upon Europe by the effect of the Yalta Agreements. That policy is incompatible with the right of peoples to self-determination.” De Gaulle was quick to point out that France did not take part in the Yalta Agreements and regretted that the invasion impeded East-West détente. The French insisted that Eastern Europe belonged to the Soviet sphere of influence, but blamed Yalta and Anglo-American complicity for those spheres.⁵¹

Dean Rusk and the State Department were quick to reject such notions of prior U.S.-Soviet agreements as preposterous, “malicious and totally without foundation”:

Rusk reminded U.S. missions around the world that Yalta dealt with zones of occupation in Germany and Austria, but not with spheres of influence in Eastern Europe. In a poignant history lesson for the French president, Rusk noted that at Yalta, in fact, France was granted a zone of occupation and postwar representation on the Allied Control Council in postwar Germany. As a final clincher, Rusk wanted to remind the world that the “Declaration of Librated Europe” tried to secure free elections in the countries liberated by the Red Army in Eastern Europe—exactly “the opposite of [a] spheres of influence” agreement.⁵² Rusk also resented being constantly needled by the French with the analogy of the U.S. invasion of the Dominican Republic in 1965 and the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia and strongly reprimanded French ambassador Lucet over such an unfriendly equivalency.⁵³

In a speech in Connecticut a couple of weeks later, Rusk came back to denying emphatically any charges of “complicity” with the Soviet Union. He reminded the world that it was the Soviets that divided Europe “in violation of its Yalta pledge.” It was the Soviet Union that “used force and the threat of force from its occupying armies to impose Communist regimes on Romania, Bulgaria, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and the Soviet zone of Germany.” It was the Kremlin, Rusk insisted, that “established and maintained by force in Eastern Europe a sphere—not of influence but of dominance.” NATO had been established as a defensive pact not to establish a “sphere of influence” in Western Europe, but to protect Western Europeans against the threat of Soviet aggression. When France withdrew its forces from the NATO command in 1966, Rusk reminded de Gaulle, the fourteen NATO members withdrew their military headquarters quickly from France.⁵⁴ Yet in spite of these strong official rejoinders, the intellectual debate about Yalta and spheres of influence continued. While the official news media supported de Gaulle’s position, the eminent political scientist Raymond Aaron upbraided de Gaulle for his myth-making. While de Gaulle accepted the division of Europe when he sent a representative to the Communist Lublin government in Poland in the fall of 1945, Yalta was the final attempt to prevent a division of Europe. Aaron admonished de Gaulle that he was in no position to preach to the Anglo-Americans on this matter.⁵⁵

Alas, charges both in Western and Eastern Europe about U.S.-Soviet “collusion” and U.S. “complicity” in the intervention did not go away. The Viennese press interpreted Washington’s failure to protest the invasion sharply as a tacit agreement between the superpowers. Austrian foreign minister Kurt Waldheim felt that East and West had clearly marked their respective spheres of interest, and Socialist Party boss Bruno Kreisky commented in a similar vein that the superpowers wanted to see their mutual spheres of influence respected. The daily Arbeiterzeitung noted that the United States had lost the moral high ground in Vietnam. Western cries of outrage about the Soviet invasion, noted the Socialist daily, could easily be dismissed by cynics with the counterpart of U.S. interventions in Southeast Asia and Latin America.⁵⁶ The West German press was full of charges of “spheres of influence agreements” as well. President Johnson’s weak response to the Warsaw Pact action against Czechoslovakia undermined his leadership role in the Western world. A National Security memorandum summarized West German public opinion: “the German press is heavy with charges of ‘superpower complicity’ in the Czechoslovak crisis and expressions of uneasy doubt of the ability of the U.S. and other of Germany’s allies to stand up to the Warsaw Pact.”⁵⁷

In Czechoslovakia, too, the rumor mill of conspiracy theories about prior U.S.-Soviet complicity was churning. Zedněk Mlynář, a prominent member of the Alexander Dubček regime and intellectual force behind the reforms of the Prague Spring, prominently insisted on explicit prior agreements in his memoirs Nightfrost. Mlynář mentions that Leonid Brezhnev received the confirmation from President Johnson on 18 August that the United States respected the Yalta and Potsdam Agreements. The Soviet leader allegedly took this as a clear signal from Washington that the United States would not react to a Soviet intervention.⁵⁸ No “smoking gun” was ever found in the Soviet or U.S. archives that confirmed such a clear-cut explicit prior agreement.⁵⁹ The most that can be said of Rusk’s policy of nonintervention, as apparently pronounced to Ambassador Dobrynin on 22 July, was the U.S. policy of “hands off” from internal affairs in the Eastern Bloc—a policy that by and large had been practiced during the Soviet interventions in East Germany in 1953 and Hungary in 1956 as well. The obvious historical analogy with the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956—unleashed by Moscow to stop satellite dominoes from falling as well as the U.S. failure to intervene—was, indeed, regularly made in analyzing the Czech crisis.

UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES: THE INVASION OF CZECHOSLOVAKIA AND THE STRENGTHENING OF THE NATO ALLIANCE⁶⁰

Ever since de Gaulle’s withdrawal of French forces from the military command of NATO in 1966, the Western alliance seemed floundering in a state of crisis. In 1967 the “Harmel Report” was published, ostensibly giving NATO a larger role in European efforts toward détente. In the midst of the growing U.S. engagement in Vietnam and the mushrooming costs of that war, tensions were further aggravated by pressure on West Germany and the NATO allies to assume more of the costs of Western defense. A reluctant West Germany agreed to buy more arms from the United States and, thus, help to assuage the U.S. balance of payment deficits with such massive “offset payments.” The resistance of NATO allies to aid the U.S. war effort in Vietnam with troops led Senate leaders to demand the withdrawal of sizable numbers of U.S. forces from Western Europe. American troop withdrawals could help save costs and remind Western Europeans that the presence of American forces on the continent never was intended to be a permanent feature of Western European defense, but only a temporary fix.⁶¹ The Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia brought an unusual clarity to many of these contested issues of Western defense. Warsaw Pact aggression and the Brezhnev Doctrine dramatically demonstrated that Moscow was still the same wolf in sheep’s clothing. The role of NATO for the defense of Western Europe suddenly seemed more vital than ever, and the Czech crisis gave a new lease on life to NATO.

Vojtech Mastny posits that NATO’s response to the 1968 crisis “was on the whole calm, reasonable, and ultimately effective.” Harlan Cleveland, the shrewd and experienced U.S. ambassador to NATO in Brussels, recognized the repercussions of the “Czech affair” right away. With the “forward capacity” of Warsaw Pact forces on the German border of Czechoslovakia, NATO’s crisis preparedness was gravely challenged. For one, the rapid response time for NATO forces was shorter.⁶² Yet the Pentagon told the supreme commander, Allied Forces Europe (SACEUR) that “NATO should not regard Soviet recent military movements as directed essentially against the West.” As a consequence, in spite of the obvious change in the alert and readiness status of Soviet and Warsaw Pact forces in Eastern Europe, the SACEUR did “not put into effect any of the formal measures of military vigilance for which he has existing authority.” However, the NATO intelligence effort was intensified following the invasion. Elements of twenty-six divisions on Czechoslovak territory, Cleveland reminded Washington, represented a “military shift” that “while not evidently directed against NATO, considerably increases military uncertainties faced by NATO.” Cleveland reported from NATO Headquarters that there was “an instinctive shift to NATO” among allies. Since nobody in the West was thinking about militarily supporting Czechoslovakia, NATO could turn its gaze inward and assess the vital issues of military preparedness and alliance solidarity, as well as the alliance’s political goals. After all, NATO was never created to save the Eastern European satellites, Cleveland reminded Washington. The Warsaw Pacts destroyed with a single blow—which was militarily effective but politically counterproductive—NATO’s recent turn toward détente and the chance for mutual balanced force reductions and a final European peace order.⁶³

What would be the right Western diplomatic maneuver to counter the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia? To reenter the limelight of great power diplomacy, the French predictably pleaded for a Western summit of the United States, United Kingdom, and France. Yet it was West Germany that had been the United States’ most reliable continental ally for some time. Chancellor Kurt Georg Kiesinger pushed the idea of following the Warsaw Pact intervention with a NATO summit meeting to arrest the erosion of the troubled alliance. West German diplomats soon dismissed Kiesinger’s radio interview, in which he called for a NATO summit, as a typical “holiday talk.” Washington, however, reacted very cautiously to any suggestions for summitry, for a Western summit of any type might confirm Moscow’s propaganda line that there was a NATO and/or West German “conspiracy” afoot against Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Bloc. Any move that smacked of Western military intervention or escalation of the crisis needed to be avoided. Moscow must not be “stigmatized” in terms of the traditional Cold War context, concluded the State Department. Such caution, then, effectively meant a NATO “hands off” policy as well in response to the Warsaw Pact intervention.⁶⁴

U.S. views quickly gained a foothold to take the invasion of Czechoslovakia as a starting point for a comprehensive NATO defense review. NATO force levels and overall strategy should be thoroughly reassessed. After all, a crisis within the Eastern Bloc was something very different from a direct confrontation between NATO and the Warsaw Pact. NATO needed to rethink its entire crisis management procedures as well as the future of détente. Moreover, weapons systems, troop training, and logistics needed to be reviewed as well. Cleveland pleaded for “striking a viable transatlantic defense bargain,” namely a better mobilization of Western European reserve forces, along with a strengthening of U.S. force levels.⁶⁵ Washington thus utilized the Czech crisis to place greater pressure on the Western European allies to increase their defense budgets and military posture. With plenty of hyperbole, President Johnson reminded Kurt Birrenbach, Chancellor Kiesinger’s emissary to Washington: “While Rome is burning, the Europeans are asleep” (emphasis mine).⁶⁶ At the same time, the Czech crisis stopped all talk in Congress that called for a withdrawal of U.S. forces from Europe. At the end of September, Rusk smugly reported in a cabinet meeting that a number of critical NATO allies such as Germany and Norway had agreed to increase their defense budgets while all talk in the Senate about troop withdrawals from Europe had been stopped. Saki Dockrill is correct in noting that as far as the reinvigoration of the NATO alliance was concerned, the Czech crisis was a “blessing in disguise.”⁶⁷ At the same time, bickering did not stop among the Western European allies about whether the Czech crisis showed a weakening of U.S. leadership in the alliance. Washington was called upon to show a more robust engagement with European affairs.

CONCLUSION

“The brutal disillusionment over overoptimistic interpretations of trends in détente” in Europe, was one of the principal consequences of the Czech crisis, noted Ambassador McGhee quite rightly. The presence of Soviet troops in Czechoslovakia improved the balance of power in Europe in favor of the Soviets. McGhee still advocated a pragmatic continuation of détente policies as soon as possible in order to secure the progress that had already been made.⁶⁸ A basic National Security Council paper came to the same conclusions in early September when it recommended a return to détente policies “in due course.”⁶⁹ President Nixon would, indeed, sign a major agreement on strategic arms limitations—also resulting from the negotiations the Johnson administration wanted to move forward in the summit of October 1968 “that never was”—as a major foreign policy initiative before his first term was over. The new German chancellor Willy Brandt had already begun pushing his ambitious Ostpolitik in 1969. Johnson never wanted a rupture in his détente policies with Moscow; thus his ambitious agenda was put on hold only temporarily. The Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia was a very inconvenient bump on the road to détente. Secretary of State Rusk’s “hands off” policy made sure that East-West tensions would not escalate so that a return to détente would be possible. Vojtech Mastny asserts that the 1968 crisis over Czechoslovakia ironically “fostered the budding détente” since both NATO and the Warsaw Pact “at the moment of truth… both showed a prudent disposition to underestimate their own strength and overestimate the strength of the adversary.” Their 1968 crisis performance led them “to the sobering conclusion that the war they had been preparing for was wrought with so many uncertainties that it could not be planned with any reliability.” After 1968, Mastny concludes about the larger significance of the Czechoslovak crisis for Cold War strategies, “neither side courted a disaster in Europe deliberately.”⁷⁰

Johnson’s desire for a summit was motivated by more than a simple improving of his image at home and abroad, as Jeremi Suri has suggested. A summit in 1968 might have frozen the arms race in intercontinental missiles and resulted in nuclear parity. Instead, the arms race continued, and the ICBMs were upgraded with MIRV technology, notes John Prados.⁷¹ One of the consequences of the continued arms race was the rise of the neocons and their critiques of Soviet superiority in the arms race and the entire détente agenda. This brought Ronald Reagan to the White House and the resumption of the Cold War. The setbacks of 1968 may have been the year when the United States entered a declining trajectory in its position of global hegemony.⁷² Indeed, as the West Europeans frequently noted in the course of the Czech crisis, during the dual crisis of Vietnam and the Warsaw Pact intervention in Czechoslovakia, American leadership was lackluster.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

For help in preparing this chapter, I am grateful to the archivists and librarians at the Lyndon B. Johnson Library and the National Archives and Records Center in College Park, Maryland. Scott Manguno has assisted me with research, and Peter Ruggenthaler has been a valuable reader and sympathetic critic. From Mark Kramer and Thomas Schwartz’s work I have learned enormously over the years. Vladislav Zubok has also helped clearing up some points.

NOTES

1. See the unpublished paper by Günter Bischof, “Respecting Cold War Boundaries: U.S. Responses to the Soviet Invasions of East Germany (1953), Hungary (1956), Czechoslovakia (1968),” lecture delivered in the conference in honor of Charles S. Maier, Crossing Boundaries: International History in a Global Age, American Academy, Berlin, Germany, 7 June 2008.

2. On the crisis year 1968, see Mark Kurlanski, 1968: The Year That Rocked the World (New York: Ballantine, 2004); Ronald Fraser, ed., 1968: A Student Generation in Revolt (New York: Pantheon, 1988); for the larger context of the 1960s, see Terry H. Anderson, The Movement and the Sixties: Protest in America from Greensboro to Wounded Knee (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); David Bruner, Making Peace with the 60s (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996); Arthur Marwick, The Sixties: Cultural Revolution in Britain, France, Italy, and the United States, c. 1958–c. 1974 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).

3. On the Johnson presidency, see Robert Dallek, Lyndon B. Johnson, Portrait of a President (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); Randall Woods, LBJ: Architect of American Ambition (New York: The Free Press, 2006); Bruce J. Schulman, Lyndon B. Johnson and American Liberalism: A Brief Biography with Documents, 2nd ed. (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2007); John L. Bullion, Lyndon B. Johnson and the Transformation of American Politics (New York: Pearson Longman, 2008).

4. The secondary literature on these events is considerable. Among the most important publications are Thomas Alan Schwartz, Lyndon Johnson and Europe: In the Shadow of Vietnam (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003); Jeremi Suri, Power and Protest: Global Revolution and the Rise of Détente (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003); Vladislav M. Zubok, A Failed Empire: The Soviet Union in the Cold War from Stalin to Gorbachev (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007); Mark Kramer, “The Czechoslovak Crisis and the Brezhnev Doctrine,” in 1968: The World Transformed, ed. Carole Fink et al., Publications of the German Historical Institute, Washington, DC (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 10–71; H. W. Brands, ed., The Foreign Policies of Lyndon Johnson beyond Vietnam (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1999); H. W. Brands, The Wages of Globalism: Lyndon Johnson and the Limits of American Power (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); Robert A. Divine, “Lyndon Johnson and Strategic Arms Limitations,” in The Johnson Years, vol. 3, LBJ at Home and Abroad, ed. Robert Divine (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1994), 239–79; Mitchell B. Lerner, ed., Looking Back at LBJ: White House Politics in a New Light (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2005); Warren I. Cohen and Nancy Bernkopf Tucker, eds., Lyndon Johnson Confronts the World: American Foreign Policy 1963–1968 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Lawrence Kaplan et al., eds., NATO after Forty Years (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1990); Vojtech Mastny, “Was 1968 a Strategic Watershed of the Cold War,” Diplomatic History 29, no. 1 (2005): 149–77; Mitchell Lerner, “Trying to Find the Guy Who Invited Them: Lyndon B. Johnson, Bridge Building and the End of the Prague Spring,” Diplomatic History 21, no. 3 (2008): 77–103; Hal Brands, “Progress Unseen: U.S. Arms Control Policy and the Origins of Détente, 1963–1968,” Diplomatic History 30, no. 2 (2006): 253–85; John C. McGinn, “The Politics of Collective Inaction: NATO’s Response to the Prague Spring,” Journal of Cold War Studies 1, no. 3 (1999): 111–38; A. Paul Kubricht, “Confronting Liberalization and Military Invasion: America and the Johnson Administration Respond to the 1968 Prague Summer,” Jahrbücher fur Geschichte Osteuropas 40, no. 2 (1992): 197–212; Andreas Daum et al., eds., America, the Vietnam War, and the World: Comparative and International Perspectives, Publications of the German Historical Institute, Washington, DC (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Alexandra Friedrich, “Awakenings: The Impact of the Vietnam War on West German–American Relations in the 1960s” (Ph.D. diss., Temple University, 2000).

5. The sources for this chapter come from three major documentary collections: the National Security Council files and other file collections in the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library in Austin, Texas (LBJL), as well as two collections in the National Archives and Records Administration in College Park, Maryland (NARA); first, the documents in the file collection “POL 27-1 COM BLOC-Czech” (hereafter abbreviated as POL-27) and “POL Czech—USSR DEF 4 NATO” (hereafter abbreviated as POL Czech), “Central Foreign Policy Files 1967–1969 [CFPF]” in Record Group 59, the General Records in the Department of State; secondly, the “Czech Crisis Files” (Lot 70 D 19) (hereafter abbreviated as CCF) in the Office of the Executive Secretariat of the Department of State, also in RG 59. I have contributed U.S. documents to the collection of Karner et al., Dokumente. U.S. documents reprinted in the basic collection of the Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States, vol. 17, Eastern Europe 1964–1968 (Washington, DC, 1996), are hereinafter abbreviated as FRUS, unless another volume from this series is specifically referenced. Johnson’s official public statements and speeches are conveniently reprinted in Lyndon B. Johnson, The Public Papers of the President of the United States, 1968–1969, 2 vols. (Washington, DC: Office of the Federal Register, National Archives and Records Service, General Services Administration, 1970) (hereafter abbreviated as PPP). Frequent references will be made to the massive volume of essays by Karner et al., Beiträge.

6. “Soviet threat to Czechoslovakia,” Rostow to Rusk, 10 May 1968, Folder “6/1/68,” Box 1558, POL-Czech, RG 59, NARA (reprinted in appendix 3 of this volume).

7. “Saber-Rattling,” in CIA memorandum “The Czechoslovak Situation,” 9 May 1968, Folder 6, and “Present USSR Attitude toward Czechoslovakia,” Folder 3, both Box 179, NSC Country Files Czechoslovakia, LBJL; see also the chapter by Donald P. Steury in this volume.

8. Memorandum, “Pressures on Czechoslovakia,” Walter J. Stoessel Jr. to Mr. Read, 9 May 1968, and Lawrence Eagleburger to Stoessel, 10 May 1968, both in Folder 6, Box 179, NSC Country files Czechoslovakia, LBJL. Walter J. Stoessel Jr., who was the deputy assistant secretary of state for European and Canadian Affairs in May and who assumed the post of ambassador to Poland right around the time of the intervention, had expected an intervention throughout the Prague Spring crisis months: “‘We’ had expected it so often over the duration of the crisis, and it had NOT transpired so often, that by the time it happened ‘we’ were indeed surprised” (my emphasis). This is how Stoessel summarized State Department expectations vis-à-vis Tom Simons when he arrived in Warsaw for embassy duty. Personal e-mail communication from Ambassador Thomas W. Simons Jr. to author, October 22, 2008. Like the War Department in 1941 in the Pacific, the State Department anticipated an intervention throughout the spring and summer of 1968. This had a “lulling effect” (Simons) on Foggy Bottom. When the attack finally occurred it came as a shock to officials and people.

9. “Memorandum of Conversation” with Sir Patrick Dean, 17 July 1968, Folder “POL US—USSR 1/1/68,” Box 2665, CFPF, RG 59, NARA.

10. Minutes, secretary of defense staff meeting, 29 July 1968. Box 18, Papers of Clark Clifford, LBJL (reprinted in appendix 9 of this volume).

11. Rusk’s statement is reported in a Central Committee resolution of 26 July 1968, reprinted in Karner et al., Dokumente, #191 (for a translation of this document see appendix 5 of this volume). In the State Department memorandum of conversation of the 22 July meeting with Dobrynin, Rusk’s message is less clear and direct than in the one Dobrynin sent to Moscow—the Warsaw Pact is not mentioned and Rusk refers to the “bridge building” policies of the Johnson administration with Eastern Europe: “He said we had not wished to involve ourselves directly in this matter, that the U.S. had been attempting to develop better relationships with Eastern European countries as well as with the Soviet Union.” FRUS, 212–14 (here 213); see also Matthew J. Ouimet, The Rise and Fall of the Brezhnev Doctrine in Soviet Foreign Policy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 34.

12. Michael Prozumenshchikov argues that Rusk’s message, as reported by Dobrynin, “virtually gave [the Soviets] the green light for their planned moves in Czechoslovakia”; see his chapter in this volume. Ouimet, however, stresses the point that in the absence of more documentary evidence this cannot be construed as a “green light” to the Soviets, see Rise and Fall of the Brezhnev Doctrine, 32–34.

13. See also the Wilke chapter in this volume.

14. Lyndon Baines Johnson, Vantage Point: Perspectives of the Presidency, 1963–1969 (New York: Popular Library, 1971), 486.

15. Ginsberg Memorandum for W. W. Rostow, 15 August 1968, Folder 3, Box 179, NSC Country File, Czechoslovakia, LBJL.

16. Ginsberg Memorandum for W. W. Rostow, 15 August 1968; for Helms citation, see Bennett Kovrig, Of Walls and Bridges: The United Sates and Eastern Europe (New York: New York University Press, 1991), 114.

17. Nathaniel Davis Memorandum “Czechoslovak Contingencies” (no date, but located in documents prior to the invasion), Folder 5, Box 179, NSC Country File, Czechoslovakia, LBJL (reprinted in appendix 6 of this volume).

18. Rusk thought so, since Dobrynin had assured him only three weeks earlier that no invasion was planned; see Dean Rusk as told to Richard Rusk, As I Saw It (New York: W. W. Norton, 1990), 351.

19. Handwritten “Message by Soviet Ambassador Dobrynin and delivered 19 August 1968, the day before the invasion of Czechoslovakia,” Folder 1, Box 57, Special Head of State Correspondence, NSF, LBJL, reprinted in Karner et al., Dokumente, #192.

20. For a fine summary of Johnson disarmament efforts, see John Prados, “Prague Spring and SALT: Arms Limitation Setbacks in 1968,” in Brands, Foreign Policies of Lyndon Johnson, 10–36 (esp. 24f).

21. Citation from Clark Clifford (with Richard Holbrooke), Counsel to the President: A Memoir (New York: Random House, 1991), 559; Johnson writes that opinions were divided about Soviet moves against Czechoslovakia “and I was not completely optimistic,” see Vantage Point, 487; W. W. Rostow’s Czech agenda item for the meeting is mentioned in John Prados, Keepers of the Keys: A History of the National Security Council from Truman to Bush (New York: William Morrow, 1991), 194.

22. Daily diary, 20 August 1968, Box 16, the President’s Daily Diary 1963–1969, and Dobrynin’s official note with the Kremlin’s public explanation for the invasion in appointment file (diary backup), Box 108, both in Papers of LBJ, LBJL; “Meeting Johnson,” Rostow with Dobrynin in Cabinet Room, 20 August 1968, FRUS, 236–41, reprinted in Karner et al., Dokumente, #193. See also Anatolii Dobrynin, In Confidence: Moscow’s Ambassador to America’s Six Cold War Presidents (New York: Times Books, 1995), 179f; Johnson, Vantage Point, 486; George W. Ball, The Past Has Another Pattern: Memoirs (New York: W. W. Norton, 1982), 440. For a good summary and Johnson’s obliviousness, see Schwartz, Johnson and Europe, 216–20.

23. Notes of emergency meeting of the National Security Council, 20 August 1968, 10:15 p.m., in FRUS, 236–41; also reprinted in Jaromír Navrátil et al., eds., The Prague Spring 1968 (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2006), #109.

24. Rusk, As I Saw It, 351.

25. Katzenbach memorandum for the president, 21 August 1968, Folder 6, Box 3, CCF, RG 59, NARA.

26. Department of State, Czech Task Force, 21 August 1968, Folder State Situation Papers, Box 182, NSC Country File, Czechoslovakia, LBJL; Rusk telegrams to embassies in Bonn and Vienna and all US NATO missions, 21 August 1968, Folder “8/21/68,” Box 1993, POL 27-1, RG 59, NARA.

27. W. W. Rostow memorandum for the president, 21 August 1968, Folder 3, Box 182, NSC Country File, Czechoslovakia, LBJL; CIA memorandum, “The Soviet Decision to Intervene,” and Thomas L. Hughes memorandum, “Impact of Soviet Move on Western Europe—First Thoughts,” both 21 August 1968, Folder 3, Box 182, NSC Country File, Czechoslovakia, LBJL.

28. McGhee memorandum for Rusk, 21 August 1968, Folder 1, Box 1, CCF, RG 59, NARA (reprinted in appendix 7 of this volume).

29. “Bohlen Briefing on Czech Situation,” Rusk to all NATO Headquarters, 22 August 1968, Folder 1, Box 1, CCF, RG 59, NARA. Rusk had reminded his colleagues of this colorful metaphor in the emergency NSC meeting on 20 August, namely that “Khrushchev called Berlin the testicles of the West and when he wanted to create pressure he squeezed there,” FRUS, 243.

30. The centrality of the German question and Soviet fears of a resurgent Germany throughout the Cold War is a surprisingly persistent theme in Leffler’s For the Soul of Mankind: The United States, the Soviet Union, and the Cold War (New York: Hill and Wang, 2007).

31. White House press release at 12:15 p.m., 21 August 1968, appointment file (diary backup), Box 108, LBJ Papers, LBJL; reprinted in PPP, 1968, II, 905.

32. For complete transcript, see notes of cabinet meeting, 22 August 1968, Folder “8/22/68,” Box 14, Cabinet Papers, LBJL; for summary notes, see FRUS, 48–49. Johnson’s presentation to the full cabinet is based on W. W. Rostow’s memorandum, “Czechoslovakia—Talking Points for Today’s Cabinet Meeting,” 22 August 1968, Folder “8/68,” Box 179, NSC Country File, Czechoslovakia, LBJL, reprinted in Karner et al., Dokumente, #203. Rostow wanted to maintain the chance for détente and wrote: “The Cold War is not over, but we should also understand that we cannot simply return to it” (my emphasis). Johnson changed the second half of the sentence to “our relations with the Soviets are in transition.”

33. Summary of meeting, 23 August 1968; see also minutes of secretary of defense staff meeting, 26 August 1968, Box 18, Clifford Papers, LBJL.

34. Memorandum of conversation (Rusk, Dobrynin, Thompson), 23 August 1968, Folder “23/8/68,” Box 1994, POL 27-1, CFPF, RG 59, NARA.

35. Minutes of the secretary of defense meeting, 26 August 1968, Box 18, Clifford Papers, LBJL. The Germans were pushing the strengthening of NATO above all else; see the memoranda of conversation between Chancellor Kiesinger and Henry Cabot Lodge, the U.S. ambassador in Bonn, 5 and 18 September 1968, in FRUS 1964–1968, vol. 15, Germany and Berlin (Washington, DC: GPO, 1999), 733–37, 743–46, as well as summary of Lodge for the president, 28 September 1969, in FRUS 1964–1968, vol. 15, Germany and Berlin, 750–51. The best discussion of the declining trajectory of the U.S. hegemonic position as result of the Vietnam War is George C. Herring, “Tet and the Crisis of Hegemony,” in Fink et al., 1968: The World Transformed, 31–53.

36. See also Mihail Ionescu, “Rumänien und die Invasion der ‘Bruderstaaten,’” in Karner et al., Beiträge, 605–16.

37. CIA memorandum, “Possible Soviet Threat to Rumania,” 23 August 1968, Folder “Cables 10/66–1/69,” Box 204, NSC Files, LBJL; Hillenbrand (Budapest) to Rusk, 28 August 1968, Folder 5, Box 2, CCF, RG 59, NARA.

38. George Kennan’s views on Czech intervention, Hilton memorandum, 29 August 1968, Folder 9, Box 179, NSC Country File, Czechoslovakia, LBJL.

39. Rusk Memorandum, “Expansion of Czechoslovakia Task Force to Include Romanian Contingency,” for president, 29 August 1968, Folder 9, Box 179, NSC Country File, Czechoslovakia, LBJL; NATO #04389, Cleveland to Rusk, 26 August 1968, Folder 5, Box 2, CCF, RG 59, NARA.

40. Memorandum of conversation (Rusk, Dobrynin, Thompson), 23 August 1968, FRUS, 256; Rusk to Cleveland (NATO mission), 31 August 1968; “Oral Communication from Ambassador Dobrynin of the USSR to Secretary Rusk,” 30 August 1968, both Folder “9/20/68,” Box 1997, POL 27-1, RG 59, NARA.

41. The “top secret” memorandum W. W. Rostow cabled to the president at the ranch in Texas on 30 August 1968 is more informative than the brief report Rusk sent to the NATO mission (see previous note), Folder 9, Box 179, NSC Country File, Czechoslovakia, LBJL.

42. “Remarks in San Antonio at the Annual Convention of Milk Producers,” 30 August 1968, Johnson, PPP, 1968, II, 917–20 (quotation 920); see also Kovrig, Of Walls and Bridges, 114; Dobrynin’s throwing water on the Washington rumor mills is mentioned in memorandum of conversation (Rusk and Norwegian ambassador Gunmeng), 11 November 1968, Folder 6, Box 3, CCF, RG 59, NARA.

43. See also the Jakovina chapter in this volume.

44. Thomas L. Hughes memorandum for Rusk, “Yugoslav Support of Czechoslovakia Persists Despite Scare over Soviet Aggression,” 28 August 1968, Folder “8/28/68,” Box 1995, POL 27-1, RG 59, NARA; Memorandum of conversation (Rusk, Ambassador Crnobrnja), 29 August 1968, Folder 6, Box 3, CCF, RG 59, NARA; for a summary of this conversation by Crnobrnja from the Serbian archives, see Karner et al., Dokumente, #147.

45. See also Peter Ruggenthaler, “Die Neutralität verplichtet: die sowjetisch-öster reichischen Beziehungen 1968,” in Karner et al., Beiträge, 993–1006.

46. Vienna #06326, MacArthur to Rusk (and Department of Defense), 30 August 1968, Folder “Vol. I 7/64 1/69,” Box 163, NSC Country File Austria, LBJL.

47. Brands, Wages of Globalism, 119.

48. “Austrian Contingency Arrangements: Information Memorandum,” Leddy to Rusk, 29 August 1968, Folder “9/20/68,” Box 1997, POL 27-1, RG 59, NARA.

49. Vienna #06276, MacArthur to Rusk, Folder 5, Box 2, CCF, RG 59, NARA; Austrian ambassador Wodak in Moscow was directed by the Ballhausplatz in Vienna to register a sharp protest in the Kremlin against these rumors, see Vienna #06275, MacArthur and Rusk, 29 August 1968, Folder 5, Box 2, CCF, RG 59, NARA; a similar protest by Bohlen is mentioned in Rusk to MacArthur, 28 August 1968, Folder “8/28/68,” Box 1995, CFPF, RG 59, NARA, reprinted in Karner et al., Dokumente, #180; the Moscow story of “green berets” in Austria also was included in the “Daily Situation Report” on 28 August of the Czech Task Force in the State Department; see Folder 5, Box 2, CCF, RG 59, NARA. About Austrian foreign minister Kurt Waldheim’s and Chancellor Josef Klaus’s protests with the Soviet ambassador in Vienna of 29 and 31 August, see Karner et al., Dokumente, #181 and #182; see also the Ruggenthaler chapter (note 45).

50. The only authors who cover de Gaulle’s curious “politics of history” in the Czech crisis are Kubricht, Confronting Liberalization and Military Intervention, 208–21, and Ouimet, Rise and Fall of the Brezhnev Doctrine, 32–34.

51. De Gaulle’s translated communiqué was quickly cabled back to the State Department on 21 August, see Folder “8/21/68,” Box 1993, POL 27-1, CPF, RG 59, NARA, reprinted in Karner et al., Dokumente, #198. See also Frédéric Bozo, Two Strategies for Europe: De Gaulle, the United States, and the Atlantic Alliance, trans. Susan Emanuel (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001), 223ff, and the Soutou chapter in this volume.

52. State #226360, Rusk to all diplomatic missions, 23 August 1968, Folder 4, Box 2, CCF, RG 59, NARA, reprinted in Karner et al., Dokumente, #204; the embassy in Vienna also presented this declaration to the Foreign Ministry. Ivan Pfaff has soundly rejected the myth of the “division of Europe” at Yalta and places the Soviet advances into Central Europe at the end of the war in the larger context of geostrategic developments; see “Die Legende von Jalta,” Forum für osteuropäische Zeitgeschichte 8, no. 2 (2004): 53–112.

53. Memorandum of conversation (Rusk, Luce, et al.), 26 August 1968, Folder 6, Box 3, CCF, RG 59, NARA.

54. Excerpts of Rusk speech before the Connecticut Manufacturers’ Association, 12 September 1968, Folder State Department [1 of 2], Box 64, NSC, Agency File, LBJL.

55. Paris #20083, Shriver to Rusk, 28 August 1968, Folder 5, Box 2, CCF, RG 59, NARA.

56. Vienna #06262, MacArthur to Rusk, 29 August 1968; Waldheim’s views in Vienna #06253, MacArthur to Rusk, 28 August 1968, both Folder 5, Box 2, CCF, RG 59, NARA.

57. Bonn #16394, Lodge to Rusk, 4 September 1968, Folder “9/1/68,” Box 1996, POL 27-1, CFPF, RG 59, NARA; this conversation is documented from the German side in Karner et al., Dokumente, #211; see also NSC Paper “The United States, Europe, and the Czechoslovakia Crisis” (n.d.), FRUS, 271.

58. Zedněk Mlynář, Nightfrost in Prague: The End of Humane Socialism, trans. Paul Wilson (New York: Karz, 1980), 241.

59. See Ouimet, Rise and Fall of the Brezhnev Doctrine, 33–34. This author set out on his archival visits with the goal on finding such a “smoking gun”; like Ouimet, he was unsuccessful.

60. In his final analysis for the Kremlin leaders of the Czech crisis, Dobrynin also came to the conclusion that the Czech Crisis strengthened NATO, see “Die USA propagieren die Stärkung der NATO,” 3 October 1968, reprinted in Karner et al., Dokumente, #217

61. For this larger context overshadowing the Czech crisis, see Schwartz, Johnson and Europe, 187–222; Schwartz, “Lyndon Johnson and Europe: Alliance Politics, Political Economy”; Schwartz, “‘Growing Out of the Cold War,’” in Brands, Johnson’s Foreign Policies, 37–60; Friedrich, “Awakenings”; Frank Costigliola, “Lyndon B. Johnson, Germany, and ‘the End of the Cold War,’” in Cohen and Bernkopf Tucker, Lyndon Johnson Confronts the World, 173–210; Bozo, Two Strategies for Europe, 187–218; Grosser, Das Bündnis, 293–358; Richard Barnett, The Alliance America-Europe-Japan: Makers of the Modern World (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983); and various essays in Kaplan et al., NATO after Forty Years. The “dollar crisis” is keenly analyzed in Hubert Zimmermann, “Who Paid for America’s War? Vietnam and the International Monetary System, 1960–1975,” in Daum et al., America, the Vietnam War, and the World, 151–73. The enormous anxiety about Congressional pressure to reduce U.S. forces in Europe and thereby weaken the Western defense posture comes through strongly in the weekly staff meetings of the Department of Defense, see appendix 9 of this volume.

62. Mastny, “Was 1968 a Strategic Watershed of the Cold War?” 174; NATO #04388, “NAC Discussion of Warsaw Pact Threat to NATO,” Cleveland and Rusk, 26 August 1968, and NATO #04375, Cleveland and Rusk, 26 August 1968, both Folder 5, Box 2, CCF RG 59, NARA.

63. NATO #04447 Cleveland to Rusk, 29 August 1968, Folder 5, Box 2, CCF, RG 59, NARA.

64. The transcript of the Kiesinger radio interview is in Bonn #15990, Lodge to Rusk, 25 August 1968, Folder 4, Box 2, CCF; see also NATO #04379, Cleveland to Rusk, 26 August 1968, Folder 5, Box 2, CCF; Kiesinger’s foreign policy adviser Osterhammel told the Americans that the chancellor’s idea of a summit meeting for the revitalization of NATO originated with the U.S. expert on Eastern Europe Zbigniev Brezinzki, see Bonn #15996, Lodge to Rusk, 26 August 1968, Folder 5, Box 2, CCF, all RG 50, NARA.

65. NATO #04427, “NATO Post-Czech Reassessment Program,” Cleveland to Rusk, Folder 5, Box 2, CCF, RG 49, NARA.

66. Memorandum of conversation (Eugene Rostow, Birrenbach et al.), 10 September 1968, Folder 6, Box 3, CCF, reprinted in Karner et al., Dokumente, #214; LBJ citation in Schwartz, Johnson and Europe, 220; the importance of the invasion for NATO is also discussed in memorandum of conversation (Birrenbach, Rusk et al.), 9 September 1968, in FRUS 1964–1968, XV, 737–40. The effect of the Czechoslovak crisis on NATO and on Congress in terms of strengthening NATO defenses and ending all talk of American troop withdrawals from Europe in Washington, is a persistent theme in Clifford’s weekly staff meetings in the Pentagon (see appendix 9 of this volume).

67. Minutes of cabinet meeting, 18 September 1968, Folder “9/18/68 [1 of 3],” Box 15, Cabinet Papers, LBJ Papers, LBJL; see also the chapter by Saki Ruth Dockrill in this volume.

68. McGhee memorandum for Rusk “New Situation for U.S. created by Czech Crisis,” 4 September 1968, Folder 6, Box 3, CCF, RG 59, NARA. Given that McGhee had served as U.S. ambassador in Bonn until the spring of 1968, it does not come as a surprise that he advocated a leadership role for West Germany in NATO; see George McGhee, At the Creation of a New Germany: From Adenauer to Brandt. An Ambassador’s Account (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989).

69. NSC Paper, “The United States, Europe, and the Czechoslovak Crisis” (n.d.), FRUS, 266.

70. Mastny, “Was 1968 a Strategic Watershed of the Cold War?” 176–77.

71. Jeremi Suri, “Lyndon Johnson and the Global Disruption of 1968,” in Lerner, Looking Back at LBJ, 53–77 (here 66); Prados, “Prague Spring and SALT,” 32–33.

72. Herring, “Tet and the Crisis of Hegemony,” 31–53, see also Brands’s conclusions, “Hegemony’s End,” in his Wages of Globalism, 254–64.

As is well known, the origins of the Czech crisis and the so-called Prague Spring lay in the election of Alexander Dubček to the post of first secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (Komunistická strana Československa or KSČ) on 5 January 1968.¹ Dubček replaced the moribund Antonin Novotný, first secretary since 1957.

Dubček’s election was greeted with enthusiasm both in Czechoslovakia and in Moscow—at least initially. Novotný had presided over the decline of the previously efficient Czech economy and apparently was regarded in the Kremlin as something of a “neo-Stalinist nuisance.” Dubček, at fortysix, was young, energetic, and—in Moscow’s eyes—reliable, having been educated in the Soviet Union and lived some seventeen years there. In the Soviet Committee for State Security (KGB) he was known as “our Sasha.” In December 1967, the Soviet Communist leader Leonid Brezhnev made an unscheduled visit to Prague during which he made clear to Novotný that he had lost Moscow’s backing—thus effectively paving the way for Dubček’s election.²

Despite this apparent stamp of approval from Moscow, Dubček proved to be anything but reliable. From his election onward, the Czech Communist leadership embarked on a program of dramatic liberalization of the Czech political economic and social system, including the overhaul of the KSČ leadership, freedom of speech, surrender of authority to the Czech National Assembly by the Communist Party, real elections at local and national levels, and even the suggestion of legalizing noncommunist political parties.

All this alarmed Moscow and the leadership of the Warsaw Pact, but throughout the Prague Spring, Dubček went out of his way to demonstrate his personal loyalty to Moscow and Prague’s intention to remain firmly within the Warsaw Pact military alliance. How sincere he was in these protestations is difficult to say, but Dubček and his allies clearly feared a repetition of the Hungarian uprising of 1956, bloodily crushed by Soviet and Warsaw Pact troops.

These fears were mirrored in Washington and, to a certain extent, even in Moscow. Certainly the Kremlin, under the nearly comatose leadership of Leonid Brezhnev, had no desire to provoke a crisis, while any disturbance anywhere was seen as a threat to the increasingly ramshackle stability of the Soviet Bloc. There was, moreover, a general tendency—at least in the West—to view some kind of internal reform as a necessary precondition for the stability of the Warsaw Pact.

Although the Warsaw Pact had been created in 1955 as a “paper organization” to counter the rearming of West Germany and the cooperative effort of the western Allies in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), by the early 1960s, the Warsaw Pact gradually was acquiring more form and substance as a military alliance. Under Nikita Khrushchev, the pact had become the mechanism by which Moscow could introduce large-scale troop reductions, principally in conventional forces deployed to Europe.³ With substantially fewer forces on the ground in Eastern Europe, Moscow had more at stake in making the alliance work. Thus, although the non-Soviet members of the Warsaw Pact had had little choice in joining the organization, once they were members of an alliance with the Soviet Union, they found they had a relatively greater voice in ordering their own affairs.⁴

By 1965, the Warsaw Pact was becoming a framework in which the nations of Eastern Europe could exercise a growing level of relative autonomy. General disenchantment with Marxist economics and Soviet-style politics and the growing attraction of the West were giving the states of Eastern Europe “both the incentive and the opportunity for striking out on their own”; “[t]he Soviets,” noted ONE, will find it difficult to arrest the process; “though crises are an ever-present danger, we believe that these countries will be able successfully to assert their own national interests gradually and without provoking Soviet intervention.”⁵ The Prague Spring thus seems to have been evaluated as part of a broader reform movement within the Warsaw Pact as a whole. There was the cautious belief that Sasha Dubček—if he were very careful and very, very lucky—just might pull it off. ⁶

Agency analysis in the Prague Spring focused on two critical factors. The first of these was the importance of the Czechoslovak armed forces to Warsaw Pact military planning. In a war with NATO, the Czechoslovakian army would have formed the first echelon of a Warsaw Pact attack into southern Germany, intended to outflank any NATO effort to defend the inner-German border and, ultimately, to drive across Bavaria and BadenWürttemberg to the Rhine.⁷ The Czech military leadership was given command of this front and would have retained command of its armed forces in wartime—which put Czechoslovakia, alongside Poland, in a privileged position in the Warsaw Pact hierarchy.⁸ The reduction of Soviet ground forces in the early 1960s had only increased Czechoslovakia’s importance to Soviet/Warsaw Pact war planning.⁹

The second was the importance of the Czech economy. Czechoslovakia was among the most industrially developed of the Warsaw Pact countries, yet it had suffered the most from twenty years of Communist rule. In 1948, Czechoslovakia was better off than West Germany. By 1968, per capita output was about two-thirds that of the Federal Republic, quite apart from major differences in quality. Moscow was aware that popular opinion in Czechoslovakia blamed the old-line party hierarchy for its relative decline.¹⁰ “Economic pressure is a major force for political change in Eastern Europe,” noted one U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) memorandum; without meaningful reform, Czechoslovakia’s problems “may become acute in the next two or three years….”¹¹

To the CIA, the Czech economic crisis meant that the Soviet leadership was concerned with the stability and reliability of the Czech military contribution to the Warsaw Pact. The Soviets thus were likely to be receptive to anything that promised a solution to Czechoslovakia’s internal problems. They also realized that the first result of a premature attempt to intervene decisively in Czechoslovakia would likely be the demoralization of the Czech military. At the same time, they were concerned that the “contagion” of Czech democratization not spread and that the Czechs themselves would go too far in creating an open society. All these factors seemed to add up to a Soviet decision to watch, wait, and hope for the best, while preparing for the worst.¹²

As the snows of winter melted, it became possible to hypothesize that Dubček’s “socialism with a human face” would find a place in the Warsaw Pact. On 23 March, Czechoslovakia was the main topic of discussion at a Warsaw Pact summit in Dresden. The CIA reported that Moscow had used the occasion to put a limit on how far Dubček could go, but that

Consequently, the Soviet leadership “did not consider Dubček as someone willing to start an anti-Soviet line.”¹⁴

This conclusion was supported by the KSČ Party Action Program, published on 10 April. The CIA noted that it was “restrained in tone, realistic and relatively free of cant… disappointing to the radical reformers in some aspects.”¹⁵ Armed with this evidence of Dubček’s moderation and the Kremlin’s tolerance, by the end of April, the CIA had concluded that the leaders of the Soviet Union appeared to have “grudgingly accepted” the Czech reforms. The only limits placed on Czech reforms were the continued primacy of the KSČ and Czechoslovakia’s honoring its military and economic commitments to the USSR.¹⁶ An unsigned CIA memorandum argued that the Soviets could have applied economic pressure had they wanted to halt Dubček’s reforms and cited as evidence a Czech radio broadcast:

In general, the CIA’s analysis seems to have accurately characterized attitudes inside the Soviet Politburo. Correctly deducing that the Soviet leadership was split over the need for intervention, the Agency reported that—at least for the time being—the Kremlin had accepted the Czech reforms as the lesser of two evils.¹⁸ Although there was strong evidence of Soviet “anxieties” over the Czech reforms, Dubček continued to prove himself to be adept at balancing reforms inside Czechoslovakia with continued adherence to doctrines of communism and pledges to uphold Czechoslovakia’s military commitments to the Warsaw Pact.¹⁹ There thus seemed reason to hope that, although Soviet pressure on Czechoslovakia would increase over “the long hot summer,” the Soviets “will take no ‘harder,’ i.e., military measures.”²⁰

What could not be known was that the Politburo’s confidence in Dubček was being eroded from within. As the Mitrokhin Archive makes clear, KGB chief Yuri Andropov was playing a growing role in the decision-making process over Czechoslovakia. Andropov was not a voting member of the Politburo and is not even mentioned in some studies of the Czech crisis.²¹ But Andropov’s position as head of the KGB gave him a powerful voice inside the Kremlin. Andropov cared little for Dubček’s protestations of solidarity or (one suspects) even for Prague’s expressions of continued loyalty to the Warsaw Pact. To Andropov, an open society anywhere would serve as a conduit for penetration by Western intelligence services. He thus flooded Czechoslovakia with KGB agents tasked with active measures designed to discredit the Dubček regime and with the fabrication of evidence showing a counterrevolutionary conspiracy. This material was both fed back to Politburo members to goad them into action and put forward as justification for the application of “extreme measures.”²²

At least in part because of Andropov’s effort to marshal support for direct military intervention, relations between Moscow and Prague deteriorated steadily over the next few months. The Politburo remained reluctant to sanction military action, but late in April, the CIA reported that “[d]evelopments since the Dresden meeting indicate that the Russians and the Eastern Europeans were dissatisfied with the results of the conference and remained concerned about Czechoslovakia’s course.”²³ By mid-June, Czechoslovakia was reported to be in an “uneasy truce” with Moscow.²⁴ Dubček reportedly was now playing for time, hoping that he could implement enough reforms quickly to present the Kremlin leadership with a fait accompli. Nonetheless, “[a]t some stage in the game,” the Agency reported, “the Soviets will… become aware that their earlier hopes for a return to anything like the status quo ante in Czechoslovakia were without foundation. It is the Czech hope that this realization will have come too late and that the Soviets’ reactions will be minimal.”²⁵

It was now clear to Agency analysts that the Politburo viewed developments in Czechoslovakia with growing dissatisfaction.²⁶ Indecision still reigned in Moscow, but the only thing now preventing the Soviet Union from intervening militarily was concern over the broad impact of yet another violent repression of an Eastern European bid for autonomy.²⁷ On 17 July, the Office of National Estimates (ONE) warned the director of Central Intelligence: “We know of no way of foretelling the precise event in Czechoslovakia which might trigger… extreme Soviet reaction, or of foreseeing the precise circumstances which might produce within the Soviet leadership an agreement to move with force.”²⁸ But the Soviets believed that Communist authority in Czechoslovakia was seriously threatened.²⁹ “The possibility will exist for some time that the Soviets will choose to intervene rather than permit Czechoslovakia to… move decisively toward… an open disavowal of Communism or of the Warsaw Pact.”³⁰ Still the Soviet leadership had not decided what to do.³¹ Very much still depended on Dubček and Czechoslovakia. “Some appropriate concessions” from Dubček would remove the need for military action. So would a conservative overthrow of Dubček.³²

The crisis seemed to have reached a climax at the end of July when Soviet leaders journeyed to Čierná nad Tisou, on the Czech border, to meet with the Czech Politburo. The bilateral negotiations were covered by a blanket of secrecy, but on 31 July, TASS reported that the talks at Čierná had an atmosphere of “frankness and comradeship,”—this, reported the CIA, was Soviet code for tough talk but no action.³³ Ominously, however, that same day Dubček’s family was reported as leaving Czechoslovakia for Yugoslavia.³⁴

The Čierná conference concluded on 1 August and was almost immediately followed by a general Warsaw Pact summit at Bratislava. Two days later, the only written statement to emerge from either of these conferences was produced. This was little more than a statement of alliance solidarity, combined with an affirmation of the principles of Marxism-Leninism. With this, the crisis seemed to be over. The Czech leadership apparently had mollified its Soviet and Warsaw Pact allies, at least for the time being. Dubček seemed to have won.

Not three weeks later, the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia.

CIA military reporting closely paralleled Agency political analysis. As a member of the Warsaw Pact, Czechoslovakia was perforce under a fairly high level of routine surveillance. As tensions heightened over the spring and summer of 1968, so did the attention paid to Czechoslovakia by U.S. and NATO intelligence services.

The full panoply of sources available to Western intelligence included photo-reconnaissance satellites; covert intelligence collection performed by U.S. Air Force (USAF) aircraft transiting the Berlin traffic corridors, as well as by SR-71 reconnaissance aircraft along the inner German border, if required; SIGINT collection sites in southern Germany and on the Teufelsberg in occupied Berlin; and—particularly important during the Czech crisis—observations by the Allied military missions in East Germany.³⁵ There also seems to have been some agent reporting available.³⁶

Military tension ratcheted up in the last half of March as the USSR concentrated troops along the Czech–East German border in the period leading up to the Warsaw Pact summit in Dresden.³⁷ This was judged to be a prophylactic measure, but on 9 May, the CIA reported that Soviet troops in Poland had been seen south of Krakow moving in the direction of Czechoslovakia.³⁸ Noting that the Soviets had a total of thirty-nine divisions available should they decide to intervene militarily, the CIA concluded, “It would appear that Moscow has decided to do some saber-rattling in order to influence the Czechoslovaks to put a brake on their democratization.”³⁹

The next month, the Soviet Union began a series of Pact-wide military exercises designed to mask the build up of forces against Czechoslovakia. These included

• Šumava or Böhmerwald: over 20–30 June, a command post and communications exercise involving Soviet, East German, Czech, and Polish troops in Czechoslovakia;⁴⁰

• Neman: from 23 July to 10 August, a rear-services exercise; and

• Skyshield: an air defense exercise, conducted over 11–20 August.⁴¹

Of the three, Neman was regarded as the most ominous, since it involved recalling reservists, requisitioning transport from the civilian economy, and mobilizing forces from Latvia to Ukraine—measures which obviously could be designed to cover the mass movement of troops against Czechoslovakia.⁴² Nevertheless, although the CIA warned that these exercises could well be signs of military intervention, most analysts in the U.S. intelligence community continued to believe that the Soviet Union would exercise restraint.⁴³

The situation grew more ominous during July. Late in the month—just prior to the bilateral talks at Čierná nad Tisou—reports poured in of large troop movements in East Germany, southern Poland, and the parts of the USSR along the Czech border.⁴⁴ On 22 July, the British Military Mission (BRIXMIS) reported that the Soviet 71st Artillery Brigade and 6th Motorized Rifle Division had vacated their barracks at Bernau, while the East German army barracks at Halle was empty.⁴⁵ On 26 July, the CIA reported that the Polish government was under great pressure to prepare for an invasion. The Soviet 32nd Army in Poland had mobilized, as had a large number of forces in East Germany. Five Polish divisions in the Silesian Military District were at a high state of readiness.⁴⁶ That same day, substantial elements of three East German divisions, including, most probably, the 7th Armored Division and the 11th Motorized Rifle Division (MRD) moved into restricted areas seventy-five miles south of Berlin.⁴⁷ To find out more, USAF SR-71s flew along the inner German border, from where they could monitor developments up to 100 kilometers inside East Germany. Meanwhile, on 29 July, BRIXMIS saw the Soviet 19th MRD deploying from its barracks.⁴⁸

At the end of the month, most of the Soviet troops in Czechoslovakia were withdrawn, but they remained just outside the country, and Western observers noted that the route signs leading into Czechoslovakia for the military movements had been left in place.⁴⁹ Four Soviet divisions in Hungary were reported moving into the field, roadblocks were set up, and convoys were seen moving in the direction of Czechoslovakia.⁵⁰ On 31 July, the Soviet air force was detected making contingency preparations for operations in Czechoslovakia, while high-level military officials in Moscow were reported operating on an indefinite alert status.⁵¹ Three days later, the CIA’s Office of Strategic Research (OSR) warned, “It would appear the Soviet High Command has in about two weeks time completed military preparations sufficient for intervening in Czechoslovakia, if that is deemed necessary by the political leadership.”⁵²

Over the first three weeks of August, the CIA was forced to function without the support of its principal collection asset, photo-reconnaissance satellites. The film-return systems in use at the time lacked the flexibility to respond to the rapidly changing situation in Czechoslovakia. A KH-4B satellite was in orbit, but its canister was not recovered until after the invasion, and when it was, the film showed Soviet forces deployed to invade: airfields packed with aircraft and Soviet military vehicles painted with white crosses to distinguish them from identical Czech equipment.⁵³

By this point in time, however, overhead reconnaissance was not really necessary: there already was ample intelligence from other sources to show that, by the end of July, the Warsaw Pact was mobilized for an invasion of Czechoslovakia. The next two weeks or so were something of an anticlimax, for the simple reason that the Soviets themselves had not decided to intervene. This hesitation gave some reason to hope that an intervention was not forthcoming, but, with nearly forty Soviet divisions on the move, it was clear that the Soviet alert was continuing.⁵⁴ When, on 18 August, the Soviets did decide to intervene, it was announced by SIGINT reporting of a Soviet military communications blackout all over Central Europe.⁵⁵

Two days later, on the morning of the invasion, Director of Central Intelligence Richard M. Helms met with the Bruce Clarke, the director of Strategic Research, and Richard Lehman, the director of Current Intelligence. Lehman relayed a wire service report that Soviet leaders had been summoned to Moscow for an urgent Politburo meeting—which, in fact, had occurred on 18 August. This was unusual in itself: Soviet leaders normally spent August entrenched in their dachas, and only a crisis would serve to get them out. Clarke, Lehman, and Helms agreed that, taken together with the military alert in Central Europe, the emergency Politburo meeting was a sure indicator something was about to happen, most probably the invasion of Czechoslovakia. Helms was already scheduled to meet with President Lyndon B. Johnson and decided to convey the information personally. Remarkably, Johnson rejected that conclusion, saying, “Dick, that Moscow meeting is to talk about us.” What Johnson knew, and Helms did not, was that the Soviet Union and the United States were due to make a joint announcement on 21 August concerning the planned strategic arms limitation talks. Not unreasonably, but unfortunately, Johnson believed that to be the subject of the meeting in the Kremlin.⁵⁶

The president and his advisors soon were disabused of that notion. At 11:00 p.m. on 20 August, a Soviet Spetznz battalion landed at and occupied Prague airport.⁵⁷ At 11:11 p.m., NATO radar monitors reported that the air space around Prague was covered with artificial “snow,” blanking out radar screens and preventing observation of what was happening.⁵⁸ Just a few hours later, at 2200, Washington, DC, time, Helms was summoned back to the White House for an emergency meeting. The invasion of Czechoslovakia was underway.⁵⁹

Given the swiftness of events, it is hard to see how Johnson could have received more warning than he did. Official Washington was holding its breath in August 1968, waiting to see what the Soviets would do. Ample, precise, and accurate strategic warnings concerning events in Central Europe had been pouring in all summer. The August calm before the storm may have meant that much of the intelligence community was surprised by the invasion when it occurred, but there had been no indication that the Soviets had stood down in Central Europe, nor had strategic warnings ever been withdrawn.

A CIA memorandum prepared immediately after the event noted that the decision to intervene must have come very late in the game.⁶⁰ Exactly how and when Moscow’s forbearance “became unraveled” was something of a mystery. To CIA analysts, however, it was clear that the decision had come some time after the Čierná nad Tisou and Bratislava conferences. The time that elapsed, the scattering of the Soviet leadership to their dachas for the August holidays, the attitude of the Soviet press, and the anodyne communiqués that were issued after each meeting all were indicators that the Dubček government was being given more time—to do what was not clear.⁶¹ “The most likely explanation,” Agency analysts concluded, “appears to be that, under the impact of internal pressures within the leadership and of importuning from its anxious allies in Eastern Europe… the fragile balance in the Soviet leadership which produced the Čierná agreement has, in the space of less than three weeks, been upset in favor of those who may all along have wanted the toughest kind of policy….” With the political scales in Moscow in such precarious balance, “it would not have needed a great shock to upset them.”⁶²

So, on the morning of 21 August, Czechoslovakia was invaded from the north, east, and south by twenty Warsaw Pact divisions totaling some 250,000 men. At the same time, the positions vacated by these units were backfilled by ten Soviet divisions. Once strategic points in Czechoslovakia were occupied, most of these forces redeployed into western Czechoslovakia, restoring the front against NATO.⁶³ There they were backed by the full might of the Warsaw Pact, including thousands of nuclear weapons targeted against Western and Central Europe. Nothing short of a world war was likely to get them out. In 1938, the Western powers had responded to threats against Czechoslovakia by backing down, rather than face a Nazi Germany they falsely believed was ready for war. In 1968, they had no choice.

NOTES

1. All statements of fact, opinion, or analysis expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official positions or views of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) or any other U.S. government agency. Nothing in the contents should be construed as asserting or implying U.S. government authentication of information or CIA endorsement of the author’s views. This material has been reviewed by the CIA to prevent the disclosure of classified information.

2. Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 250.

3. NIE 12-65, “Eastern Europe and the Warsaw Pact,” 26 August 1965, Doc. Nr. 273191, 1, 3–4. This and all other CIA primary source documents cited herein are available online from the CIA Freedom of Information Act Electronic Reading Room, http://www.foia.cia.gov (accessed 14 September 2008).

4. NIE 12-65, “Eastern Europe and the Warsaw Pact,” 5.

5. ONE Special Memorandum 10-65, “Prospects for Independence in Eastern Europe,” 18 February 1965, Doc. Nr. 427965, 1.

6. NIE Special Memorandum 1-68, “Czechoslovakia: A New Direction,” 12 January 1968; Doc. Nr. 608720, 14; CIA intelligence information cable, “Political Events and Personnel Changes in Czechoslovakia,” 27 March 1968, Doc. Nr. 242352, 7; unsigned CIA memorandum, 8 April 1968, Doc. Nr. 119580, 1–2.

7. Office of Strategic Research (OSR) intelligence memorandum, “Warsaw Pact War Plan for Central Region of Europe,” 18 June 1968, Doc. Nr. 969832, 5.

8. OSR intelligence memorandum, “Warsaw Pact War Plan,” 1.

9. OSR intelligence memorandum, “Warsaw Pact War Plan,” 1.

10. ER IM 68-33, “Economic Pressure for Change in Eastern Europe,” (27) March 1968, Doc. Nr. 427962, 2.

11. ER IM 68-33, “Economic Pressure for Change in Eastern Europe,” 1, 4.

12. Unsigned CIA memorandum, 8 April 1968, Doc. Nr. 119580, 1–2.

13. CIA intelligence information cable, “Political Events and Personnel Changes in Czechoslovakia,” 27 March 1968, Doc. Nr. 242352, 7–8.

14. CIA intelligence information cable, “Political Events and Personnel Changes in Czechoslovakia,” 7–8.

15. CIA, “Weekly Summary,” 19 April 1968, Doc. Nr. 44603, 13.

16. DI Intelligence Memorandum 0658/68 (OCI), “Czechoslovakia in Transition,” 23 April 1968, Doc. Nr. 608719, 2.

17. Unsigned CIA memorandum, 8 April 1968, Doc. Nr. 119580, 1.

18. ONE memorandum for the director, “Subject: The Czechoslovak Crisis,” 17 July 1968, Doc. Nr. 242346, 5.

19. Unsigned CIA memorandum, “Subject: The Czechoslovak Situation (as of 1200 hours),” 9 May 1968, Doc. Nr. 262105, 3; ONE Special Memorandum 12-68, “Subject: Czechoslovakia: the Dubček Pause,” 13 June 1968, Doc. Nr. 95035, 1.

20. CIA intelligence information cable, “Present USSR Attitudes toward Czechoslovakia,” 10 May 1968, Doc. Nr. 242350, 2.

21. For example, Jiri Valenta, Soviet Intervention in Czechoslovakia, 1968: Anatomy of a Decision (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991).

22. Andrew and Mitrokhin, Sword and Shield, 250–57.

23. DI Intelligence Memorandum 0658/68 (OCI), “Czechoslovakia in Transition,” 23 April 1968, Doc. Nr. 608719, 12.

24. ONE Special Memorandum 12-68, “Subject: Czechoslovakia: the Dubček Pause,” 13 June 1968, Doc. Nr. 95035, 1.

25. ONE Special Memorandum 12-68, “Subject: Czechoslovakia: the Dubček Pause,” 16–18.

26. ONE Special Memorandum 12-68, “Subject: Czechoslovakia: the Dubček Pause,” 4.

27. ONE Special Memorandum 12-68, “Subject: Czechoslovakia: the Dubček Pause,” 5, 9.

28. ONE memorandum for the director, “Subject: The Czechoslovak Crisis,” 17 July 1968, 7.

29. ONE memorandum for the director, “Subject: The Czechoslovak Crisis,” 4.

30. ONE memorandum for the director, “Subject: The Czechoslovak Crisis,” 6–7.

31. ONE memorandum for the director, “Subject: The Czechoslovak Crisis,” 5.

32. ONE memorandum for the director, “Subject: The Czechoslovak Crisis,” 6.

33. CIA intelligence memorandum, “The Situation in Czechoslovakia as of 4:00 PM EDT,” 30 July 1968, Doc. Nr. 265449, 1.

34. CIA intelligence memorandum, “The Situation in Czechoslovakia as of 4:00 PM EDT,” 2.

35. James Bamford, Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency, from the Cold War to the Dawn of a New Century (New York: Random House, 2001), 152; David Miller, The Cold War: A Military History (New York: St. Martin’s, 1998), 38; Curtis Peebles, The Corona Project: America’s First Spy Satellites (Annapolis, MD: U.S. Naval Institute, 1997), 235; Jeffrey T. Richelson, The Wizards of Langley: Inside the CIA’s Directorate of Science and Technology (Boulder, CO: Westview, 2001), 170.

36. See, for example, CIA intelligence information cable, “Preparations for Military Intervention in Czechoslovakia,” 26 July 1968, Doc. Nr. 96552.

37. CIA intelligence information cable, “Political Events and Personnel Changes in Czechoslovakia,” 27 March 1968, Doc. Nr. 242352, 7.

38. Unsigned CIA memorandum, “Subject: The Czechoslovak Situation (as of 1200 Hours),” 9 May 1968, Doc. Nr. 262105, 4.

39. Unsigned CIA memorandum, “Subject: The Czechoslovak Situation (as of 1200 Hours),” 2–3, 4.

40. Miller, The Cold War, 38, and Cynthia M. Grabo, “Soviet Deception in the Czechoslovak Crisis,” Studies in Intelligence (Spring 1970): 29.

41. Miller, The Cold War, 60.

42. Grabo, “Soviet Deception,” 29.

43. ONE Special Memorandum 12-68, “Subject: Czechoslovakia: the Dubček Pause,” 13 June 1968, Doc. Nr. 95035, 2, and Richelson, Wizards of Langley, 170.

44. Miller, The Cold War, 38.

45. Miller, The Cold War, 38.

46. CIA intelligence information cable, “Preparations for Military Intervention in Czechoslovakia,” 26 July 1968, Doc. Nr. 96552, 1.

47. CIA intelligence memorandum, “The Situation in Czechoslovakia as of 4:00 PM EDT,” 30 July 1968, Doc. Nr. 265449, 1, and CIA intelligence memorandum “The Situation as of 4:00 PM EDT,” 26 July 1968, Doc. Nr. 265446, 2.

48. Miller, The Cold War.

49. Miller, The Cold War.

50. CIA intelligence memorandum, “The Situation in Czechoslovakia as of 4:00 PM EDT,” 30 July 1968, Doc. Nr. 265449, 1.

51. CIA intelligence memorandum, “The Situation in Czechoslovakia as of 4:00 PM EDT,” 31 July 1968, Doc. Nr. 265448, 2.

52. Richelson, Wizards of Langley, 169.

53. Richelson, Wizards of Langley, 170.

54. Miller, The Cold War, 39.

55. Miller, The Cold War, 38.

56. Richard M. Helms, A Look over My Shoulder: A Life in the Central Intelligence Agency (New York: Random House, 2003), 340–41.

57. Miller, The Cold War, 60.

58. Miller, The Cold War, 38.

59. Helms, Look over My Shoulder, 342.

60. CIA intelligence memorandum, “The Soviet Decision to Intervene in Czechoslovakia,” 21 August 1968, Doc. Nr. 326291, 3.

61. CIA intelligence memorandum, “The Soviet Decision to Intervene in Czechoslovakia,” 1–2.

62. CIA intelligence memorandum, “The Soviet Decision to Intervene in Czechoslovakia,” 2.

63. Miller, The Cold War, 61.

In late October 1968, that is, over two months after the Soviet and Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia (20/21 August 1968), the Foreign and Commonwealth Office was sending its instructions to Her Majesty Government’s major overseas missions about “Czechoslovakia: East-West Contacts.”¹ The gist of the message was that the critical period was now over, and the missions could return to business as usual. Britain, along with the rest of its allies, would, therefore, continue to pursue its existing policy “based on both Defense and détente” vis-à-vis the Eastern Socialist Bloc. But there was a caveat in the above-mentioned telegram, “While showing willingness to do official business with them, you should avoid public expression of goodwill.” This probably meant that it would be better not to smile widely, or not to shake hands vigorously with Eastern Bloc officials, particularly in front of the media. Doing so would be playing into the hands of Soviet propaganda, for Moscow was already suggesting that the East-West relations were back to normal, implying that “nothing important has happened.”²

This is not to suggest that avoiding “the public expression of goodwill” was as far as the British could go in the form of protest against the Czechoslovakian invasion. The United States, too, remained cautious, urging its allies to engage in “quiet diplomacy.”³ The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was not prepared to do anything militarily which might provoke the Soviet Union during the Czech crisis. For the United Kingdom, the crisis underlined Soviet weakness as much as the importance of maintaining the solidarity of the Western alliance, and this chapter explains why.

THE EVOLUTION OF BRITAIN’S POLICY TOWARD EUROPE AND THE SOVIET UNION

Despite the relatively low level of interest Whitehall had shown toward Eastern European countries during the Cold War, it must not be forgotten that it was the European theatre to which Whitehall gave first priority from the point initially of its strategic and defense importance to Britain after 1950. By that time, the Cold War had become a fact of life; the Iron Curtain had descended on Central Europe; and the North Atlantic Alliance had come into being. In March 1950, the Cabinet Defense Committee agreed that holding the Soviets “East of Rhine” was now “vital” to the defense of Britain. This entailed an important shift in Britain’s global strategy from the Middle East to Western Europe. With the shock of the Korean War, Britain increased its defense contribution to NATO even further, while launching an ambitious rearmament program.⁴

This priority given to Europe coincided with Britain’s other and equally important decision. That was to seek multilateralism in fighting the Cold War in Europe, along with the United States, and within the framework of the North Atlantic Alliance. This was not to say that Britain’s Atlanticism came naturally after the end of the Second World War. In the immediate postwar years, the wartime special relationship with the United States was replaced by a rather more uneasy partnership. Following the abrupt ending by Congress of Lend Lease in August 1945, Britain began difficult negotiations with the United States for a loan. The passage of the McMahon Act through Congress in 1946 was another blow to Britain’s close atomic relations with the United States. It was only the growing pressures of the Cold War, as well as the West’s fear of Soviet expansionism in the Mediterranean, the Middle East, and Europe that helped to draw the United States and Britain closely together in establishing the North Atlantic Alliance.⁵ In the case of London, this was motivated by a practical, but nonetheless serious, consideration of what Britain could do on its own in keeping Soviet-led communism at bay in Europe. It is interesting to find how candidly this feeling of the limitations of Britain’s capacity to defend itself was expressed officially at one of the Cabinet Defense Committee (consisting chiefly of cabinet ministers of overseas and defense departments plus the chancellor of the exchequer, and the representatives of the chiefs of staff, chaired by the prime minister) meetings in the summer of 1949. It affirmed that “[we] have reached a stage where we can no longer avoid stating our intentions to Western Union. We know for certain that without United States active and early support the defense of Western Union is not practical unless or until a period of full scale rearmament is embarked upon.”⁶

Since then, Britain’s policy for the defense of Europe remained remarkably consistent. Throughout the Cold War and beyond, London remained a keen supporter of the transatlantic alliance, although it preferred to be seen to be an “influential” member of that organization. At no time did Britain try to go it alone in Europe as General Charles de Gaulle’s France had done by withdrawing from NATO’s integrated military command in 1966. This is worth noting, for Britain was more independent in its formulation of the nation’s global policy outside Europe, where Britain, in the 1950s and 1960s, still held considerable responsibilities for ensuring the stability and peace of many countries and protectorates, such as in East Africa, the Persian Gulf, and Southeast Asia. During Harold Wilson’s Labour government years, the Lyndon Johnson administration wanted the United Kingdom to send troops to Vietnam and/or to retain its military presence East of Suez as long as the United States was fighting in Southeast Asia. The U.S. requests were, of course, discussed and considered at cabinet level, but Britain did not feel able to comply with either of these pleas. Britain chose the timing and manner in which it would retreat from Singapore, Malaysia, and also from the Persian Gulf in 1967 and 1968 even if this meant doing so at the cost of upsetting Washington.⁷

When turning to Europe, Britain found such independent action unthinkable. NATO continued to be seen to be a “vital element” and was “cardinal to the security of Britain.”⁸ This stance can be understood when viewed against Britain’s perceptions of the Soviet Union and of the Eastern European countries. The Foreign Office’s Permanent Undersecretary’s Committee (PUSC, comprising its highest officials) set out, in January 1952, Britain’s long-term policy toward the Soviet Union. It appreciated that the USSR’s objective was the spread of communism worldwide under Moscow’s leadership, but at the expense of Western interests. The paper asserted that the present Soviet leadership was inspired not only by “traditional Russian ambitions but also by a fanatical and dynamic revolutionary spirit which utterly rejects the very idea of a lasting settlement with the non-communist part of the world.”⁹ Under the circumstances, Britain could only contain Soviet “encroachment by active and ceaseless vigilance over a long period of time, backed by armed strength.” The final and lasting settlement after this “uneasy absence of war” with the Soviet Union was likely to “follow a substantial modification in the outlook and structure of the present Soviet régime.” That is, regime change was the sine quo non for the end of the Cold War.¹⁰

Referring to the liberation of the Eastern European countries, the document recognized the possibility that the satellites could be detached with Western help “from the Soviet Bloc by a series of ostensibly spontaneous uprisings.” As happened in Yugoslavia, the PUSC continued, “[T]he psychological effect of the liberation of any satellite from the Soviet yoke would… be far reaching throughout the Soviet orbit, and indeed, in the free world.”¹¹ These ideas were somewhat similar to the subsequent U.S. Republican policy of liberating captive peoples in Eastern Europe; however, it was important to note that the PUSC saw little prospects for any successful liberation by Eastern European resistance groups unless they were backed up by Western armed forces. In fact, the committee foresaw quite accurately that “with the possible exception of Albania” (who would leave the Warsaw Pact in 1968), none of the satellite countries would, in the foreseeable future, be able to depart from the Soviet camp “unless the Western Powers were able to neutralize the Soviet army either by armed intervention on a sufficient scale or by diversionary action elsewhere or by the possession of such preponderant strength that the Soviet government would be unwilling to incur the risk of a general war.” In the committee’s view, therefore, the liberation of Eastern Europe could not be successful without substantial Western help, but none of the Western powers were ready to provide this at the cost of confronting the Soviet Union.

Indeed, the subsequent crisis in Hungary in 1956 brought the severe limitations of U.S. liberation policy home to the White House. The revolutionary Hungarian government led by Imre Nagy proclaimed Hungary’s withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact and appealed to the United Nations for help in defense of Hungarian neutrality. These developments placed the West in a moral quandary about what steps they should take toward Hungary. While President Dwight Eisenhower was clear that “it has never been our policy to incite captive peoples,” U.S. support for the liberation of Eastern Europe was greatly exaggerated worldwide, resulting in mounting criticism of U.S. and Western inaction over Hungary.¹² The lesson learned from the 1956 Hungarian crisis was, in the words of Permanent Undersecretary David Gore-Booth (1965–1969), “not to offer false expectations.”¹³

THE EMERGENCE OF DÉTENTE WITH THE EAST BETWEEN 1963 AND 1968

After the Cuban Missile Crisis and the successful conclusion, in August 1963, of a limited test ban treaty outlawing nuclear testing in the atmosphere, in outer space, and under water, a significant step by the three major nuclear powers toward managing and controlling nuclear weapons, East-West relations seemed to move toward détente, which was defined in the West as “the search for secure and peaceful East-West relations leading in time to a European security settlement.”¹⁴ The UK Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC)¹⁵ in 1964 noted that the Soviet Union, too, wanted a respite from the Cold War because of the economic strain of waging it, the costly arms race with the United States, growing difficulties with Communist China, and a lack of any “gains by their tough tactics in Berlin and Cuba.” However, the committee astutely observed that Soviet interest in détente was a matter of tactics rather than the reflection of a fundamental change in its basic policy. Thus the détente will be “subjected to interruptions,” concluded the committee, “whenever they [the Soviets] consider that their purposes can best be served by raising tension.”¹⁶

For Britain, too, détente cut both ways: it was welcomed as far as it would make Europe a safer place by making its opponent more predictable, would help to reduce NATO’s defense expenditures, and would increase business and trade with the Eastern Bloc. However, détente could also work against the interests of Britain. It might threaten the solidarity of the NATO alliance, dividing the pro-Atlanticists and pro-Europeanists, while détente might lead the U.S. Congress to demand the return of U.S. troops from Europe. After 1965, U.S. national security interests gravitated toward the conflict in Vietnam, away from a relatively calmer Europe. The German question might also raise its ugly head when West Germany felt free to pursue its own national goals.¹⁷

Despite these limitations, détente, if successful, was a much better alternative to the high Cold War of the previous decades. It was, therefore, British policy to seek détente and negotiations with Moscow when any opportunity arose, and this was certainly part of the vision embraced by the incoming Labour government led by Harold Wilson after October 1964. At the age of forty-eight, Wilson was a determined, pragmatic, and astute politician, with twenty years of experience in politics. Like his predecessors Winston Churchill and Harold Macmillan, Wilson, too, wanted to play a major role in trying to prevent a superpower conflict and to secure a “friendly understanding” with Moscow.¹⁸ On the surface, the new prime minister had more than sufficient experience in dealing with the Soviet Union. As president of the Board of Trade between 1947 and 1951, Wilson was already known to the Soviet Committee for State Security (KGB) as a politician enthusiastically promoting trade with the USSR. In the 1950s, he continued to be a strong advocate of encouraging trade with Moscow and was the first visitor in May 1953, in the aftermath of Josef Stalin’s death, to the capital from the British political establishment. When he became shadow prime minister, he visited the Soviet Union twice, once in 1963 and again in 1964, and presented his idea of convening regular summit talks with Moscow, along with the United States and, possibly, France. According to the Mitrokhin Archive, the KGB once attempted to convert Wilson into a Soviet agent. Perhaps more damaging to him was an unfounded rumor circulated in the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the British Security Services (MI5) that Wilson was, indeed, a Soviet mole.¹⁹

As the new Labour prime minister, he continued to aspire to a better relationship with the USSR, although his interests remained largely in the field of trade and technology. In reality, Britain was not able to exercise much influence on the Soviet Union. A number of attempts Wilson initiated to bring about a negotiated settlement in Vietnam in cooperation with the Soviet Union did not secure a sympathetic ear in Moscow. In February 1966, the British prime minister proposed the setting up of a hotline between London and Moscow, but this did not materialize until October 1967. By then, however, Charles de Gaulle’s France had already established a similar communication link with the Kremlin.²⁰ The Anglo-Soviet summit talks in February 1967 began with negotiations for an Anglo-Soviet friendship treaty. The treaty was intended to “regulate commercial, cultural, educational and scientific exchanges,” but the negotiations soon became stalled in early 1968.²¹

The timing coincided with Britain’s devaluation of sterling in the autumn of 1967 and its subsequent announcement of an accelerated withdrawal from East of Suez in January 1968.²² Reporting to London, the British ambassador to Moscow, Sir Geoffrey Harrison, expressed his amazement at the bad press Britain was receiving in Moscow over its East of Suez decision. Great Britain was described by the Soviet press as a country going through a period of “profound malaise and disillusionment” in 1967, and warned that 1968 would be even worse for Britain.²³ The problems, they analyzed, were due to Britain’s dire dependence on the United States. The Foreign Office suspected that these were the usual Soviet tactics of trying to drive a wedge between the two Anglo-Saxon countries.²⁴ Behind the façade of peaceful Anglo-Soviet relations, the Soviet Union in the aftermath of Britain’s retreat from East of Suez quickly projected its naval power into the Indian Ocean. Prior to July 1967, there had been no permanent Soviet naval presence in the Indian Ocean, but by 1974, the number of Soviet warships in the ocean rose to more than 10,000.²⁵ The Kremlin optimistically saw the fragmentation of American society after Vietnam as a sign of the failure of the Western capitalist system. There was rising confidence in Moscow that the Soviet Union, and not the United States, was “becoming the dominant actor” in the world.²⁶

Just as Britain thought that the real solution to the Cold War required a drastic change in the Soviet system, Moscow’s condition for any improvement on Anglo-Soviet bilateral relations would be for Britain to sever its relations with the Western alliance, especially the United States. One can see that there was, therefore, little room for the two governments to cultivate any real friendship beyond certain trade and cultural exchanges. This, in turn, implies the severe limitations Britain and the West would face in exercising any influence over the Soviet Union and its policies, such as over Czechoslovakia in 1968.

All was not well in the Western Bloc, either. The emergence of détente resulted in differing approaches in the West to the security of Western Europe. In the mid-1960s, many observers on both sides of the Atlantic raised serious concerns about the possible collapse of NATO, which was seen to be in deep crisis. The role of the United States as the ultimate nuclear guarantor was becoming increasingly questionable, since the superpower nuclear arms race now produced a balance of terror in Europe. The John F. Kennedy administration’s solution was to enhance the conventional capabilities of European powers to meet a less serious military threat. This meant that European NATO allies had to raise the nuclear threshold, making U.S. nuclear deterrence less credible to military conflicts in Europe, and increasing the risk of conventional limited wars occurring there.²⁷ Moreover, the question of NATO’s nuclear sharing, especially that of meeting West Germany’s aspirations for an equal status in NATO’s nuclear policy, required skilful diplomacy. The idea of creating the Multilateral Nuclear Force (MLF) proposed during the Kennedy years had, however, never become a serious proposition for the Europeans, and by 1964, West Germany and the United States were the only countries who supported the scheme.²⁸

General Charles de Gaulle, the president of the French Republic, became increasingly irritated by what he perceived to be Kennedy’s intention of dominating European NATO, and the relaxation of East-West tensions prompted the general to embark on an East-West rapprochement “from the Atlantic to the Urals” outside the framework of the transatlantic alliance. In July 1966, France withdrew from NATO’s integrated military structure and asked NATO to withdraw its staff and institutions from France by April 1967. The emerging East-West détente was by no means accepted by all the NATO powers at this time. Those countries close to the Iron Curtain (West Germany, Turkey, and Norway) took the growing Soviet military capability more seriously than did other European countries, and Bonn was, in any case, unlikely to be drawn into a premature détente unless it embraced the reunification of Germany.²⁹

Not only did France withdraw from NATO’s military command, but the two other major powers, the United States and Britain, also revived their long-term grievances about NATO. They felt that their initial troop commitment to Europe, which had been forced upon them when the Cold War was at its height in 1949–1950, should now be reduced. London and Washington were united in maintaining that the other European allies, especially the Federal Republic of Germany, should pull their weight by contributing more resources to the defense of Western Europe now that their economies had become prosperous.³⁰

For Britain, some defense cuts in a relatively peaceful Europe proved to be possible when the Labour government embarked on a series of defense reviews after 1964. The United States became heavily involved in the war in Vietnam with over half a million troops fighting there. U.S. involvement in the war in Vietnam was regarded in Europe as a diversion of attention and resources from the defense of Western Europe. The United States, on the other hand, was displeased with a lack of support from its European allies to the cause of Asian containment, and in August 1966, Congress began to call for a substantial reduction in U.S. troops in Europe unless the Europeans were prepared to resolve the “dollar gap” in the foreign exchange. The subsequent tripartite negotiations between the United States, Britain, and West Germany about Anglo-American troop reductions demonstrated how difficult it was to overcome the differences between these three Western countries.³¹

In order to overcome NATO’s mid-life crisis, Whitehall had plenty to worry about and to do to maintain the cohesion of the Western alliance. In the end, however, the alliance survived de Gaulle’s challenge reasonably well. NATO resolved the question of nuclear sharing by setting up the Nuclear Planning Group (December 1966), accepted in 1967 the new strategy of flexible response, which included options preferred by both Europe and the United States, and agreed to adopt the Harmel Report (December 1967) calling for détente and defense, a strategy which served to increase Western Europe’s pressure for détente in the 1970s. All of these were, in fact, in line with the national interest of the United Kingdom, and it welcomed the fact that détente was now part and parcel of NATO’s objective, a slap in the face to de Gaulle’s solo pursuit of détente.

By contrast, the UK’s interest in Eastern Europe remained unremarkable. While it agreed to start negotiations on what became known later as the Mutual and Balanced Force Reductions (MBFR) Talks with the Warsaw Pact, Whitehall did not make much effort to promote cultural exchanges or contacts at ministerial levels either. The prime minister focused heavily on improving Anglo-Soviet relations. The Foreign Office gave only a grudging approval of change in “the atmosphere and mechanics” of the relationship with Moscow, but reported that the two powers were not any closer on “fundamentals.”³² There was also the problem of a large expansion of Soviet and Eastern Bloc intelligence activities in England after 1964. Following the arrest of a British citizen, Gerald Brooke in Moscow in 1965, V. A. Drozdov (a third secretary in the Soviet embassy in London) turned out to be a spy and was sent back to Moscow in 1968 after he was caught collecting top secret official information from a so-called dead letter-box in London.³³ The Foreign Office’s prescription was that Britain should be firmer and more realistic in dealing with the Soviets and avoid “running after them.”³⁴

THE WEST’S INTELLIGENCE FAILURE, OR DEALING WITH AN UNPREDICTABLE KREMLIN? FROM THE PRAGUE SPRING TO THE SOVIET/WARSAW PACT INVASION

In the East, things were not working according to the theories of MarxismLeninism. It was clear by the middle of the 1960s that the Socialist economic system had seen better days. The major Eastern European countries were struggling with severe economic problems. The Kremlin (then led by Nikita Khrushchev) had encouraged gradual and limited political and economic reforms because it believed that these might ignite the economic dynamism needed for the economic recovery of these countries. Czechoslovakia, under a conservative Stalinist ruler, Antonin Novotný, was compelled to introduce a degree of relaxation, moving away from the Stalinization of the past. Reforms soon strengthened the hands of the anticonservative section of the party and made Novotný’s position difficult. In January 1968, he was replaced by a moderate and populist figure, Alexander Dubček.35 In effect, Dubček became instrumental in promoting “socialism with a human face,” a precursor of Eurocommunism in the 1970s. By the summer of 1968, the Czechoslovakian perestroika (restructuring) and glasnost (openness) were gaining their own momentum, and pressures for change spread to nearly every corner of the country. Dubček sought to reform Czechoslovakia, but he had no intention of breaking away from the Soviet Union. However, other Czech reformist party officials were willing to go further by reducing party control over the church, parliament, censorship, and the economy as was to happen later in Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika. The dilution of the party’s role in Czech social, political, and economic affairs became the mainstay of the Prague Spring.³⁶ Indeed, the Prague Spring looked as if it might be spreading to other Eastern European countries.

In May 1968, the Foreign Office set up a conference of British ambassadors to Eastern European capitals, which discussed the implications of the Prague Spring. An important question, initially, was how the Soviet Union and other Eastern European countries would react to the Prague Spring, but with less attention given to the relevance of the Prague Spring to Western Europe. Permanent undersecretary at the Foreign Office, Booth felt that the West had no power to control or influence the events which were taking place in Czechoslovakia, and that in any case, it would not be in the West’s interest to increase Soviet “difficulties” by interfering in what was perceived to be its internal affairs. The ambassador to Moscow, Sir Geoffrey Harrison, also predicted that the Prague Spring would not affect AngloSoviet relations in any serious way. But Harrison believed that the turmoil in Czechoslovakia must have “serious implications” for the USSR and wondered how this would affect the Kremlin’s foreign policy toward the West. If Czechoslovakia succeeded in establishing its own distinctive version of socialism at home and such reform started spreading to other Warsaw Pact countries, Harrison suspected that the Kremlin might “crush” the Prague Spring, or conversely let the reforms in Czechoslovakia continue, but limit any damage caused to the Kremlin’s leadership in Eastern Europe. The most optimistic speculation was that the Kremlin might even go along with the Czech movement as part of the current détente. The conference did not reach any definite conclusion, but suggested that there was some consolation to be extracted from the Soviet Union’s current preoccupation with Eastern Europe, for Moscow’s interference in other theaters, such as the Middle East and Far East, would be reduced at a time when British interests there were threatened.³⁷

The result of this conference was developed into the UK’s official policy, which was circulated by Foreign Secretary Michael Stewart to the cabinet in mid-June 1968. What is worth highlighting here is a new effort to link the events taking place in Eastern Europe to the interests of the West. This may have been the result of taking into consideration the views expressed by UK ambassadors serving in Eastern Europe. They were dissatisfied with Britain’s neglect of that part of the world, and asked King Charles’ Street to be more constructive in its policies toward Eastern Europe. The official memorandum therefore appreciated that most East European countries retained a degree of Western democratic traditions, and that, as a result, they would be more susceptible to modernization, liberation, and other democratic changes. Not only the reforms in Czechoslovakia, the documents continued, but other more modest economic and social reforms in Hungary and Poland might gather momentum and might, in turn, lead to a more independent Eastern Europe. Thus the document admitted that “the desire of the East European countries for greater individual independence is also in the interests of the West generally.” In order to encourage this trend, Britain should increase “substantially” its contacts with Eastern Europe in terms of official visits as well as cultural and business associations.³⁸

This was as far as the Foreign Office would go, since its hard-line analysis of the Soviet Union remained much the same as before. That country, after its abandonment of the “more brutal features of Stalinism” had still not completely escaped from “the grip of the old system.”³⁹ While current moderate economic reforms might “in the very long run cause radical changes,” any reform would require some loosening of central control which might, however, threaten the stability of the existing Soviet system, a dilemma Gorbachev later encountered in the 1980s. Otherwise, Moscow continued to believe in its mission to spread communism worldwide, maintained a hostile stance toward Western democratic countries, and was anxious to undermine the relationship between the United States and Western Europe. The last thing that Britain and its Western allies wanted was to rock the boat in the Eastern Bloc, such as by driving wedges between the Eastern European countries and the Soviet Union. Instead, the Foreign Office recognized that what the West could do to help Eastern European reforms such as the Prague Spring was extremely limited, while London assumed that the Eastern European countries should generally continue to support Soviet foreign policy, either because it suited their national interests or for “tactical reasons.”

Overall, the Foreign Office produced a generally hopeful, but pragmatic, and sometimes farsighted, analysis of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Meanwhile, the ferment in Czechoslovakia increasingly worried the Kremlin and the other Warsaw Pact countries. In May, the Warsaw Pact powers began to deploy their troops close to the Czechoslovak borders under the guise of Warsaw Pact military exercises, but, in fact, the redeployment was meant to serve as a threat to the pro-reform Czechs.⁴⁰ Walter Ulbricht of East Germany and Władysław Gomułka of Poland grew frustrated by the inability of the Dubček regime to control the pace and degree of the reforms in Czechoslovakia.⁴¹ The country was a major producer of advanced weapons and uranium for Moscow’s military-industrial complex and as such was too important to be allowed to leave the Soviet orbit. Nevertheless, Brezhnev was reluctant to resort to repressive measures against Prague, which might, he feared, provoke the West into war against the Soviet Union. Soviet foreign minister Andrei Gromyko, and chief of the KGB Yuri Andropov, both apparently persuaded an indecisive Brezhnev to make the decision to intervene. There was also the fear that once Czechoslovakia fell into the hands of “counterrevolutionaries,” the rest of the Warsaw Pact powers might follow suit. It was important for Moscow to nip “the Prague Spring” in the bud.⁴² We now know that it was a difficult decision to make, but the decision was made nonetheless.⁴³

On the night of 20/21 August 1968, the Soviet Union, with the help of other Warsaw Pact countries (the German Democratic Republic, Poland, Hungary, and Bulgaria), mounted a huge military operation, twice as large as Moscow’s intervention in Hungary in 1956, and with it the Prague Spring ended abruptly. Twenty-nine army divisions, 7,500 tanks, and more than 1,000 aircraft were sent to “a Defenseless country which had not even mobilized.” The Soviet military intervention shocked Dubček and other Czechoslovakian reformers, and they were reluctantly forced to accept that Marxist-Leninist theory was, in fact, “incompatible with a genuine, modern, democratic, economic and political system” and even worse, the system was not “even open to reform.”⁴⁴

The August invasion caught the Western leaders off-guard. This was not because the Western intelligence communities failed to detect massive troop movements on the border areas of Czechoslovakia in the summer. Indeed, June and July were the months when Western intelligence officials were most acutely concerned about the risks of a Soviet military intervention in Czechoslovakia.⁴⁵

Partly because of this heightened sense of danger, NATO governments, led by the United States, had deliberately kept a low profile. The White House was decidedly against any move which might provoke the Soviet Union at this difficult time. In the United Kingdom, the foreign secretary told Parliament on 18 July that every country had its own right to determine its own domestic affairs, which could be taken as a veiled warning to Moscow, but Whitehall, too, avoided giving any impression that the United Kingdom was interfering in the Soviet Union’s sphere. In June, NATO showed an interest in discussing with the Warsaw Pact countries the Mutual Balanced Reduction Forces. The implications were that if the Soviet Union went ahead with the use of force, détente would then be in jeopardy, which, the West believed, would make the Soviet Union think twice before it used force against Czechoslovakia.⁴⁶

Apart from this soft approach to Moscow, the West did not have any strategy to deal with what turned out to be an escalation of the Czech crisis, for few in Western capitals really believed that the Soviet Union would resort to force to restore stability and order in Czechoslovakia. Thus the crucial point of this analysis must focus on the question of interpretations and, ultimately, the judgments by senior ministers and officials on the basis of the information collected, rather than on the technical accuracy of such information that influenced the UK and West’s attitudes toward the Soviet Union and its intentions toward Czechoslovakia.

In hindsight, it was ironic that the Harold Wilson government had undertaken a series of reforms of the UK intelligence community, for he thought the community’s credibility had been reduced in recent years by numerous Soviet spy cases, the difficulty of collecting information from within the Ian Smith regime in Rhodesia, and the failure to predict unrest in Ghana and in Nigeria.⁴⁷ Like the Eisenhower administration’s centralization of the numerous U.S. intelligence agencies in the 1950s, the Labour government introduced measures which were intended to enhance the efficiency and accuracy of the intelligence community, including the appointment (in the spring of 1968) of an intelligence coordinator operating from the cabinet office. The reformed intelligence system ignominiously failed to pass the first big test over the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August. Sir Percy Cradock, a former Foreign Office official, recalled that the Federal Republic of Germany’s intelligence community got it right, more or less, in terms of the likelihood of military invasion, but those Western intelligence officers who believed that there might be a Soviet armed invasion thought that this would be after the Czechoslovakia Party Congress on 9 September, and not before.⁴⁸

According to recently declassified documents in the United Kingdom, the JIC maintained throughout the crisis that the Soviet Union was not going to invade Czechoslovakia in defiance of world opinion and détente. UK intelligence officials were aware of two large military exercises taking place between 11 and 20 August, but these were interpreted as part of “the psychological warfare” against Prague and not a preinvasion move, which was what they turned out to be. How could this military training maneuver involving a total of twenty-nine divisions around the Czech border area be dismissed as a mere show of force? The line of argument by the intelligence community was that if intervention was on the agenda then the military build-up would be kept secret where possible, and not be as openly conducted as it was prior to the invasion.⁴⁹

The Foreign Office, too, was aware of the risk of invasion, but it thought that the Soviets would do everything—“bully and cajole, bribe and threaten”—to the Czechs, except embark on a military invasion. This feeling was somewhat strengthened by another mistaken belief that the heightened tension between the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia had been largely resolved during their bilateral meetings at Čierná nad Tisou between 29 July and 1 August and also at Bratislava on 3 August.⁵⁰ As a result of this estimate, the Joint Intelligence Committee “in consequence sat on the fence.”⁵¹

Why did the United Kingdom and the West so misjudge Soviet intentions? One can, of course, legitimately argue that this was because the Kremlin itself did not reach a final decision to intervene until late July. However, while there were frequent and massive military exercises by the Warsaw Pact countries from the summer onwards, the West, including the United Kingdom, continued to dismiss the thought of Soviet invasion, assuming that the Kremlin should not, or would not, do things which might affect the development of détente with the West. Why? This was probably because it was the desire of the Western leaders to maintain détente with the Eastern Bloc, which resulted in not fully appreciating the strategic priorities from the Soviet Union’s point of view and that of other conservative Eastern European leaders who were desperate to hold Eastern Europe together under the Kremlin leadership for the sake of their countries’ stability and interests. Michael Stewart gave what he meant to be a veiled warning to the Soviet Union when he met M. Smirnovsky, the Soviet ambassador to Great Britain, at the end of July: “[I]f events went badly over Czechoslovakia, the opportunities for increasing understanding between us would be frozen.”⁵² Hence, “too much thinking in Western terms” led to misjudgements about what was to happen in Prague.⁵³

UK POLICY AFTER THE INVASION

When the invasion actually took place, most cabinet ministers were away on their summer vacations, and only a few (including the prime minister, the foreign secretary, and the defense secretary) attended a hastily arranged emergency cabinet meeting on 22 August.⁵⁴ The invasion was condemned by Yugoslavia, Romania, and many other Western governments, including Great Britain. Whitehall was concerned that the Soviet Union might also use force against Romania or Yugoslavia. Denis Healey, returning home after cutting short his family holiday in Switzerland, felt it important to warn Moscow that NATO would not stand aside if a neutral country, like Yugoslavia, was attacked. Later in November, NATO publicly urged the Soviet Union “to refrain from using force and interfering in the affairs of other states,” and repeated this warning later in April 1969 at the end of the NATO’s Council meeting in Washington, DC.⁵⁵

The August cabinet meeting was also reminded that soon after the invasion, the Soviet government made painstaking efforts to convey a message to the United Kingdom and other NATO governments to the effect that its invasion was limited in nature and scale and that Moscow had no intention in harming any other states. In the case of the United Kingdom, Moscow hoped that its bilateral relationship with London would not be affected by this incident. It was also confirmed at this cabinet meeting that there seemed to be no other threats in the European theater. The prime minister promised at the end of the cabinet meeting that if, in the meantime, there was any urgent development which might require the UK’s action, this would be considered by himself in consultation with the foreign secretary, suggesting that no full cabinet meetings would be necessary for the time being.⁵⁶ Nevertheless, Wilson called for an emergency sitting of Parliament for two days toward the end of August. The pro-Wilson minister of health and Social Security, Richard Crossman, thought it was “right” for Wilson to arrange this, which brought nearly three hundred members of parliament back from their holidays. Having said that, Crossman soon found the debate rather depressing because “everyone now knows that Britain could do nothing to help the Czechs.”⁵⁷

That the crisis had no serious implications for the United Kingdom had, of course, to do with the low priority accorded to Eastern Europe in its global policy, and this was also generally true for most NATO countries (with a possible exception of the Federal Republic of Germany). President Johnson, anxious to outmaneuver Republican presidential candidate Richard Nixon’s informal overtures to Moscow, was keen to persuade the Kremlin to agree to start arms negotiations talks before he ended his term as president in January 1969. This almost blinded him to what was going on in Czechoslovakia on 20 August. On that early Sunday evening in Washington, DC, the Soviet ambassador read to the president a message from Moscow. Johnson did not seem to react in any adverse way to the invasion. On the contrary, and to the surprise of Anatolii Dobrynin, the president was anxious to move on to a different subject, that is, a possible beginning of the Strategic Arms Limitations Talks (SALT) with Moscow as though seven thousand Soviet tanks rolling into Czechoslovakia had nothing to do with the United States.⁵⁸ Similarly, the British prime minister concentrated his attention on the next summit talks with Moscow. Within NATO, the main task in 1968 was a series of studies developing the Harmel Report into practical policies.⁵⁹ This lack of attention to the Czech liberation movement in the West was facilitated by the fact that, unlike the Hungarian uprising in 1956, the Dubček government did not try to break away from the Kremlin’s tutelage or from the Warsaw Pact. This situation saved the West from the moral dilemma about what action to take in the face of the unfolding tragedy in Czechoslovakia.

The first major postinvasion analysis of Britain’s relations with the Soviet Union in late September was subdued, but not wholly pessimistic. The invasion was considered to be a setback (but not a serious one) for the West in pursuing détente with the East. Whether Moscow’s use of force in Czechoslovakia marked any change of approach by the Soviet Union to NATO and the West generally remained to be seen, but the JIC did not expect that it would lead to any danger of Moscow’s going to war with the West because of the Czech crisis.⁶⁰ In terms of the East-West military balance, and especially in relation to the long border with West Germany, the JIC recognized that Soviet armed forces deployed in Czechoslovakia meant that the Eastern Bloc had increased its military capabilities (although the eleven existing Czech divisions would not now be regarded as trustworthy by the Kremlin), which would enable it to mount a surprise attack on the NATO forward areas. But again, the Cabinet Defense and Overseas Committee was not convinced that the Czech crisis increased Soviet readiness to use force against the West, and the paper concluded that NATO still expected “substantial political warning of a change in this direction.”⁶¹

Outside the NATO area, the committee examined the Far East and the Middle East, where the British government had recently announced its decision to retreat from East of Suez. Their findings concluded that there would be no change in Soviet strategies in these theaters which would require any urgent revision of UK global policy.⁶² Despite the crisis, there was no evidence that the Soviet Union would pose a more serious threat to NATO than before. The committee, however, believed that the Czech crisis revealed that the Soviet Union was “willing to act violently and to use massive force in complete disregard of world opinion where she considers that her fundamental interests are at stake.”⁶³ Later in November, these sentiments were codified in a public statement by Brezhnev in Poland, known in the West as the Brezhnev Doctrine.

For the West, the crisis provided NATO with an opportunity to renew its purposes and commitments. The secretary of defense reminded the cabinet in late September that prior to the crisis, there had been some worrying signs in NATO: following France’s withdrawal from the command structure, the United States was also demanding some U.S. troop reductions in Europe. But the crisis demonstrated that de Gaulle’s independent move toward détente outside the North Atlantic Alliance carried little weight. From the British point of view, the crisis could be seen as a blessing in disguise. Whitehall could now turn this into an opportunity to strengthen Britain’s links with Europe and NATO. The idea was well received in Washington, which had long insisted that the European powers should do more to assist in the defense of Western Europe. The Ministry of Defense was already considering a number of measures (but not at the cost of increasing defense expenditures) to reinforce NATO’s defensive power.⁶⁴

While ministerial visits to the Eastern Bloc were put on hold as part of the West’s protest against the Soviet use of force in Czechoslovakia, normality slowly returned by the summer of 1969 when official contacts with the Soviet Union were resumed. In the United States, as a result of the invasion, SALT had been postponed, but only for a short period. Nixon invited the Soviet Union to the opening of arms limitations talks in June 1969, and in November, the talks began in Helsinki between officials of the two superpowers. The election of Willy Brandt as the next chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1969 removed the remaining obstacle to détente. The United Kingdom fully supported Brandt’s Ostpolitik, which was to accept the existence of Eastern Germany, and from then on, détente demonstrated genuine possibilities for increasing contacts between both sides. In other words, despite the setback caused by the Czechoslovakian crisis, UK policy toward the Soviet Bloc did not change significantly and would continue to be based on “defense and détente.”

CONCLUSION

While the Soviet Union may have won a tactical victory over the West with its surprise invasion of Czechoslovakia, the death of the Prague Spring marked the decline of the legitimacy of Communist rule throughout Eastern Europe. The Soviet Communist Party had lost its appeal to its fellow Communists in Western Europe. The younger generation of Eastern European intellectuals began to search for a “European” identity as an alternative to subordination to Moscow, although many of their rulers had no choice but to return to conservatism (or “normalization”) by closing the doors to the modernization of the Communist socioeconomic systems, a situation which persisted into the middle of the 1970s.⁶⁵ The Kremlin, having found that there had been no violent reactions from the West to its crushing of the “Prague Spring,” became more confident about the ability of the Soviet Union to defend its own interests. This sense of confidence was reinforced by growing Soviet military and nuclear strength, which had been built up in the latter half of the 1960s. The Soviet Union was now ready to enter into more peaceful international relations, despite the remaining ideological differences with the Western Bloc. Détente was simply for Moscow the West’s recognition of the Soviet Union’s equality with the United States in terms of power and influence in the world.⁶⁶

For Britain, détente meant more contacts with the Eastern Bloc through trade and scientific and cultural exchanges, rather than a break from the Cold War. However, because of the UK’s long history of interactions with Russia and the USSR, the United Kingdom was a tad more suspicious about Soviet intentions than was any other NATO power. Thus the right balance between defense and détente needed to be struck if the West was ultimately to win the Cold War by changing the Soviet system. The Czech crisis provided the opportunity to strengthen NATO and helped the UK to reinvigorate its efforts to maintain NATO’s political cohesion.

In other aspects, the crisis also exposed how Britain’s détente policy was not always consistent, and sometimes not even coherent. Post-1945, prime ministers often sought summit meetings with Kremlin leaders, which they believed might lead, almost magically, to the end of the Cold War. Wilson was no exception, but the Foreign Office regarded the prime minister’s dealings with the Soviet leaders as too soft and even pedantic. This was particularly so, given the unvarying hostility expressed by the Soviet Union toward Britain (London was often singled out by the Soviet Union as a hard-line country anxious to exploit Moscow’s weaknesses). The more enthusiastic the West became about détente (which might provide the West with an opportunity to penetrate the Eastern Bloc), the more suspicious the Kremlin became. As Geraint Hughes argues, this vicious circle may have tipped the balance in Moscow in favor of the use of force against Czechoslovakia.⁶⁷ On the other hand, British ambassadors in Eastern Europe felt that UK policy for Eastern Europe lacked initiative and inspiration. They believed that pursuing détente with a heavy focus on the Soviet Union, while neglecting British relations with Eastern Europe, was a foreign policy weakness, but this too, could now be reexamined thanks to the Czechoslovak crisis and the subsequent slow progress of détente.⁶⁸

In the final analysis, the following three points are important in understanding the UK’s attitude toward the crisis. First, the UK government regarded the crisis as a misfortune for the Soviet system. At a Defense and Oversea Policy Committee (OPD) meeting in late September, Denis Healey stated that he found the Soviet’s action significant because force was used “to maintain the status quo, not to change it.”⁶⁹ Thus, instead of exploiting this misfortune to the full, the United Kingdom chose to keep a low profile (in line with the rest of the NATO powers) in order not to make things more difficult for the Kremlin. The other side of the coin was not to give Moscow any propaganda opportunity to accuse the West of provoking Moscow into resorting to force over the Prague Spring. Second, London thought that it was right for NATO to stick to the noninterference policy. The Ministry of Defense explained this in cut and dried terms just a few days after the invasion: NATO was “never designed to protect any Warsaw Pact country from Soviet intervention” because it was “an essentially integrated organisation with a single military purpose, namely to protect its members from outside attack by positing an effective deterrent.” Thus, while the crisis was unfolding in Eastern Europe, Britain’s main task was to observe that there was no threat to Western Europe. When British postinvasion analyses showed that this really was the case, as far as the United Kingdom and NATO were concerned, the crisis was over.

The final point was about the importance of Western Europe for the United Kingdom, which has been explained fully in the earlier part of this essay. This remained unchanged throughout the Cold War years. Because of this importance, the United Kingdom wanted to make sure that the United States and European NATO powers were working closely together and was conscious of the fact that Moscow was aware that the United Kingdom had significant influence, especially in Washington.⁷⁰ This role could only be played effectively so long as the United Kingdom worked as part of the multilateral organization in dealing with the Soviet threat in the primary theatre of Europe. Thus, what the foreign and commonwealth secretary minuted in February 1969 is worth citing here, “An independent power acting alone, we cannot achieve much vis-à-vis the Soviet Union: as an influential member of the Alliance and in due course of a united Western Europe, we have a very considerable part to play.”⁷¹ Thus, the assumption that the Czechoslovakian crisis had huge implications for the future fate of the Soviet Eastern European empire, the conviction about what NATO was for, and the belief in multilateralism, these three factors defined, shaped, and characterized Britain’s policy toward the Prague Spring and the Soviet invasion in August 1968.

NOTES

1. The Foreign Office and the Commonwealth Relations Office were amalgamated and became the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) from 17 October 1968.

2. Michael Stewart to certain missions and dependent territories, guidance telegram, no. 264, 29 October 1968, Documents on British Policy Overseas Series III, vol.1, Britain and the Soviet Union, 1968–1972 (London: The Stationery Office, 1997), 85–86 (hereafter cited as DBPO).

3. John G. McGinn, “The Politics of Collective Inaction: NATO’s Response to the Prague Spring,” Journal of Cold War Studies 1, no. 3 (Fall 1999): 127.

4. Cabinet Defense Committee Meeting, DO (50) 20, 20 March 1950, Cabinet 131/9, the National Archives, England (hereafter cited as TNA).

5. Saki Ruth Dockrill, Britain’s Retreat from East of Suez: The Choice between Europe and the World? (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 11–12.

6. Cabinet Defense Committee Meeting, DO (49) 45, 17 June 1949, Cabinet, CAB131/17, TNA; see also John Baylis, The Diplomacy of Pragmatism: Britain and the Formation of NATO, 1942–1949 (London: Macmillan, 1993), 76–91.

7. For Anglo-American relations and Britain’s decision to withdraw from Singapore, see Dockrill, Britain’s Retreat from East of Suez.

8. Cabinet Defense and Overseas Policy Committee memoranda, DO [O][S][64] 29, 2 October 1964, Cabinet, 148/9, TNA.

9. “Future Policy toward Soviet Russia,” PUSC (51) 16 (final), 17 January 1952, Foreign Office, FO 371/125002/4, TNA.

10. “Future Policy toward Soviet Russia,” PUSC (51) 16 (final), 17 January 1952.

11. Annex B. Liberation of the Satellites to PUSC (51) 16 (final), 17 January 1952.

12. MacArthur II to Hoover (minute), 13 November 1956, Foreign Relations of United States 1955–1957, vol. 25, Eastern Europe (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1990), 435 (hereafter cited as FRUS).

13. Paul Gore-Booth, With Great Truth and Respect (London: Constable, 1974), 386.

14. Enclosure, “The Longer Term Prospects for East-West Relations after the Czechoslovak Crisis,” in Mr. Stewart to HG ambassador to Moscow (Sir D. Wilson), RS 3/2, 15 May 1969, DBPO, 151.

15. The Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC), created in 1936, is composed of the representatives of numerous intelligence agencies as well as the major departments, including the Foreign Office, the Ministry of Defense, the Home Office, and the Treasury. For the history of the JIC, see Percy Cradock, Know Your Enemy: How the Joint Intelligence Committee Saw the World (London: John Murray, 2002), 7–49ff.

16. JIC (63) 85, 3 March 1964, CAB148/4, TNA.

17. R. Gerald Hughes, Britain, Germany and the Cold War: The Search for a European Détente, 1949–1967 (London: Routledge, 2007), 155.

18. For Harold Wilson’s personalities and his government, see Dockrill, Britain’s Retreat from East of Suez, 46–49.

19. Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The Mitrokhin Archive: The KGB in Europe and the West (London: Allen Lane, 1999), 528–29. See also, John Young, The Labour Governments, 1964–1970: International Policy (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2003), 14–16.

20. Andrew and Mitrokhin, The Mitrokhin Archive, 129.

21. Geraint Hughes, “Giving the Russians a Bloody Nose: Operation Foot and Soviet Espionage in the United Kingdom, 1964–1971,” Cold War History 6, no. 3 (May 2006): 233.

22. The January 1968 announcement was based on the decision in July 1967 to withdraw from East of Suez by the middle of 1970s. See Dockrill, Britain’s Retreat from East of Suez, 193–208ff.

23. G. Harrison to Mr. HFT Smith (Head of the Northern Dept.), Foreign Office, 17 January 1968, DBPO, 6.

24. Hayman (asst. undersecretary of state) to Harrison, Moscow, NS 3/18, DBPO, 26–27.

25. Robert G. Patman, The Soviet Union in the Horn of Africa: The Diplomacy of Intervention and Disengagement (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 80–87.

26. Neil S. MacFarlane, “Successes and Failures in Soviet Policy toward Marxist Revolutions in the Third World, 1917–1985,” in The USSR and Marxist Revolutions in the Third World, ed. Mark N. Katz (New York: Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars, 1990), 35; Odd Arne Westad, “The Fall of Détente and the Turning Tides of History,” in The Fall of Détente: Soviet-American Relations during the Carter Years, ed. Odd Arne Westad (Oslo: Scandinavian University Press, 1997), 11–19.

27. Lawrence S. Kaplan, NATO and the United States (New York: Twayne, 1994), 82–84; Lawrence S. Kaplan, The Long Entanglement: NATO’s First Fifty Years (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1999), 99–111; Helga Haftendorn, NATO and the Nuclear Revolution: A Crisis of Credibility, 1966–1967 (Oxford: Clarendon Press Oxford, 1996), 1–11.

28. Christoph Bluth, Britain, Germany and Western Nuclear Strategy (Oxford: Clarendon Press Oxford, 1995), 95–104; Saki Dockrill, “Britain’s Power and Influence: Dealing with Three Roles and the Wilson Government’s Defense Debate at Chequers in November 1964,” Diplomacy & Statecraft 11, no. 1 (March 2000): 227–34.

29. Frédéric Bozo, Deux Stratégies pour l’Europe: De Gaulle les États-Unis et L’alliance Atlantique, 1958–1969 (Paris: Plon, 1996), 72–77, 102–32, 133–66; Haftendorn, NATO, 13.

30. Simon W. Duke and Wolfgang Krieger, eds., U.S. Military Forces in Europe: The Early Years, 1945–1970 (Boulder: Westview, 1993); Olaf Mager, Die Stationierung der britischen Rheinarmee-Großbritanniens EVG-Alternative (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 1990); Saki Dockrill, “Retreat from the Continent? Britain’s Motives for Troop Reductions in West Germany, 1955–1958,” Journal of Strategic Studies 20, no. 3 (September 1997): 45–70; Saki Dockrill, “No Troops, Please. We Are American—the Diplomacy of Burden Sharing in the case of the Radford Plan, 1956”; Hand-Joachim Harder, Von Truman bis Harmel: Die Bundesrepublik Deutschland im Spanningsfeld von NATO und europäischer Integration (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2000), 121–31; Hubert Zimmerman, “The Sour Fruits of Victory: Sterling and Security in Anglo-German Relations during the 1950s and 1960s,” Contemporary European History 9, no. 2 (2000): 225–43.

31. Kaplan, Long Entanglement, 139, 152; Dockrill, East of Suez, 165.

32. Sir D. Greenhill (deputy undersecretary of state at Foreign Office) to GoreBooth, 29 January 1968, Prime Minister’s Office minutes, PREM13/2402, TNA; See also Young, The Labour Governments, 129.

33. Gerald Brooke (a British citizen) was tried by a Moscow court and was sentenced to one year in prison followed by four further years serving in a labor camp, for “importing bibles” into the USSR. The case was not resolved until 1969 when the Wilson government decided to exchange Brooke with two U.S. intelligence agents who were spying for the Soviet Union and were arrested in the United Kingdom in 1961. See Young, The Labour Governments, 129; see also Harrison (Moscow) to H. F. T. Smith, Foreign Office, NS 3/3, 17 January 1968, DBOP, 7.

34. Cabinet Defense and Overseas Policy Committee memoranda, OPD (68) 45 “Relations with the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe,” 17 June 1968, CAB 148/37, TNA.

35. Ben Fowkes, The Rise and Fall of Communism in Eastern Europe (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1995), 121–22; R. J. Crampton, Eastern Europe in the Twentieth Century and After (London: Routledge, 1997 ), 315–19.

36. Crampton, Eastern Europe, 326–40.

37. “Record of the 9th meeting of the Conference of Her Majesty’s Representatives in Eastern Europe,” 10 May 1968, DBPO, 45–48.

38. OPD (68)45, 17 June 1968, CAB 148/37, TNA (see note 34).

39. OPD (68)45, 17 June 1968, CAB 148/37, TNA.

40. McGill, “The Politics of Collective Inaction,” 124.

41. Wilfried Loth, “Moscow, Prague and Warsaw: Overcoming the Brezhnev Doctrine,” Cold War History 1, no. 2 (January 2001): 105–6.

42. Vladislav Zubok, “The Brezhnev Factor in Détente, 1968–1972,” in Cold War and the Policy of Détente: Problems and Discussions, ed. N. I. Yegorova (Moscow: Russian Academy of Sciences, Institute of Universal History, 2003), 291–92; Andrei Gromyko, Memories (London: Hutchinson, 1989), 232–33; Mark Kramer, “Ideology and the Cold War,” Review of International Studies 25, no. 4 (October 1999): 545.

43. Loth, “Overcoming the Brezhnev Doctrine,” 108; Anatolii Dobrynin, In Confidence: Moscow’s Ambassador to America’s Six Cold War Presidents (New York: Random House, 1995), 184.

44. Crampton, Eastern Europe, 336, 337–40.

45. Cradock, Know Your Enemy, 241, 249.

46. See the editors’ (Gill Bennett, Keith Hamilton, et al.) comments, DBPO, 65.

47. Young, Labour Governments, 14–16.

48. Cradock, Knowing Your Enemy, 252.

49. Redacted version of the “Nicoll Report: The JIC and Warning of Aggression in May 2007,” in Michael S. Goodman, “The Dog That Didn’t Bark: The Joint Intelligence Committee and Warning of Aggression,” Cold War History 7, no. 4 (November 2007): 537–38; see also Tom Bower, The Perfect English Spy: Sir Dick White and the Secret War, 1935–1990 (London: Mandarin, 1996), 362–63.

50. Cradock, Know Your Enemy, 251; Loth, “Overcoming the Brezhnev Doctrine,” 107.

51. Cradock, Know Your Enemy, 249.

52. Stewart to Harrison, Moscow (letter), 24 July 1968, DBOP, 68.

53. Cradock, Know Your Enemy, 252.

54. Young, Labour Governments, 133.

55. Cabinet memoranda, CC (68) 38, 22 August 1968, CAB 128/43, TNA; OPD (68)17th mtg., 25 September 1968, CAB 148/35, TNA; Denis Healey, The Time of My Life (London: Michael Joseph, 1989), 320; Anthony Howard, ed., The Crossman Diaries, 1964–1970 (London: Hamish Hamilton & Jonathan Cape, 1979), 466–68; Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) to certain diplomatic missions, tel. 86 guidance, 18 April 1969, PREM 13/2553, TNA.

56. CC (68) 38, 22 August 1968, CAB 128/43, TNA.

57. Howard, Crossman Diaries, 467–68.

58. Dobrynin, In Confidence, 185.

59. McGill, “The Politics of Collective Inaction,” 132.

60. OPD (68) 58, 20 September 1968, CAB 148/38, TNA.

61. OPD (68) 58, 20 September 1968, CAB 148/38, TNA.

62. OPD (68) 58, 20 September 1968, CAB 148/38, TNA.

63. OPD (68) 58, 20 September 1968, CAB 148/38, TNA; see also OPD (68) 63 (Joint memorandum by Michael Stewart and Denis Healey), 28 October 1968, CAB 148/38, TNA.

64. OPD (68)17th mtg., 25 September 1968, CAB 148/35, NSA; OPD (68)63, 28 October 1968, CAB 148/38, TNA.

65. Loth, “Moscow, Prague and Warsaw,” 108; Odd Arne Westad, introduction in The Soviet Union in Eastern Europe, 1945–1989, ed. Odd Arne Westad et al. (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1994), 5.

66. Raymond L. Garthoff, Détente and Confrontation: American-Soviet Relations from Nixon to Reagan (Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution, 1994), 40, 41–57.

67. Young, Labour Governments, 135; Hughes, “Giving the Russians a Bloody Nose,” 235–36.

68. Geraint Hughes, “British Policy toward Eastern Europe and the Impact of the Prague Spring, 1964–1968,” Cold War History 4, no. 2 (January 2004): 133–35.

69. OPD (68) 17th meeting, 25 September 1968, CAB 148/35, TNA.

70. OPD (68) 45, 17 June 1968, CAB 148/37, TNA.

71. OPD (69) 8 by Michael Stewart on “The long term prospects for East-West Relations after the Czechoslovakian Crisis,” 18 February 1969, CAB 148/91, TNA.

The invasion of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact troops on 20 August 1968 spelled the end for de Gaulle’s policy of détente, which had been predicated on the Eastern Bloc’s increasing de-ideologization and on its growing independence from Moscow. Many observers have come to the conclusion that, in the wake of these events, government circles in Paris vacillated between disappointment and indifference, yet in view of what we know today, historians are less likely to arrive at such a straightforward picture. What did the policy of détente actually mean to Paris? How was the Soviet invasion assessed? What lessons did the French government draw from it? The archives that have now become accessible enable us to piece together a picture that is both telling and complex. The leading government circles saw the August crisis as proof rather than a refutation of their previously held views, even if this was not in keeping with the majority view at the time.

DE GAULLE’S OSTPOLITIK AND HIS POLICY TOWARD GERMANY PRIOR TO THE CZECHOSLOVAK CRISIS

From 1964 to 1965, Paris was engaged in developing a genuine political dialogue with Moscow. The driving forces were, on the one hand, disappointment with the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) arising from the inefficacy of the Elysée Treaty of 1963 and, on the other, a fear that rapprochement between Washington and Bonn might go too far and enable the FRG to take part in the decision-making process concerning nuclear armament.¹ Furthermore, there was the will to build a counterweight together with the Soviet Union to the FRG in Europe and, on a global scale, to the United States.²

Because of the split between Beijing and Moscow (which became obvious in 1964 and was beyond repair) and the resulting weakening of the global standing of the Soviet Union, Charles de Gaulle came to the conclusion that the time was now ripe for his great plan. He considered the de-ideologization of Eastern Europe and a rebirth of independent nations free from Soviet tutelage a genuine possibility. There was in Paris in 1964 the perception that such a development was already discernible.³ It would, therefore, soon be possible for France, once the so-called Yalta gap had been addressed, to pursue a new European policy. The first objective of this political realignment was to be a solution of the German question within a European security framework led by Moscow and Paris. At the same time, on the strength of interstate cooperation within the European Economic Community, France would become Western Europe’s leading power and would ensure a balance of power vis-à-vis the Soviet Union.⁴

In this overall concept of a new European security system, the German question played a key role in de Gaulle’s eyes, albeit not without a certain ambiguity. On 18 May 1968, he told Nicolae Ceaus¸escu that the German two-state solution was “temporary and artificial” and that there was only “one German people.”⁵ However, this statement did not entail a demand for reunification.

During his visit to the Soviet Union in June 1966, de Gaulle told the Soviet party leader Leonid Brezhnev that he was “neither very keen” on German reunification, nor in any great hurry. In any case, Germany would have to offer security guarantees, which meant above all foregoing the possession of atomic, biological, and chemical (ABC) weapons and accepting the borders of 1945.⁶

De Gaulle had presumably other forms of rapprochement and/or collaboration between the two German states in mind. In December 1967, an article in Foreign Politics (Politique étrangère) caused a stir with its analysis of potentional European security systems. Entitled “European Security Models” (“Modèles de sécurité européenne”) and listing its authors simply as a “research group,” the article was, in fact, based on a study by the FrancoGerman Research Committee (Comité d’études et de recherches franco-allemand or CERFA),⁷ which was run in close collaboration with the Elysée as well as with West German experts.⁸ The authors did not envisage reunification for Germany; they preferred the model of the German Union (Deutscher Bund) of 1815: “Over more than 50 years this Union safeguarded [Germany’s] internal stability and a European balance of power.” The article described a potential variant of such a union, which would have included the creation of joint agencies headquartered in Berlin, in which the two German states would be represented on equal terms; both the Bundeswehr and the Volksarmee were to be preserved if only in a reduced form and linked to one another through a liaison staff. In this way, a European security system guaranteed by the United States, the Soviet Union, Great Britain, and France might be a way of overcoming Europe’s division by reversing the division of Germany within that pan-European security system.

As late as May 1968, de Gaulle still believed that the FRG would prove amenable to the realization of this overall concept. He told Ceaus¸escu on 18 May he wanted to encourage Bonn to enter into negotiations with Eastern European countries, including the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic (ČSSR). His relationship with the West German foreign minister Willy Brandt was sufficiently good to warrant such ideas.⁹ The new European security system whose creation the general had in mind would be taking shape, if necessary, without the involvement of the United States, which tallied well in principle with Soviet intentions.¹⁰ The salient point here was that Paris and Moscow would have assumed a dominant position in Europe with Germany under their control. The continuity of de Gaulle’s policy from his journey to Moscow in 1944 to the Franco-Soviet Treaty and the years 1966/1968 has quite rightly been remarked on repeatedly.¹¹

THE PRAGUE SPRING IN THE REPORTS OF THE FRENCH EMBASSIES IN PRAGUE, MOSCOW, AND WARSAW

The reports coming from the French embassy in Prague during Czechoslovakia’s invasion by the Warsaw Pact states were extremely patchy. The embassy had next to no contacts in the population. There were rather pathetic predictions of an early end to Alexander Dubček’s “moral resistance.”¹² The embassy in Prague discounted the possibility of a long-term determination on the part of the people to resist the occupation. In psychological and historical terms this was portrayed as proof of the Czechs’ putative pliability that had been in evidence since 1938—an attempt, one might say, to get rid of France’s co-responsibility for the Munich Agreement of 1938. According to this interpretation, the Soviet invasion was not based on ideological but on geostrategic reasoning. The long-term strategic goal, in the words of Ambassador Roger M. Lalouette on 17 September, was the advance to the Mediterranean and the annexation of Czechoslovakia by the USSR.¹³ His report was given the derisive nickname “the Anschluss telegram” at the Quai d’Orsay. Robert Morisset, active as an embassy inspector at the time and formerly accredited himself at the Prague embassy at the end of the 1950s, made a trip to Prague in September on a tour of inspection of the embassy and its activities.

The first thing he noted was that the embassy had failed to cultivate contacts with the population. He himself talked to ordinary citizens and to intellectuals; in doing so he noticed how deeply rooted in people’s minds was the tendency to advocate liberation, at least as a theoretical possibility.¹⁴

The French embassy in Moscow was more accurate in its assessment of the situation. It was headed by two outstanding personalities: Ambassador Olivier Wormser and Minister Henri Froment-Meurice. The two nurtured no illusions regarding a so-called liberalization of the Soviet Union, nor did they entirely toe the line of de Gaulle’s foreign policy.¹⁵ They were well aware of the difficulties Moscow was up against: on 21 August 1968, their analysis of TASS’s announcement of “fraternal assistance” had already led them to the conclusion that the Soviet government was not going to mount a serious attempt to justify its decision by citing an “invitation” issued by the Czechoslovak government or the party leadership.¹⁶ On 23 August, they mentioned in a telegram on the occasion of an international scientific meeting in Moscow the openly displayed despair of the Soviet intelligentsia.¹⁷ The conclusion they expressed in an internal telegram on 27 August was a very cautious one: Moscow’s reactions were defensive and hesitant; the invasion had been carried out to silence internal criticism which was aimed at the leadership’s lack of response to developments in Czechoslovakia. On 5 September, they registered their disagreement with a view that was repeatedly voiced in the West, namely that the USSR was entering into a new expansionist phase. In the view of the two French diplomats, Soviet policies were generally defensive in character also vis-à-vis Bucharest or Belgrade.¹⁸ The Kremlin, as they saw it, was above all concerned with defending its cordon sanitaire in Eastern Europe. It was also unacceptable for Moscow that reforms should progress more quickly in Eastern Europe than in the USSR itself.

On 14 September, the French embassy noted in its internal communications that Moscow was attempting to shift responsibility for the Czechoslovak crisis to Bonn, which constituted a crucial change in the overall assessment and had far reaching effects on Paris, as will be shown below. The significance of the Brezhnev Doctrine of “limited sovereignty” within the “socialist camp” was fully understood from the beginning both at the Moscow and the Warsaw embassies, which reported extensively on the matter and on the basis of reliable information.¹⁹ The message of the events was clear for most diplomats and observers: de Gaulle’s notion of a de-ideologization within the Eastern Bloc and the rebirth of the nations was either mistaken or premature at the very least.²⁰

THE QUAI D’ORSAY’S ASSESSMENT OF THE SITUATION

The assessment of the situation by the Quai d’Orsay coincided largely with that of the Moscow embassy and was, on the whole, correct. Already on 11 July 1968, the Eastern Europe Department had concluded that after the hardening of Moscow’s attitude at the beginning of July an invasion could no longer be excluded, even if grave consequences should be attached to it. Moscow would not tolerate liberalization in Czechoslovakia, even with the proviso that the country would remain inside the Communist fold and a member of the Warsaw Pact, for this would be too dangerous for the maintenance of the status quo in the USSR itself.²¹ After the invasion, the fact that liberalization in Eastern Europe had been stopped for good was used to justify the invasion. The USSR had given precedence to shoring up its sphere of influence in Eastern Europe at the expense of East-West détente and had been motivated to adopt this course of action by the fear of escalating reform pressure within the USSR itself. This development spelled the end of the optimism that had been prevalent above all between 1964 and 1966 at the Quai d’Orsay as to the reformability of the Soviet system.²² It should also be noted that no one at the Foreign Ministry thought the FRG was to blame for developments in the ČSSR.²³ This charge was first formulated by the ambassador in Bonn, François Seydoux, and was taken up above all by the top representatives of the state and by leaders of the Gaullist Party. Those diplomats who had studied the Soviet Union and the Communist system most closely concluded that a liberation of Eastern Europe was impossible at the time (the Prague Spring was perceived by hardly anyone as a harbinger of things to come); the politics of détente played a subordinated role for Moscow, and the Kremlin evinced no interest in the security model for Europe favored by France, which had Germany’s neutralization at its center. Instead, it concentrated on maintaining the ideological and power political status quo in Eastern Europe.

PUBLIC REACTIONS OF THE FRENCH GOVERNMENT

The French government condemned the invasion immediately and unequivocally, demanded the prompt withdrawal of troops, and restated its aversion to “bloc” politics.²⁴ Paris equated the invasion of Czechoslovakia with the landing of U.S. troops in the Dominican Republic in 1965.²⁵ The example of the ČSSR was viewed in Paris as a corroboration of the French policy which was aimed at reducing the role of the two hegemonic powers and/or blocs.

This policy was also considered the only possible solution for Europe on a larger scale. It was, therefore, only logical for Paris to assert that France intended to pursue its policy of “détente, understanding and cooperation” with regard to the East as far as possible. Outwardly, Paris demonstrated restraint as to possible consequences of the invasion. Before the Foreign Policy Committee of the National Assembly, Foreign Minister Michel Debré referred to the invasion as “a traffic accident on the road to détente,” which caused a certain amount of consternation.²⁶

De Gaulle saw his views vindicated. He emphasized in a press conference on 9 September 1968 “Soviet hegemony” and praised the Czechoslovaks’ resistance and the courage they had shown in confronting the occupiers. Embodying “the character of Europe,” they were also living proof how sound the foundations were on which French policy was based.

Vehement public criticism of the FRG came from Michel Debré because the FRG refused to accept its Eastern frontiers and was trying to expand eastward economically. It now became apparent that Paris was attempting to blame the crisis in Europe on the FRG. Once the Soviet-Czechoslovak treaty of 15 October 1968 on the stationing of Soviet troops in the ČSSR had been signed, France stopped pressing for a withdrawal of Warsaw Pact troops in their meetings with Soviet diplomats. By December 1968, this U-turn in French policy had become impossible to overlook. From January 1969, it was business as usual in this respect in Paris, and the crisis was noticeably downgraded. The weightiest argument that remained and was repeatedly formulated in the public debate was that the invasion had vindicated the French policy of détente as the only possible option.

THE FRENCH GOVERNMENT’S INTERNAL INTERPRETATION

In its internal assessment, the French government showed great restraint and caution. A circular note to the embassies of 31 August contained the following guidelines: there would be no change in economic and cultural matters in France’s attitude toward the countries of the Eastern Bloc; politically a “certain temporary distance” was to be observed.²⁷ In a number of meetings with representatives of other countries on 10 and 12 October, 15 November, and notably with U.S. representatives 19 November, leading French politicians asserted that the Soviet Union’s stance was a purely defensive one, which was exclusively oriented to preserving the status quo and that the fear of more of the same (directed against Yugoslavia or Romania) was almost certainly unfounded.²⁸

In de Gaulle’s view, the crisis had no bearing on France whatever. On 3 December, he told the French ambassador in Moscow, Wormser, “What we have here is a communist family quarrel. Under these circumstances, dear Ambassador, you will understand that I don’t care a fig about Czechoslovakia” (“La Tchécoslovaquie, dans ces conditions, je m’en bats l’oeil”).²⁹ The meaning of this statement, couched in the humoristic musketeer language characteristic of de Gaulle, and expressed as an answer to Wormser’s discreetly diverging views, was obvious: the invasion did not call the overall plan of French foreign policy into question. The time for this plan was simply not yet ripe because there were no serious liberalizing tendencies discernible in Prague, nor a genuine striving for national independence and de-ideologization.

In de Gaulle’s view, it was not Prague that spelled danger for détente, but Vietnam and the Middle East, by which, of course, he alluded to U.S. foreign policy.³⁰ With reference to Germany, he now thought—as opposed to earlier statements—that the country had to remain divided under all circumstances and that it must not be allowed to form any kind of political alliance either because this would spark a war with the Soviet Union.³¹ The real cause of the crisis and the purpose of the invasion, as the French president saw it, lay in the Soviet Union’s resolution to intimidate the FRG, which would ensure its back was covered for the confrontation with China. De Gaulle saw no reason for a change of strategy, nor did he seek a rapprochement with the United States and/or the North Atlantic Treaty Organization; he continued to stand by the strategy of nuclear deterrence, which was predicated on decisions taken in 1967 and tallied with the premises of his foreign policy.³²

THE SALIENT POINT: THE GERMAN QUESTION

The Prague crisis highlighted a central tenet of French politics according to which the greatest source of danger for peace was not the Soviet Union, but Germany. This is evidenced notably by the fact that both internal meetings of the leading political circles and talks with foreign diplomats and politicians in the weeks before and after the invasion were dominated by references to World War II. All the charges against Bonn that had accumulated since the beginning of the 1960s were again stated and widened in scope: the FRG had not observed due care in its dealings with Prague;³³ it was not prepared to recognize the Oder-Neisse border; it was nursing ambitions to obtain nuclear armaments, and after the project of the Multilateral Force had been abandoned,³⁴ Bonn had consistently tried to introduce a “European clause” into the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty in order to keep open the back door for the Bundeswehr being given nuclear potential.³⁵

The great currency crisis of 1968—the FRG stubbornly resisted the appreciation of the Deutschmark and, consequently, a depreciation of the French Franc appeared imminent, which was unacceptable to de Gaulle for reasons of national prestige—led to relations between the two countries coming under serious strain. The Bild-Zeitung’s notorious banner headline—“Again Number One” (“Wieder Nummer Eins!”)—was by no means helpful. In the margin of a report about a derogatory remark made by the German ambassador in Paris, Foreign Minister Debré made the note on 21 November: “Germans will be Germans” (“Les Allemands seront toujours les Allemands”).³⁶ Great political significance attached to the currency crisis. The French public got the impression that Germany was trying to throw its economic weight around on the political stage. Debré was very reserved in all his dealings with Germany. During the crisis, he was torn between two contradictory fears. On the one hand, he felt that the FRG’s attitude vis-à-vis the Soviet Union was incautious and provocative; on the other, he feared Central Europe would be carved up on the sly between Bonn and Moscow.³⁷ De Gaulle, whose foreign policy included a rapprochement with the FRG and reconciliation with Germany as cornerstones, appeared disillusioned and pessimistic. On 27 September, he told Federal Chancellor Kurt Georg Kiesinger in a tense conversation that the invasion of Czechoslovakia had its causes in the policies of the FRG. The Germans would be well advised, according to de Gaulle, to adopt a “very humble” attitude toward the East, in particular with regard to the border question, to its economic policy, and also in its relations with the German Democratic Republic (GDR).³⁸

RELATIONS TO THE SOVIET UNION: TURNING OVER A NEW LEAF TO BRING ABOUT RAPPROCHEMENT AND THE FORMATION OF A STRATEGIC COUNTERWEIGHT

As had already been repeatedly the case in the Fifth Republic, Moscow was the most important partner for Paris with regard to its German policy. On 24 August 1968, the Quai d’Orsay’s secretary-general, Hervé Alphand, told the Soviet ambassador in Paris, Valeriyan Zorin, that Paris condemned the invasion and demanded the withdrawal of troops from Czechoslovak territory.³⁹ One week later, on 2 September, Debré told Zorin that even though France demanded a withdrawal of troops, Soviet-French cooperation was the only policy capable of putting an end to “German militarism.”⁴⁰ His Soviet counterpart, Andrei Gromyko, received assurances from Debré on 5 October that Paris was intent on continuing the policy of détente.⁴¹

Initially, de Gaulle’s diction in his dealings with the Soviets was more forceful than that of Debré. He told Ambassador Zorin as late as 19 November that the policy of détente was now in danger and that the cause was not Germany, but the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, Paris wished to return to the policy of détente and was ready for talks on Vietnam and the Middle East, but not on Europe. De Gaulle, however, agreed to continue bilateral negotiations.⁴²

However, the overall situation was about to change dramatically very shortly. Between 21 and 24 November, the currency crisis and the resulting tug-of-war between Paris and Bonn reached their climax; de Gaulle unexpectedly came down against the depreciation of the Franc, which the government was preparing to adopt. On 28 November, Zorin, speaking on behalf of Soviet Premier Aleksei Kosygin, offered France assistance in dealing with the currency crisis; Kirilin, the head of the Soviet delegation in the Great Committee, the body dealing with Soviet-French economic coopera-tion, would shortly be dispatched to Paris. Deals worth billions of Francs to the French economy were on the horizon.

De Gaulle welcomed Kirilin’s prompt visit and the fact that the session of the committee was moved forward; it had actually been scheduled to take place several months later.⁴³ The Great Committee was convened in Paris in January 1969 and decided to intensify trade relations between the two countries. At the meeting, Debré told Kirilin with his eye on Germany: “Let’s hope Moscow and Paris will never forget the lessons that history and geography can teach us and let’s hope they will always assist one another. Peace in Europe depends on it.”⁴⁴

SUMMARY

De Gaulle and Foreign Minister Debré both undoubtedly responded with regret to the fact that Soviet hegemony continued and became even more deeply entrenched in Eastern Europe. De Gaulle, however, remained faithful to his perspective of bilateral détente between Moscow and Paris and even felt vindicated by the crisis, for “bloc politics” was incompatible in his eyes with a new order in Europe. Yet the crisis did affect his policy of détente in that it shifted the focus of his attention from ideology, that is, from the de-ideologization of the Eastern Bloc, to power aspects. It was no longer the national rebirth of the Eastern European countries and the decline of communism that served as key concepts, but a play of balance and counterweights. The policy of détente was continued, and the liberation of Eastern Europe was downplayed. With reference to Germany there was an unmistakable hardening in de Gaulle’s attitude. Earlier on, his views on reunification were, if ambiguous, at least not negative in principle. Now Paris rejected this possibility out of hand. The crisis had laid bare the latent animosities and misgivings that Paris harbored against Bonn.

As for the future of Czechoslovakia, de Gaulle on occasion took an optimistic view (as at a press conference in September), on other occasions also a pessimistic one (as vis-à-vis Ambassador Wormser). A view that interpreted the Prague Spring as a harbinger of things to come (also regarding a potential transformation within the Communist system) was not in evidence. The only way of overcoming communism, according to de Gaulle, was the resuscit ation of a national consciousness. Seen from Paris, there was no third way: there was either communism or the traditional national consciousness. This is the real meaning of de Gaulle’s “je m’en bats l’oeil” (“I couldn’t care less”). The opportunity of understanding the developments of 1968 as a point of departure for later transformation in the East that transcended the old demarcation lines went unclaimed.⁴⁵

NOTES

Translated from German into English by Otmar Binder, Vienna.

1. On 22 January 1963, Federal Chancellor Konrad Adenauer and President Charles de Gaulle signed a treaty on Franco-German cooperation at the Elysée Palace.

2. AN, 5AG3/858, historical introduction to the notes of the director of the European Department, Jacques Andréani, 2 February 1979.

3. Georges-Henri Soutou, “De Gaulle’s France and the Soviet Union from Conflict to Détente,” in Europe, Cold War, and Coexistence, 1953–1965, ed. Wilfried Loth (London: Frank Cass, 2003), 173–89.

4. Georges-Henri Soutou, L’Alliance incertaine: Les rapports politico-stratégiques franco-allemands 1954–1996 (Paris: Fayard, 1996), 281–82; Georges-Henri Soutou, “La France et la défense européenne du traité de l’Elysée au retrait de l’OTAN 1963–1966,” in Crises and Compromises: The European Project, 1963–1969, ed. Wilfried Loth (Brussels: Bruylant, 2001).

5. MAE, Secrétariat général, vol. 34.

6. Private holdings, minutes of the meeting of de Gaulle and Brezhnev in June 1966.

7. CERFA was founded on the basis of an intergovernmental agreement in 1954 as a platform for political-scientific exchange between Paris and Bonn.

8. For the genesis of this article, see Walter Schütze, “Vingt deux ans après: Un concept français pour un règlement panallemand dans le cadre européen,” Politique étrangère 3 (1989).

9. Maurice Vaïsse, “De Gaulle et Willy Brandt: Deux non-conformistes au pouvoir,” in Willy Brandt und Frankreich, ed. Horst Möller and Maurice Vaïsse (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 2005).

10. MAE, Secrétariat général, vol. 34. Minutes of the meeting with Brezhnev in June 1966 and of the meeting between the head of the Political Department, Beaumarchais, with his Soviet counterpart, Oberenko, on plans concerning a European security conference with the United States, 15 May 1968.

11. Pierre Maillard, De Gaulle et l’Allemagne (Paris: Plon, 1990), 241, 247–52.

12. MAE, Europe 1960–1970, Tchécoslovaquie, vol. 243, report of 16 October 1968.

13. MAE, Tchécoslovaquie, vol. 243.

14. Private holdings, letter written by Morisset to Jean-Marie Soutou (then inspector general of embassies), 20 September 1968.

15. Olivier Wormser, “L’occupation de la Tchécoslovaquie vue de Moscou,” Revue des Deux Mondes (June/July 1978): 590–605, 30–45; Henri Froment-Meurice, Vu du Quai: Mémoires, 1945–1983 (Paris: Fayard, 1998).

16. MAE, Tchécoslovaquie, vol. 245.

17. MAE, Tchécoslovaquie, vol. 245, telegram of 23 August 1968.

18. MAE, Tchécoslovaquie, vol. 245, telegram of 23 August 1968.

19. MAE, Tchécoslovaquie, vol. 245, report from Moscow, 23 August 1968; MAE, Tchécoslovaquie, vol. 245, report from Warsaw, 25 August 1968.

20. Raymond Aron, “D’un coup de Praguee à l’autre,” Le Figaro 2 October 1968, reprinted in Raymond Aron, Les articles de politique internationale dans Le Figaro de 1947 à 1977, vol. 3, Les Crises février 1965 à avril 1977: Présentation et notes par Georges-Henri Soutou (Paris: Éditions de Fallois,1997), 561–64.

21. MAE, Tchécoslovaquie, vol. 244.

22. Soutou, “De Gaulle’s France.”

23. De Gaulle mentioned this in a meeting with Federal Chancellor Kiesinger. Debré shared his opinion; Prime Minister Maurice Couve de Murville did not.

24. MAE, Tchécoslovaquie, vol. 315.

25. See the statements de Gaulle made at a press conference on 9 September 1968; Charles de Gaulle, Discours et Messages 5, 1966–1969 (Paris: Plon, 1970), 332–33; for details, see the article by Günther Bischof, “‘No Action’: The Johnson Administration’s Response to the Czech Crisis of 1968,” in this volume.

26. Michel Debré, Gouverner autrement: Mémoires 1962–1970 (Paris: Albin Michel, 1993), 259.

27. MAE, Tchécoslovaquie, vol. 242.

28. MAE, Secrétariat général, vol. 35.

29. Wormser, “L’occupation de la Tchécoslovaquie vue de Moscou,” 45.

30. See his letter to President Johnson, 3 January 1969, in Charles de Gaulle, Lettres, Notes et Carnets, Juillet 1966–Avril 1969 (Paris: Plon, 1987), 273.

31. MAE, Secrétariat général, vol. 35, de Gaulle’s conversations with Senator Scranton, 20 September 1968, and with U.S. ambassador Robert Sargent Shriver Jr., the brother-in-law of the assassinated John F. Kennedy, 23 September 1968.

32. Georges-Henri Soutou, “La menace stratégique sur la France à l’ère nucléaire: Les instructions personnelles et secrètes de 1967 et 1974,” Revue Historique des Armées 236 (2004); de Gaulle’s speech at the Institut des Hautes Etudes de Défense nationale, 25 January 1969 in De Gaulle, Lettres, Notes et Carnets, 284.

33. This is also the gist of Debré’s no-compromise speech before the UN General Assembly on 7 October 1968. MAE, Tchécoslovaquie, vol. 245.

34. The MLF was a proposal floated by the United States dating back to 1963, which provided for a fleet consisting of U.S. submarines and twenty-five NATO country warships equipped with multiple nuclear-armed Polaris ballistic missiles (with a range of 4,500 km). The rockets and warheads were to form the joint property of the NATO countries involved. The fleet would have operated under NATO command. This was supposed to give the nonnuclear members of the alliance, which included Germany, access to and control of a nuclear strike capability. After lengthy discussions within NATO, the proposal was abandoned because no countries except the FRG and the United States were prepared to make substantial contributions to its finances.

35. MAE, Secrétariat général, vol. 35, meeting between Debré and Rusk, 4 October 1968.

36. MAE, Secrétariat général, vol. 34.

37. Debré, Mémoires, 257–58.

38. MAE, Secrétariat général, vol. 34.

39. MAE, Secrétariat général, vol. 245.

40. MAE, Secrétariat général, vol. 244.

41. MAE, Secrétariat général, vol. 35.

42. MAE, Secrétariat général, vol. 35.

43. MAE, Secrétariat général, vol. 35.

44. Debré, Mémoires, 261.

45. At the Quai d’Orsay, Robert Morisset appears, in his letter to Jean-Marie Soutou quoted above, to have been the only one who believed that such a development was possible.

Most Western European Communists loved Marilyn Monroe. They especially loved her dead, for they valued all her tragic contradictions. Her life, the leading Italian Communist review Rinascita commented after her death, “was enlightened by her efforts to be accepted for what she was, and not as a product of a consumerist society.” The actress represented the fundamental contradiction of a “society that knows how to unleash the vitality of its components only to engage them in a violent struggle which leads to its own destruction.” Monroe epitomized the isolation and sense of alienation that Paul Goodman detected in a society in which “human nature could not fully develop or even exist.” For the French Communist critics, Marilyn the icon was also the iconoclast. There was a beautiful inconsistency in her sexual rebellion against a puritanical and conformist society because it made eroticism familiar and spontaneous for every conformist as well. But her “spontaneous defiance” finally “devoured her.” Such comments did not go without resistance within the French and Italian Communist parties (Parti communiste français or PCF and Partito Comunista Italiano or PCI, respectively), and there was an intense polemic between new and old intellectuals, new and old guard within each party, with the older generation being accused of “intellectual snobbery” toward the cultural ferment in the United States.¹

Undoubtedly, the Western Communists, while always irredeemably anti–United States from an ideological standpoint, also nurtured ambivalence toward the pluralism of U.S. society. This ambivalence was particularly heightened in the immediate post–World War II period and in the 1960s. The centrality of themes of dissent and the intellectual magnetism for the European Left of characters such as Walt Whitman, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Jack Kerouac, Bob Dylan, or even contradictory ones such as Marilyn Monroe or James Dean, informed the cultural and political debate among French and Italian Communists, even as they, and particularly when they, confronted themselves with the emerging dissent or antiestablishment developments in Eastern Europe. It is on the intersection between their adaptation to neocapitalism and their continued temptation to rebel against the establishment, whether in the West or the East, that this chapter focuses. The Prague events, together with the student movement, intensified both the French and Italian Communist parties’ dilemma about how best to overcome the Cold War policy and politics of the two blocs that constrained their power: to what extent could they reconcile their effort to become accepted by the establishment with their eagerness for renewal on the Left which embraced rebellion both at home and elsewhere directed toward international socialism? Ultimately this dilemma, if not their whole Cold War experience, was determined more by their cultural and political confrontation with the West than by their issues of allegiance with the East.

BRAVE NEW WORLDS

According to negative topoi fully formed by the 1920s, modern capitalism, in its managerial, “Americanized” form, subsumed a mechanized world immersed in materialism, consumerism, and mass culture, all together projecting the worst visions of a homogeneous, conformist, spiritually and intellectually hollow society.² Italian and French Communists, while echoing and amplifying those fears, also portrayed the Soviet model of modernization as the alternative, serving instead of enslaving humanity.

But idealism also meant discerning what both “young countries,” the United States and the Soviet Union, could offer to those whose expression had long been repressed (under Fascist Italy) or stifled (in both France and Italy during the interwar period). From the 1920s onward, that offer consisted of the two emerging superpowers’ nature as dynamic masters of technology, architects of a brave new world distinguished from stagnant, decadent Western Europe.³ That was how PCI founder Antonio Gramsci first analyzed the United States in his essays on Fordism and Americanism: as the place of the most advanced technological and societal experimentation.⁴

Youthfulness and informality were also the main strengths of American literature, a powerful response to the elitist, rigid academic nature of Europe’s bourgeois culture. In the words of intellectual and novelist Italo Calvino, to many Western European Communists until the late 1940s, Hemingway was “a sort of God,” and jazz was a “banner of untamed cosmopolitanism.”⁵ Traveling to the United States in 1946, French Communist author Claude Roy became captivated by the America on the road, where “the individual himself becomes the road,” and where “the road can become a drug, flavorless like marihuana.” America, he added, was a genuine “rebellion of the spirit,” a land of “infinite possibilities.” These possibilities could go either way, for America’s “pride [was] sometimes tragic and menacing,” and “sometimes attractive.”⁶ For Italian writer Cesare Pavese, America was “an immense theater where our common drama was played out with greater frankness than elsewhere.” Party leader Pietro Ingrao remembered that in the 1930s the American novel “gave us the image of a society where contradictions openly erupted.”⁷ All these observations displayed far more than fascination with the enemy. They also reflected Communist hopes that the radical, experimental America would prevail over the conservative, philistine, imperialist United States. They were hoping that this vibrant and youthful America would somehow rub off on themselves, too.

The ensuing condemnation of the United States by these same intellectuals was just as revealing. Having nurtured hopes about democratic America, they felt betrayed by the Cold War United States, above all because the “New World” had ceased to be new. Instead of helping to bring liberation to Europe, it imitated and allied itself with Europe’s most conservative, stifling political and cultural elements. Pavese best expressed this disillusion: Americans had turned bad only in part because, in their Cold War retrenchment, they now appeared closer to traditionalist American values; actually, their main fault was that they had “undergone a process of spiritual Europeanization,” losing “a large part of the exotic and tragic directness that was their essence.”⁸ Thus disenchanted, French and Italian intellectuals were just waiting, if not wishing, to be proven wrong. The United States could, perhaps, again help them spearhead their war against philistine provincialism. Dismissive as leftist thinkers might be in their condemnation of U.S. politics and society, their set of attitudes, especially their reconciliation of subjectivity and social commitment, was bound to make connections with radical thought in the United States, starting from the late 1950s and culminating in the late 1960s. The result would deeply affect the French and Italian Communist parties.

In part, the two superpowers were presumed to “deprovincialize” Europe. What a dream it would be if in the East, too, the contradictions of the human condition were fully displayed, but with the basic difference that, in the East, the oppressed would both express and overcome those contradictions! It would have made the Soviet Union look more human than utopian—utopian with all the meaning of the word, including the dangers associated with being a “brave new world” above human condition. Even before the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Kommunisticheskaya Partiya Sovetskogo Soyuza or CPSU) and Nikita Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalinism, members of the PCF and PCI already nurtured the illusion that the Soviet Union was well on its way to perfecting its social and cultural experience through constant debate and open exchange of ideas. The PCI’s Cultural Commission, in its report of November 1953, noticed that while debates on ideology and culture were stalling in the Italian Left, lacking “enough self-criticism,” in the “country where Marxist-Leninist theory has been tempered by thirty years of experience… our comrades liberally and animatedly discuss everything.” On the other hand, the United States, in the throes of McCarthyism, was rapidly “decaying toward authoritarianism.” Indeed, “having ended the common struggle against fascism,” the head of the Cultural Commission, Carlo Salinari, observed, “that is, without the progressive thought embodied in some of its traditions, America, no matter how many skyscrapers, and automobiles, and military [technologies] it produces, will no longer be the vanguard of mass culture. Without its struggle for progress, it will in fact risk surrendering to fascism, even in the name of its best traditions.”⁹ By 1956, while through de-Stalinization the Soviet leadership was “admitting its own mistakes,” in Italy the Communists had seen no reprieve from McCarthyism, still represented there by the obstreperous U.S. ambassador, Clare Boothe Luce.¹⁰

By the early 1960s, the effects of the “economic miracles” in both countries and the first Marxist analyses of the resilience of neocapitalism somewhat mitigated the Western Communist image of an imperialist and irreparably declining United States. Among French and Italian workers, the prospect of individual, not collective, improvement was now captivating. The working class—and even Communist activists in both countries—craved higher individual living standards. Lotteries were becoming the “new opium of the poor.” Small Fiat or Deux Chevaux Citröen cars, or even the Lambretta scooters may have been poor matches to what U.S. workers could afford, yet even at those modest levels, they were luxuries worth many months of the average Italian or French worker’s paycheck. Nevertheless, their number rose by the millions. Films and television celebrated this newfound freedom and way of life. The PCI’s Giorgio Amendola, who distinguished himself for his economic expertise and political moderation, and Luciano Romagnoli, who directed the party’s propaganda section, were among the first to recognize that “higher standards of living” were “genuine developments toward a more democratic society”; they also felt more compelled than ever to rouse the “workers’ class conscience.” The party, as Enrico Berlinguer exhorted, would not allow “American ideology” and “modernity” to weaken “the sort of political and moral tension, the sort of human spirit without which there cannot be revolutionary action.”¹¹

For the PCF, it was easier to find a culprit outside the mechanisms of neocapitalism: Gaullist charisma. The party’s political bureau recognized that the “grand illusions [of welfare inspired by the president] are the greatest obstacle against the unity of the working class.” The PCF’s persistent ouvriérisme not only alienated potential new social strata; it also weakened the very countercultural society the party was striving to maintain among workers, for, indeed, sectors of increasingly affluent workers did not resist the lure of consumerism. As it has been widely recognized, “the traditional, closed world of the worker, which reinforced an identification with the PCF… slowly dissolved.” The new urban landscape, with its anonymous high-rises, privileging “family, personal space, and ‘modern’ communications (principally television)—in a word ‘individualism’—usurped the place of the locality and the party.” As in the United States, people gradually began to shed their workers’ identity, aspiring to a middle class status and comforts.¹²

A persistent anti-U.S. prejudice was matched by a renewed faith in Soviet progress, nurtured by the dream of plenty revived by Khrushchev. In the late 1950s, the Soviet leader launched the slogan “‘catch up and surpass America’ as the cornerstone of the construction of communism over the next twenty years.” His predecessors had never allowed communism to be judged other than through its own criteria. Now the peoples of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe began to compare their standards of living with those of the Americans.¹³ Did Khrushchev’s revolutionary romanticism affect the French and Italian Communists? Maybe not on nuclear issues, given the two parties’ continued reliance on pacifism to extend their popular appeal, but on the competition with capitalism, most evidence shows that it did. The press from both parties kept repeating like a mantra that, as Pierre Lefranc put it, “we are approaching the moment of truth, when the first Socialist country is going to catch up and overtake the first capitalist country.” New discoveries in the field of automation also revived the contrast between the job-killing machines in the capitalist West versus technology placed at the workers’ service in the Soviet dreamland. In a system not subordinate to the law of profit, the two parties’ economic experts argued, unemployment was virtually impossible, and automated factories brought material and cultural improvement to the masses. Soviet workers benefited from higher productivity, growing salaries, and opportunities in technical education. Even the Vatican’s 1961 encyclical Mater et Magistra, calling for greater social welfare and deploring the arms race and economic disparities among nations, had mainly one significance for both parties: it was a serendipitous admission of capitalism’s shortcomings and an implied concession to the superiority of the Soviet system.¹⁴

By the end of the decade, socialism with a human face at first appeared to be the true fulfillment of the Gramscian dream of cultural hegemony, of the organic intellectual truly undistinguished from the forces of the proletariat, truly bringing about the classless society. It could also be a special validation of the intellectual correctness of the Italian vision of socialism, not just the Italian path to socialism. So admission of failure in the Soviet camp, in this vision, would actually restore the credibility of Western communism and its mixture of parliamentary and insurrectionary tactics.

But both the French and Italian Communist parties miscalculated not only on the Soviet side, thinking that socialism could be reformed from above, but also on the side of protest at home, failing to comprehend the antiestablishment spirit from below. At the time of the events in Hungary in 1956, PCF and PCI leaders had come across as defenders of authoritarianism. In 1968, they simply looked old, a group quickly aging, in every sense, just like Charles de Gaulle or the old guard Christian Democrats. Youthful rebels and the new extraparliamentarian Left saw the PCF as a bureaucratized apparatus that compromised with the Soviet Union, which, in turn, had compromised with de Gaulle; in the case of the PCI, its own left wing disconcerted the new rebels once it began its slow approach to Catholic groups, though not the Catholic establishment.

THE PCF, PCI, AND THE SOVIET SCRIPT

Significant differences divided the two parties, and they have been amply examined and reassessed. For the sake of brevity, the most significant difference is summarized in historian Marc Lazar’s quip that the more thoroughly Bolshevized PCF followed the Soviet script in allegro vivace whereas the PCI did it in allegro moderato.¹⁵ Although recent research has revealed that the Italian Communists maintained as strong an intimacy with Moscow as their French comrades, at least until 1956, it remains undisputable that the PCI’s reference to Stalin was less obsessive than that of the PCF.¹⁶ To some extent, this difference reflected the respective political traditions of Italy and France. In the former, where the state’s weakness remained endemic, “partitocracy,” or rule by parties, undermined a strong executive—with the notable exception of the discredited fascist years—and also favored the search for constant mediation and even “transformism”; the Communists reinforced their tendency to assimilate and compromise.¹⁷ In the latter, where the state was strong and centralized and societal conflict more inscribed in its evolution and even enshrined in the French Revolution, unassailable ideological faith could be more easily conflated with national identity.¹⁸ The PCI’s long experience as a clandestine group under fascism also kept its cadres alert to the danger of being ostracized again.¹⁹

The prominence of intellectuals was notable in both parties. Nevertheless, the PCI fielded a more highly educated leadership than the PCF. As historian Stephen Gundle has noted, the PCI’s “well-directed strategy aimed at achieving a hegemonic position within national thought and culture was virtually without precedent in the history of the European workingclass movement.” The French Communist leaders brandished their modest backgrounds as badges of honor, but also retained less control of fellowtraveling intellectuals. This was potentially and ironically one of the PCF’s major weaknesses.²⁰

ESTABLISHMENT VERSUS ANTIESTABLISHMENT

By the mid-1960s, after almost twenty years in opposition, both parties were trying to form alternative government coalitions. The PCF did so by relaunching the cooperation of the Left with the Socialists, starting with the presidential elections of 1965. The PCI debated whether it should break the center-left coalition by seeking cooperation with the Socialists or by reaching out to Catholic workers.²¹ All these tactics required détente at home and an implied accommodation with the rapprochement between the establishment forces in the West and the establishment forces in the Soviet Union. In France, this meant endorsing to a certain extent the efforts of President de Gaulle of using détente to distance himself from Washington, while also drawing a distinction between that effort and a more thorough connection to the East proposed by the Left.

At the same time, both parties tried to co-opt the movements on their Left, endorsing some of their antiestablishment tactics. Paradoxically, that was especially true for the more parliamentarian of the two parties, the PCI. The cooperation between labor and student movements was more intense there because of the rapid, hence problematic, transition to modernity for Italy. In an interview with Rinascita in December 1968, PCI secretary Luigi Longo went as far as arguing that insurrection was an option, especially if youth and labor demonstrations continued to be met with violent repression.²² But both parties’ main efforts were directed at harnessing the antiestablishment forces. When the PCF proposed a government of popular democratic unity following the May 1968 events, it was not acting in a revolutionary way, but was channeling the revolutionary tide toward the rather limited goal of unseating de Gaulle.²³

The Prague events intersected with this contradiction because they contained a disruptive potential for the détente that was the premise for the two parties’ access to the government and because they also contained a potential for their genuine emancipation from Moscow and even for a rejuvenated or new kind of revolutionary spirit in the West. Philosopher JeanPaul Sartre, in a rather unusual defense of the establishment in 1956, had described Hungary’s revolution as infected by a “rightist spirit.” Hungarian refugee François Fejtö rebutted that the Stalinists were the right-wing reaction to an experiment to improve communism from within.²⁴ Few French radical intellectuals would question the latter’s interpretation during the Prague Spring of 1968.

REACTION TO THE EVENTS IN PRAGUE

Prague was the second chance for the greater autonomy of Western Communists as well. Each time a crisis had arisen in the East, the two parties, the PCI especially, tried to relaunch their own initiative in the West. The first of such attempts at coalition building among Western Communist parties was a conference in San Remo, Italy, in May 1956. Palmiro Togliatti’s speech on polycentrism came right after the publication of Khrushchev’s report in June. A key part of that speech, even more than its claim of greater autonomy from Moscow, was the assertion that the path to socialism could occur without the Communist parties being the leading ones in a coalition. This was the first genuine step toward a reformed socialism incorporating some social democratic forms.

The PCI reiterated its principle of unity within diversity after the repression in Hungary. French and Italian Communists concurred in denouncing the “imperialist plot” in Hungary, but only the PCI also admitted the mistakes made by the Hungarian Communists. The French Communists clashed with their Italian comrades more in 1956 than in 1968, accusing Togliatti of revisionism (at the world conference of sixty-eight parties in November 1957). It should be noted, though, that the PCI remained more loyal than the PCF to Khrushchev, for the Soviet leader was for a while seen as an agent of social renewal at home. In this sense, the French Communists, pledging loyalty to Stalinism, asserted their nationalist position more strongly than the Italian Left. In 1956, intellectuals started a slow hemorrhage in the PCF, and a more abrupt withdrawal from the PCI, with a famous document signed by one hundred intellectuals specifically addressing the issue of democratization in the East. Most of that group defected by the end of the year.²⁵

A major reason for both parties promoting a sharper break with Moscow in 1968 was the pursuit of internal legitimacy. They both had to demonstrate that their own brand of communism was compatible with the democratic process. The electoral situation had favored this moderation for the PCI, but not as much for the PCF. With national elections held in May 1968, the PCI actually gained votes, proving it had, in part, channeled the radicalism of students and workers. In the French elections of the following month, the PCF lost one-tenth of its electorate, showing above all its inability to harness the youth movement.

The PCF’s support of Alexander Dubček’s reforms was very “temperé.” In July, Waldeck Rochet warned the Czech leader of the dangers of counterrevolution, so strongly that Dubček wondered whether the warning came from the PCF or the USSR. There is no conclusive evidence of Moscow’s success in using the PCF as mediator. But a big scandal erupted in France in 1970 after it was revealed that the French Communist leadership had given the “normalized” Czech government documents from the exchange between Rochet and Dubček, which resulted in trials of several members of the dissident group Club 231. The PCI was more ostensibly sympathetic to the winds of change in Prague, but Luigi Longo in July asked his party’s political bureau to warn Dubček that there were “dangerous positions within the movement (of the Prague Spring)… that threaten[ed] the very basis of socialism” and against which it was “necessary to fight.”²⁶ Both parties condemned the joint intervention of the Warsaw Pact powers in August. Notable dissidents included Jeannette Thorez-Veermesch, Emilio Colombi, and Pietro Secchia on the “orthodox” side, and Roger Garaudy, Umberto Terracini, and the PCI’s Manifesto group further breaching the wall of party orthodoxy.²⁷

Reconciliation for the PCF with the USSR came as early as 3 November 1968. The French party accepted normalization. Although it also endorsed the summoning of a conference of Communist parties in Moscow the next June, the PCF rejected any formal international agency along the lines of the previous Cominform. The PCI refused to sign the common declaration (it approved only the document condemning imperialism). Also, the Italian Communists condemned the normalization and upheld the notion of “pluralism,” though only within a Socialist framework. The party leadership, however, still expressed solidarity with the world of socialism and the Soviet Union.²⁸

The crushing of the Prague Spring was, however, traumatic for the leadership of both Western parties. This impact was, perhaps, best exemplified by the similar passionate reactions of the two party secretaries, Rochet and Longo. Consternated by the Soviets’ conduct, they both fell ill soon after the invasion of Czechoslovakia. The simultaneous deaths of Togliatti and Thorez in 1964 had not led to significant transformations in the two parties. Instead, the new leadership emerging in the late 1960s further explained the two parties’ increasingly diverging paths. Georges Marchais was, in many respects, more orthodox than Rochet, and Berlinguer was considerably more flexible than Longo. The Italian leader had already anticipated his departure from the bond with Moscow, predicting immediately after the invasion of Czechoslovakia that the “USSR suffer[ed] from an ideological retrenchment”; therefore, it was likely that the Western Communists would “engage in a political confrontation with the Soviet comrades.”²⁹

Several reasons dictated a moderate response by the two parties to the Soviet repression of the reform movement. Concisely, they can be ascribed to their leaders’ concerns about various possible domino effects should they actually fully express their criticism.

1. Fear of Domino Effects in the East: French and Italian Communist leaders upheld the connection between détente and “controlled” Socialist reform: the radical forces from below, or, after Nixon’s visit to Beijing in 1972, from China, could be upsetting in the West, but they could be devastating in the East. For both parties, the choice of muffling the antiestablishment pressures (from any direction) reflected their slogan of “neither orthodoxy nor heresy.”³⁰

2. Fear of Domino Effect One in the West: Moderation was also dictated by the fear that an ideological domino effect originating from the discredited East might easily affect the Western Communists as well. An utter condemnation of Moscow could have meant a loss of credibility for socialism altogether, argued the most orthodox members in both parties.³¹

3. Fear of Domino Effect Two in the West: The domino effect could also come from the extreme Left. The PCI in part balked because of the position of the Manifesto group within the party and of other extraparliamentarian groups that favored China over the Soviet Union. So pressures from radicalism reinforced a tactical orthodoxy.³²

4. Fear of Political Domino Effects at Home: A moral equivalent between the United States and the Soviet Union might force the PCI and especially the PCF to compromise at home with the Socialists, or with regard to their own practice of “democratic centralism.” A break with the Soviet Union, PCF leaders admonished Garaudy in January 1969, would only serve the cause of Western imperialism. By the end of 1969, Marchais condemned Garaudy after the publication of his book Le grand tournant du socialisme because its denunciation of totalitarian excesses included all of Eastern Europe and even Latin America’s Marxist movements “so bravely fighting their own bourgeoisie and American imperialism.” Garaudy’s book was also censured for its acceptance of the “Marcusian” argument that after the working class had been “integrated” into the “consumer society” it had lost its role as the guide to revolution, which was now waged by the still “excluded” students and other “social or intellectual outcasts.”³³

Correlated with these fears were other concerns. Once the PCF found full reconciliation with Moscow, the Italian Communists worried about their own isolation in the Western Communist movement.³⁴ Concerns about grassroots connections also haunted the leadership of both parties; steeped in Soviet myths, the parties’ rank and file had more trouble than their leaders with estrangement from Moscow. But above all, the political advantages of the emerging détente seemed to command a moderate response to the Soviet Union. Even the PCI in the end informally recognized normalization, in part out of fear that the forces of radicalism or Chinese intransigence would freeze détente in Europe and leave no room for maneuvering for the party’s possible rapprochement with social democratic forces in the West. Maintaining détente meant keeping close relations with Moscow.³⁵

INTERNATIONALISM AND CONTINENTAL INTEGRATION

In 1968, however, French and Italian Communists were still excluded from domestic politics. So they aimed at regaining some exposure by giving priority to foreign policy issues. The two parties’ internationalism was, in part, predicated on their belief that they could preserve a role in the West if they could act as mediators in the East. This had been the case since the Moscow meeting of the eighty-one Communist parties in November–December 1961. On that occasion, both the French and the Italian parties sought to revive their international credentials by trying to cushion the impact of the Sino-Soviet split. Throughout the following decade, the PCI was quieter than the PCF on this issue. But its own concern about balancing détente with Sino-Soviet reconciliation was finally emphasized in the meeting Giancarlo Pajetta and Carlo Galluzzi held in Moscow with Andrei Kirilenko and Mikhail Suslov in July 1968.

More importantly, by the mid-1960s, the two parties practiced a “new internationalism,” as the Italian Communists called it. The core elements of this policy were the virtually unconditional support of North Vietnam in its fight against “imperialism” and the effort to reestablish relations with the European Left—as the PCI did at the end of the decade by endorsing Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik.

Protesting the Vietnam War gave the parties control of the streets and the propaganda battle. It also established their strongest connection with the youth movement. During the summer of 1968, the PCF’s political bureau decided to increase aid to North Vietnam and to create various committees supporting not just peace, as before, but victory for the Vietminh and Vietcong forces. Even more so now, the political bureau argued in August 1968, given the bourgeois attacks on socialism following the Czech events, the party needed to call the public’s attention to the “struggle for freedom” in Vietnam. The constant parallel between Vietnam and Czechoslovakia, under the rubric of “freedom and independence,” PCF’s Roland Leroy told the leader of the Mouvement de la Jeunesse Communiste Française Roland Favaro, drowned the anti-American tradition into anti-Soviet animosity.³⁶

But it was through a reevaluation of Western European integration that French and Italian Communists could get recognition and more control in parliament. For the PCI especially, this “Europeanism” reflected its effort to transform détente into a vehicle for European emancipation from both superpowers.

During the development of events in Prague, the PCF in July first proposed a meeting of the European Communist parties aimed at averting the Soviet action. It was a way for the PCF to establish its mediation role, but also to reassert the status of the Western parties. Moscow ignored that proposal. Indeed, for both Italian and French Communists, the main goal was to coalesce the Left in the West to better combat Western (U.S.) imperialism more than Moscow’s control. The Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia gave them the pretext to further their attempt to overcome the “politics of the two blocs.” For the PCI’s main champion of an acceptance of the European Economic Community (EEC), Giorgio Amendola, the Prague events would help prompt a campaign for the “withdrawal of [both] imperialist forces from occupied Europe… and the achievement of a real “European unity.”³⁷ This position, prevalent in the PCI, actually favored utter condemnation of the Czech invasion, setting the tone against those who feared that an ideological domino effect would follow the party’s reprobation of Soviet conduct. Denouncing Moscow, this argument went, could, in fact, give the party more power within the Socialist movement. Also, if Moscow’s interference in the East was not rejected, the West could justify counter-coups against socialism in the West.³⁸ That was how the PCI saw the events in Chile five years later, or the so-called strategy of tension at home, which started with Fascist terrorist bombings in December 1969.

The risk of an escalating aggression from both superpowers in Europe was highlighted in a Mediterranean conference in April 1968, the first Cold War general Western Communist gathering to be organized separately from Moscow. The meeting, held in Rome, discussed geopolitical scenarios in the region after the Arab-Israeli War of June 1967. The delegates concluded that the situation “created the threat of ‘aggressive Atlantic-American imperialism’ and threatened to transform the Mediterranean into a potentially explosive new front or scene of dangerous confrontation between the U.S. Sixth Fleet and the newly introduced Soviet naval units.”³⁹

Just as the impact of the Hungarian events in 1956 was mitigated by the imperialist venture at Suez and the follow-up of the Eisenhower Doctrine, so the repression in Prague twelve years later was counterbalanced by a persistent anti-Americanism centered on a campaign against the Vietnam War. That campaign had actually contributed to reinserting the two Communist parties into a general national consensus opposing the war. Significant for the dialogue between Communists and Catholics, early in 1966 Pope Paul VI had established an informal diplomatic contact with North Vietnam through Ber-linguer and other party leaders.⁴⁰ Moreover, the anti-Sovietism unleashed by the events in Prague in most respects prompted both the PCI and the PCF to intensify their anti-Americanism, almost as an instinctive reaction: their main reproach was that the ruling parties, enslaved to the United States through the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the EEC, could not “afford to lecture” the two Western Communist parties or the Soviet Union.⁴¹

For the older generation of World War II Communist resistors, the Soviet myth, combined with a vision of capitalist decline, persisted, even after deStalinization and Western economic miracles. The fact that large sectors of the working class, especially in Italy, were still excluded from consumption, economically justified the continuing myth and resulted in improved electoral results for the PCI in the 1970s. That myth also ascribed to the Soviet Union a sincere desire for détente, as opposed to a relentless imperialist drive from the United States.⁴² But as officials from the U.S. embassy in Rome predicted as early as September 1968, the invasion of Czechoslovakia might have induced the PCI to begin reevaluating its denial of Soviet expansionism and to seek shelter in the Western alliance for its own brand of socialism, which is what Berlinguer did gradually by balking at the campaign to prevent the renewal of the NATO treaty in 1969, by accepting NATO in 1974 in front of the political bureau, and by publicly announcing this turn in June 1976.⁴³

For the PCF, anti-Americanism remained a raison d’être, not only because of its orthodoxy, or because of its tactics to harness the youth movement, but also because de Gaulle himself had shifted direction. After recognizing that “with [the] Soviets on [the] warpath this is not time to be feuding with [the] U.S.,” the French government took the role as host to Vietnam negotiations “in part due to the evident unpopularity of ‘way out’ anti-U.S. rhetoric.”⁴⁴

If the PCI and PCF had some room to maneuver in international politics, it was also, in part, because of Moscow’s diminished interest in them. Soviet money now primarily went to Vietnam, Cuba, and the Arab countries; the two parties’ protest against repression in Czechoslovakia also deprived them of a lot of money, but not of their autonomy. In fact, financing from Moscow resumed in the early 1970s after a brief break.⁴⁵ This renewed funding corresponded to the Soviets’ own redefinition of national security. The Western parties had ostensibly received more autonomy in the immediate aftermath of the 1956 events. A decade later, for the USSR, national security became more tightly dependent on ideological cohesion, anywhere, because of the increasing ideological permeability of its Eastern satellites. It is no accident that the PCI’s reform leader Amendola in 1971 first suggested the end of Soviet funding as a means to gain more autonomy in international politics.⁴⁶

Financial matters were not the only barometer of this increasing autonomy. The crisis of 1956, together with other events, had moved the main international focus to the emerging Third World. The year 1968 was a different story: it restored hopes among Western European Communists that revolution was possible in Europe and in the West, too.

THE MEANINGS OF EUROCOMMUNISM

It is now widely accepted that for both the PCF and (especially) the PCI, the decline of the Soviet model began in 1968, and both parties fully acknowledged that decline only by the mid-1970s. Until the mid-1970s, Italy’s Communists still analyzed world politics through Soviet lenses: the United States was in decline and power was shifting to the Soviet side. What the PCI seriously questioned from the late 1960s onward was the bipolarity implied in the détente process—or in the constant Soviet demonizing of the United States—as well as the internal practices of the Soviet camp.

After a meeting with a Soviet delegation in Budapest in November 1968, Berlinguer rejected his counterparts’ suggestion to intensify anti-NATO propaganda, as the PCF had done after its encounters with the CPSU of a few weeks earlier. Those pressures for tactical anti-Americanism, Berlinguer told Boris Ponomaryov, were unacceptable.⁴⁷ It was the first time that the Italian Communists diverged from the Kremlin on anti-American propaganda.

By the mid-1970s, realizing that communism was no longer expanding, that Angola, and later, Afghanistan, were illusions, the Berlinguer leadership redefined the Soviet model from the geopolitical standpoint as well. In positioning itself as the middle path between social democracy and communism and in favor of European interdependence, Eurocommunism strove to deny both blocs. In January 1973 at a party meeting, Berlinguer defined a policy that would be “neither anti-Soviet nor anti-American.”⁴⁸ In fact, with its anti-U.S. accents, its anticonsumerist ethic (all the campaigns for austerity and for a moral cleanup of Italian politics of the late 1970s and 1980s), it continued to favor a catastrophic vision of capitalist decline, thus reemphasizing its identity as the genuine harbinger of a reformed Eastern Bloc, as if the Prague Spring could be revived from the West. Faith in this capacity was essential; otherwise, Western communism would have been just another social democracy.⁴⁹

The paradox was that only under the Atlantic umbrella, Berlinguer thought by 1974, could Western communism be free to advance the true “socialism with a human face.”⁵⁰ The PCI increasingly saw NATO as a vehicle of peace and détente: once détente was achieved, then emancipation from NATO would be possible.

Eurocommunism enjoyed a brief season of hope and moderate success. It is beyond the scope of this chapter to narrate its developments. It will suffice here to mention the milestones of this design orchestrated mainly from Rome. The theme was first addressed at a meeting between Marchais and Berlinguer in May of 1973, which also paved the way for the conference of the Western Communist parties held in Brussels the following year. Eurocommunism became the main banner of the ensuing meetings between Marchais and Berlinguer in November 1975, the PCF summit of a few days later with the Spanish Communists (PCE), renewed encounters between the French and Italian leaders in Paris in June of 1976, and, finally, the summit of the three leaders, including Santiago Carillo, in Madrid in March of 1977. The plenary conference of all European Communist parties, held in Berlin in June 1976, gave the three parties the chance to present their autonomous views within the Communist movement. Besides upholding their open cooperation with the Socialist and Social Democratic parties, the Western Communists abided by the declaration signed by Marchais and Berlinguer at their 1975 meeting, which supported the promotion of basic rights and freedom in Socialist societies.⁵¹

In the end, Eurocommunism had a minimal impact on politics in the West; it did not significantly lift the U.S. veto on a Communist sharing of power. But it did have a subversive impact on the East, for it drew the attention of East Germans, Romanians, Poles, and Yugoslavs. The Soviet Union became hostile because of this “magnetism” and because of its own fear that Eurocommunism, with its increasing acceptance of NATO, would ultimately favor the militarization of Western Europe.⁵² Interestingly, from the other side, U.S. secretary of state Henry Kissinger also opposed the Eurocommunist idea because he thought that the PCI’s experimentalism would weaken Western resolve and work its subversive way through to dominate Italian politics. In this case, for the realist Kissinger, ideology and the struggle for the minds and hearts did matter.⁵³

What was most remarkable for both parties was that, although they ostensibly waged their main actions internationally, they both claimed their independence from Moscow first in their internal affairs, from as early as the mid-1960s.⁵⁴ Embracing interdependence did not mean excluding a nationalist outlook. In fact, years after the Prague events, both parties continued to define the defense of national autonomy as the main achievement of the reform movement in Czechoslovakia. They shared an utter rejection of a restored Cominform under any disguise.⁵⁵

Again, traditions of nationalism and the nation-state, and even the nationalist belief that revolution had its roots in France, contributed to making the PCF more impervious than the PCI to any transnational option. The PCI was nationalist only intermittently and, like other Italian parties, looked at Europe as an instrument for the country’s emancipation from the Cold War.⁵⁶

But the emancipation from the blocs was also inherent in the PCF’s internal choice of siding with the establishment represented by François Mitterrand. Internal détente in France clashed with the external one, where the Soviet Union favored the ostensibly anti-Atlantic de Gaulle and his successors on the Right to a presumed pro-Atlanticist Mitterrand. It became an essential tactic for the Communists to have electable candidates.⁵⁷ After a narrow loss by Mitterrand in the presidential elections of 1974, which was actually welcomed in the Left as an unexpected success, the PCF had to become the suitor in the relationship and part of the system. But when the common program with the French Socialists (Parti Socialiste or PS) temporarily foundered in 1977, the Communists in most respects reverted to orthodoxy on matters of détente and European integration.⁵⁸

For the PCI, Eurocommunism also meant the beginning of the Historic Compromise with the Christian Democrats, an external support to the ruling party first proposed by Berlinguer in three famous articles in the party’s magazine Rinascita in the issues from October through December 1973. The main aim was that of eventually entering and transforming the government coalition. This was more of an anti-U.S., rather than an anti-Soviet, move. Following the coup in Chile against Salvador Allende, the Historic Compromise proposal was, in part, designed to prevent a similar scenario, invoking the common struggle against fascism, as in the postwar coalition of all democratic parties.⁵⁹

While accepting Europe as a genuine third force between the two superpowers, Eurocommunism never truly coalesced with the forces of social democracy. The PCI’s contacts with Brandt or Olav Palme were confined to issues of nuclear proliferation and aid policies for the southern hemisphere. Berlinguer’s strategy consisted of finding a legitimate insertion in Western democracy, while remaining an ideological bridge between East and West. It was a tough balancing act that would have required truly overcoming the Cold War. The “Europeanization” of the PCI, it has been noted, was “never a choice of civilization.” It was a “Westpolitik,” as PCI intellectual Sergio Segre put it in 1974. It was focused on détente rather than pluralism and democracy. This focus on international matters was chosen in order to keep the more orthodox PCF and the more radical Communist Party of Spain (Partido Comunista de España or PCE) tied to the project. In part it also stemmed from the fear of alienating the Soviet Union with a radical departure from democratic centralism.⁶⁰

Actually, the French Communists became more antiestablishment than their Italian counterparts with regard to détente. They espoused, earlier than the PCI, the campaign for human rights in the East. A series of articles in the party’s newspaper L’Humanité in October 1975 condemned the incarceration of high profile dissenters, mathematician Leonid Plyushch above all. But this criticism was still based on the belief that Soviet repression was merely a remnant of Stalinist distortions of socialism and national security. That’s why a notable exception was the more thoroughly dissenting Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: against his Gulag Archipelago the PCF mounted a virulent campaign.⁶¹ In the following years, the attacks against the Soviets’ shabby human rights record and against totalitarianism of all colors came not only from the militant group of the New Philosophers led by Bernard Henri-Levy and the reviews Les Nouvelles Littéraires and Le Nouvel Observateur; former Communists, such as Jean-Marie Domenach, Pierre Daix, and Paul Vercors echoed those voices and denounced orthodox Marxism as scholastic.⁶² But the French Communists continued to oppose détente as the validation of the status quo in the West, resenting its mitigating effect on their anti-U.S. campaigns.⁶³ In the final analysis, Eurocommunism for the PCF was a mere temporary expedient and even less of a choice of civilization than for the PCI.

The main question for both the Italian and the French Communists, in light of the protest movements in the East and the West, was whether it was possible to build a European identity outside the two superpowers. The mass movements from both sides and their stress on participatory democracy made this impossible. They made it impossible to break loose from the influence of U.S. mass culture, not from the extreme Left that had apparently commanded the rebellions of the late 1960s.

THE PATH TO AMERICA…

The impact of the events in Prague in August 1968 on the French and Italian Communists cannot be fully comprehended without including the events of Paris in May 1968. French intellectual and student activist Régis Debray ten years later quipped, “The French path to America passed through May ’68.” While much of the youth movement rebelled against the materialism and consumerism of the U.S. way of life, it also followed trends and a redefinition of oppression based on the ethical, individualistic modes of American radicalism rather than the Marxist script or the “French-style revolutionary sensibility.”⁶⁴ Much has been said about the Italian and especially the French Communists’ ineptitude in absorbing these movements. Suffice here to underline how their dilemmas between establishment and antiestablishment broadly affected their reactions to the Prague Spring.

The pressures of the antiestablishment from both sides of Europe ultimately undermined the ideological tension that the two parties formulated in strictly Cold War terms. As U.S. deputy assistant secretary of state for European affairs George Springsteen observed to French conservative leader Raymond Barré, the generation gap in Eastern Europe meant that the youth were not interested in ideology. In the West, the two concurred, all the revolutionary romanticism sounded like a triumph of ideology and like a “virus” causing contagion from France to the rest of Europe, but, in fact, if “no system of spiritual, political and social values [was] immune,” then it meant that the post–World War II generations had no reference at all, or even that their “real problems [could] spread into other areas and provide the foundation for frivolity.”⁶⁵

Sir Isaiah Berlin described the 1960s movements as “the rebellion of the repentant bourgeoisie against the complacent and oppressive proletariat.”Both the PCF and the PCI appeared insulted and worried by this new development. The French Communists’ reaction to the youth movement is often exemplified by Marchais’ Humanité article that lambasted Daniel Cohn-Bendit as an anarchist and the movement as bourgeois.⁶⁶

While the PCI developed a strategy of “attention” toward the youth movement, even a moderate such as Amendola lamented the “resurgence of extremist infantilism,” and an anarchic tendency that equated criticism of the Soviet Union to that of American imperialism. In the secret debate within the party’s political bureau in June, Amendola waxed confident about absorbing a diversified extreme Left and not “repeating the same errors as the PCF”; but he also worried that the students, rather than advancing Maoist sectarianism, might instead, with their defiance “against all intellectual heritage,” feed the theories on “the end of ideologies.” In much harsher tones poet and movie-maker Pier Paolo Pasolini excoriated the students for their fascination with the counterculture: “the Americans,” he pointed out in a controversial poem addressed to the students, “with their stupid flowers, are inventing a ‘new’ revolutionary language, for their own!… But you cannot do it because in Europe we already have one: can you ignore it? Yes you want to ignore it. You ignore it by ‘going more to the left’… you set aside the only instrument that truly threatens your parents: communism.” Earlier, just as significantly, Pasolini had denounced the “beatnik Stalinism” of the Italian New Left.⁶⁷

To paraphrase historian Jeremi Suri, the two parties in the end sided with power more than with protest.⁶⁸ They feared being outflanked on the left and from below. They wanted détente and, possibly, a restoration of security into European hands, which was to their internal advantage because it would open a path to the government.

In Czechoslovakia, the disjunction between workers and intellectuals also evoked the emerging split in the West. The country was very egalitarian by the 1960s, and Stalinism had repressed the intellectual elites the most. So with the first signs of liberalization from above, it was the intellectuals who began to clamor for more. Czechoslovakia was also the first country in Eastern Europe to have a student revolt, in October 1967 at Prague’s Technical University. When Italian students sang, “We are not with Dubček; we are with Mao,” a major miscommunication between East and West was revealed: for many students in Rome, Paris, and Berlin, “pluralist democracy was the enemy,” whereas for the Czech students “it was the goal.”⁶⁹

Another way in which Prague was connected with the student revolt in the West was by challenging democratic centralism. It was Achille Occhetto, as one of the leaders of the Italian Communist Youth Federation (Federazione Giovanile Comunista Italiana or FGCI), who most explicitly invited “in Italy a new socialist experience, in which… next to the socialization of the means of production there will be a socialization of the power system” with a “mixed system of delegated democracy and participatory democracy.” Party secretary Longo recognized that the youth movement was “a struggle against authoritarianism… for greater participation of the masses in decision making… both in capitalist and in socialist countries [where] the bureaucratic structure of power tends to suffocate and exclude the single as well as the group.”⁷⁰

To be sure, the student movement, especially in Italy, saw this change as the precursor of true socialism. But in denying the party its function of guide in favor of that of mere “coordination” of factory and student counsels, it was, in fact, undermining its Marxist-Leninist essence.⁷¹ In the end, democratic centralism could not be given up because with a genuine internal debate the PCI and PCF would have become as factionalized as the other parties. Even the FGCI gave priority to the struggle for unity with the proletariat, gaining members in the following years, but at the price of its ideological cohesion.

The intellectual diaspora was also more consequential for both parties in 1968 than in 1956 because of the combined effect of the youth rebellion, the increasing gap between intellectuals and the “complacent proletariat,” and the events in Prague. Attention to dissent had started earlier in France, with Communist intellectual Pierre Daix prefacing the first French edition of Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in 1963. The journal Les Lettres Françaises accepted dissident contributors beginning in 1965, and its director Louis Aragon shed all his remnant orthodoxy and called the Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia a “Biafra of the spirit.” Roger Garaudy was expelled from the party after a critical speech at the 19th Party Congress in 1970.⁷² For Jean-Paul Sartre, 1968 actually changed the role of the intellectual altogether: the existentialists took an active part instead of just being moral supporters. This change was inspired in part by the Chinese model, but it ended up encouraging the individualist implications of the youth rebellion. Sartre’s condemnation of the PCF’s handling of the student movement matched his condemnation of Prague: “today the Soviet model,” he sentenced, “smothered as it is by a bureaucracy, is no longer viable.”⁷³

In part because of the influence of Sartre and Existentialism and in part because of economic conditions, the countercultural aspects of the youth rebellion held a broader appeal on the French Left than on the Italian Left. With its individualist pathos, the French cultural scene fielded several intellectuals who waged with fervor human rights campaigns against the Soviet Union. But the PCI had also better absorbed the intellectual dissent: the Yalta Memorandum had called for more freedom in intellectual life. The party’s Cultural Commission had been phased out in 1962 and absorbed by the more liberalized Gramsci Institute.⁷⁴

What was characteristic of left-wing intellectual autonomy in both countries was an amalgam of, on the one hand, efforts to “create a more direct and unmediated contact with the people” using such dated instruments as the wallpaper or the improved Festival de l’Unità (the annual fund-raising fair of the PCI) and, on the other hand, the triumph of the media intellectual distilling the debate, but also highly “mediating” it for the masses. The two parties’ cultural profile was raised by the apparent dialogue established with the new forms of protest that criticized Western models of development, as well as by their coming to terms with an increasingly individualized Western culture that was repelled by totalitarianism. In fact, French and Italian Communists faced two far more insidious and, for that reason, insurmountable challenges: that from consumerism and the apparently opposite one from the theories of alienation against the consumerist society which, however, turned upside down the conventional Marxist understanding of revolution in a socioeconomic sense. It was at this time that the young Marx was “exhumed,” the one with an accent on psychological more than social repression. The new generations took that philosophical turn to justify their emphasis on private desires over collective struggles. Both challenges reflected the “individualist sensibilities of the age.”⁷⁵

The U.S. culture of dissent, with its emphasis on existential problems and issues of individual expression—namely cultural alienation, women’s emancipation, the generation gap, and gay rights—subverted the economic discourse that had informed Marxist doctrines and established a transatlantic dialogue between the younger generations. In dealing with these developments, the French and Italian Communist leadership showed either rigidity (especially in the PCF) or flexibility (in the PCI) to the point of losing their ideological and political consistency altogether.

Furthermore, the United States’ self-perception had changed by the late 1960s to be less exceptionalist, less naïvely optimistic, and more vulnerable in every way, showing the superpower’s true weaknesses, but also highlighting its pluralistic and multifaceted character. It thus inspired further adaptations and permutations of Communist anti-Americanism in France and Italy. It also reignited a subtlety and ambivalence in the Communists’ assessments of the United States that resumed and refined their equivocations of the immediate postwar period.

The ambivalence of America begat the ambivalence of anti-Americanism: as early as March 1966, Rinascita’s correspondent to the United States, Gianfranco Corsini, with an opening article in an issue of Il Contemporaneo dedicated to the “America of dissent,” reflected that there was “an America that does not dwell in complacency, and that prefers to pose the most daring questions, rather than remaining bound to an immutable belief system”; because of the “tight cultural interdependence of our time,” Corsini concluded, “these [American] debates can help us understand ourselves better in a moment in which we try to interpret and correctly evaluate (without any prejudice) other peoples’ troubles.”⁷⁶ The Writers Union of the PCF took a little longer to fathom the value of U.S. counterculture, but by 1971, it drafted a memorandum questioning whether it was a temporary phenomenon or the beginning of a genuine cultural revolution in the West spearheaded by the U.S. “underground” movement. “Would you pay,” the Union asked the party leaders,

These assessments reflected the United States’ own ambivalence, proved its cultural dominion, and confirmed its role as harbinger of Europe’s future.

The PCF remained unable to address the new problems of education, individual liberties, and sexual liberation. In the 1960s, it still defined birth control as a product of reactionary Malthusianism inspired by imperialist capitalism. The PCI, despite its tentacular reach into all new cultural developments, especially through its cultural recreation organization ARCI, also failed to fully grasp the redefinition of oppression by women’s and youth groups. In its attempt to establish a Historic Compromise with the Christian Democrats, it muffled its leadership in causes such as the divorce and abortion referenda of the mid-1970s and early 1980s. Feminism was at first dismissed as an “heir to the youth movement and its errors” and as “more an expression of social unease than a social movement.”⁷⁸

At the same time, the PCI remained more Eurocentric than did Communist and radical French intellectuals. From the time Pope Paul VI issued his encyclical Populorum Progressio in 1967, which upheld the theories of modernization, Italian Communist leaders kept fearing that the main global focus of change and progress might switch from the developed countries to the developing ones and that, therefore, the Chinese interpretation of revolution might prevail.⁷⁹ Modernization theories, on the other hand, connected new French and American sociological theories, adding luster to France’s intellectual heritage.

It should also be noted that part of the modernist assumptions, which gave so much credit to neocapitalism, prompted PCI leaders to further expand their own notions of “socialism with a human face.” The NATO umbrella to which Berlinguer referred was not only a protection in terms of security, but also in economic and social terms. According to Communist intellectual Franco Rodano, Italy could spearhead the transformation of Europe through the use and diversion of a consumerist economy, shifting its dimension gradually from private to “public” or “social consumption.”⁸⁰ In other words, a more affluent Europe, made possible by its permanence in NATO, would ultimately emancipate Europe socially and geopolitically from U.S. control.

The 1960s movements in both Europe and the United States that “purported to despise and abhor ‘consumer culture’ were from the outset an object of cultural consumption, reflecting a widespread disjunction between rhetoric and practice.” As Tony Judt has best noted, the effects of both revolts in the East and the West were limited: “in the East the message of the Sixties was that you could no longer work within the ‘system’; in the West there appeared no better choice.” So much of the fervor and antiestablishment of the 1960s was the “swansong” of Europe’s “revolutionary tradition.”⁸¹ It was the second major step toward ending ideological politics in Europe. The first one had an economic dimension, the “politics of productivity,” as pointed out by Charles Maier and others in reference to the effects of the Marshall Plan. This second one ultimately went deeper, favoring the private sphere over collective struggles, or as Maier again noticed, 1968 transformed the social, technological, and cultural bases of the “imperial rivalry” between the two superpowers, and ended the “controlled conflictuality” of bipolarism and the Cold War.⁸²

CONCLUSION: REFLECTIONS ON THE U.S. CONFRONTATION WITH WESTERN COMMUNISM

The main key to understanding the tension between establishment and antiestablishment pressures within the French and Italian Communist parties lies in their perceptions of and interactions with U.S. influence. The U.S. response was also significant. Throughout the Cold War, the United States only gradually evolved toward exhibiting the necessary flexibility in confronting left-wing anti-Americanism.⁸³ After placing much confidence in economic determinism during the early phases of the Marshall Plan, the U.S. foreign policy establishment reached the conclusion that communism in the West did not thrive only in poverty. An Intelligence Report of December 1952 described the situation of the previous years in France, where the living standards were relatively high while the social gaps did not appear to diminish, but to widen. The study pointed out that “only a rough correlation exists between poverty and adherence to the French Communist Party. What is true, rather, is that the party rallies those who are discontented with their present living standards, which may not necessarily be the lowest in the country, that they are convinced that only thoroughgoing changes in the social and economic order could possibly improve things for them.”⁸⁴

The resilience of both the PCI and PCF, despite their strong identification with the Soviet Union and in face of the two nations’ economic growth, induced the Truman and Eisenhower administrations to refine their own instruments of psychological warfare and also to wage a “cultural cold war” to defuse many of the Western Europeans’ assumptions about the United States’ cultural shallowness. Psywar consisted above all of repressive actions geared to reduce the institutional power and mass appeal of the two Communist parties. Those actions yielded only short-term results. The U.S. cultural cold war institutional framework also had relative success in the 1950s and 1960s, but in 1967 was discredited by revelations of CIA backing.⁸⁵

All the refinement of these propaganda battles are rather significant for the gradual, long-term effects they had on U.S. leadership itself. In 1949, George F. Kennan was in a relative minority as he observed that in the West, the Communist appeal was “emotional” more than economic. This induced the architect of containment to stigmatize some “fundamental flaws” within the “complicated civilization” of the West. He regretted the disappearance of the sense of organic community in modern U.S. society. Instead, he noted, the individual found solace in a culture of media, consumerism, and hedonism. The result of all this was “a gradual paralysis of the sense of responsibility and initiative in people….” “Not being the masters of our own soul,” Kennan concluded, “are we justified in regarding ourselves as fit for the leadership of others? All our ideas of ‘world leadership,’ ‘the American century,’ ‘aggressive democracy’, etc. stand or fall with the answer to that question.” Almost ten years later, President Dwight D. Eisenhower also mused over the insecurities of the Western man and the conditions of atomized passivity and confided to his speechwriter Emmet J. Hughes that he felt “the need to assert American purposes, before all the world, in terms more proud, and in measures less mean, than sheer material might.”⁸⁶

At the onset of the youth rebellion and anti-Vietnam protest in both Europe and the United States, most U.S. officials feared that the most insidious forms of left-wing anti-Americanism on both sides of the Atlantic could be mutually nurtured.⁸⁷ This did happen, but in the end, as we have seen, to the detriment of Communist orthodoxy and even power in France and Italy. It is no accident that Senator J. William Fulbright, who best grasped the importance of U.S. soft power, during the Vietnam war argued that the “selfcritical, generous America,” should eventually prevail over the “egotistical… self-righteous” one. As late as 1977, at the peak of the Eurocommunist experiment, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger reflected that “the spread of Marxism” in Western Europe “[could] be one of the profound problems of the modern period, namely the alienation of the population from the modern industrial state, that in the modern industrial state no matter how it is governed the people feel that they have no influence over the real decisions, and if you couple that with certain left wing traditions in Italy and France you can see why it spreads.”⁸⁸ Analyses such as these deeply informed the U.S. response to pluralism in the West and to Eurocommunism: they had the peculiar quality of synthesizing realism, a cultural understanding of certain exceptions in Western European politics, and an understanding of the limits of traditional Marxism in those contexts.⁸⁹

Washington’s response to the Communist threat in France and Italy, and even the effects of Americanization altogether, were strongest when the United States married its own “psychological warfare” to a subtle use of diplomatic actions that only indirectly helped modify the political balance within each of the two allied countries. Making diplomatic concessions to the French and Italian governments throughout the Cold War helped raise their profile against the Communist opposition. Moderately accommodating President de Gaulle on certain international issues helped muffle the anti-Americans on the left in France. Eisenhower’s Atoms for Peace campaign won over important sectors of public opinion in France and Italy and in only a few other countries. The diplomacy of détente, both in the late 1950s and in the Nixon-Kissinger era helped not only harness the voices of pacifism and protest in the Western world, but also check Communist pressures within NATO. U.S. diplomacy in the Middle East from the mid-1950s, allowing indirectly a U.S. dialogue with the center-left in Italy, helped isolate that country’s extreme Left.

The years 1975 to 1977 proved to be crucial in this particular respect: facing the threat of reformed Western communism, U.S. diplomacy renounced direct confrontation and instead adopted its most subtle approach to date, drawing, through the emerging G-7 summits, a concert of powers aimed at forging a socioeconomic consensus around the restoration of laissezfaire principles. This included the cooption of social democratic forces in France, Germany, and Italy. Both the French and the Italian Communists for the most part continued to rely on neo-Keynesian recipes. While this confirmed their cultural and economic adaptation to neocapitalism, it also showed their detachment from the realities of international economics and diplomacy that took shape under the influence of Kissinger and German chancellor Helmut Schmidt.⁹⁰ A restored laissez-faire policy, while temporary, was the dream of neither the Prague nor the Paris rebels. Most of Italy’s Communists, converging into the establishment of the new Party of the Democratic Left at the end of the Cold War, at best strove for a capitalism with a human face.

NOTES

1. Gianfranco Corsini, “Marilyn tra mito e verità,” Rinascita, 11 August 1962; JeanMarc Aucuy, “Hommage a Marilyn Monroe ou le decolonisation par l’erotisme,” Nouvelle Critique 140 (November 1962); Gianfranco Corsini, “Marilyn e gli intellettuali,” Rinascita, 8 September 1962; see also “‘Miller: Mia moglie è geniale; Marilyn: mio marito è matto’: Intervista con i due,” Vie Nuove, 23 April 1960.

2. For background, see especially Philippe Roger, The American Enemy: The History of French Anti-Americanism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Jessica C. E. Gienow-Hecht, “Always Blame the Americans: Anti-Americanism in Europe in the Twentieth Century,” American Historical Review 111, no. 4 (October 2006): 1067–91; Herbet J. Spiro, “Anti-Americanism in Western Europe,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences 497 (May 1988): 120–32; David W. Ellwood, ‘The American Challenge Renewed: U.S. Cultural Power and Europe’s Identity Debates,” Brown Journal of World Affairs, Winter/Spring 1997; Federico Romero, “Americanization and National Identity: The Case of Postwar Italy,” in Europe, Its Borders and the Others, ed. Luciano Tosi (Napoli: ESI, 2000); David Strauss, Menace in the West: The Rise of French Anti-Americanism in Modern Times (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1978); Nemici per la pelle. Sogno americano e mito sovietico nell’Italia contemporanea, ed. Pier Paolo D’Attorre (Milan: F. Angeli, 1991).

3. Cf. Ilya Ehrenburg, “Non potete capirci niente se dimenticate che è un paese giovane,” L’Unità, 18 August 1946; Italo Calvino, “Petrov e Ilf in America,” L’Unità, 23 March 1946; Marcello Flores, L’immagine dell’URSS: L’Occidente e la Russia di Stalin (1927–1956) (Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1990), 343–48.

4. Antonio Gramsci, “Americanism and Fordism,” in Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1971); see also Antonio Gramsci, Note sul Machiavelli, sulla politica e sullo stato moderno (Turin: Einaudi, 1955), 329–40.

5. Quoted Calvino, “Hemingway e noi,” Il Contemporaneo, 13 November 1954, pp. 3, 5; cf. Nello Ajello, Intellettuali e PCI, 1944–1958 (Bari: Laterza, 1979), 14; Patrick McCarthy, “America: L’altro mito della cultura comunista,” in D’Attorre, Nemici per la pelle, 222–23.

6. Claude Roy, “Le ciel est ma frontière,” Les Lettres Françaises, 1 November 1946.

7. Cesare Pavese, La letteratura americana, e altri saggi, 3rd. ed. (Turin: Einaudi, 1959), 194; see also Elio Vittorini, Diario in pubblico, 2nd ed. (Milan: Bompiani, 1957), 234; Michele Bottalico, “A Place for All: Old and New Myths in the Italian Appreciation of American Literature,” in As Others Read Us: International Perspectives on American Literature, ed. Huck Gutman (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1991). Ingrao qtd. in McCarthy, “America: L’altro mito,” 223.

8. Pavese, La letteratura americana, 196.

9. Report Commissione Culturale Nazionale, November 1953, 5; and Report Salinari, in Report Commissione Culturale Nazionale, November 1953, 33, Commissione Cultura, Archivio del Partito Comunista Italiano, Istituto Gramsci, Rome, Italy (hereafter APCI).

10. Quoted Mtg. Direzione, 20 June 1956, Verbali Direzione (hereafter VD), mf 198, APCI. On Clare Luce in Italy, see also Mario Del Pero, “American Pressures and Their Containment in Italy during the Ambassadorship of Clare Boothe Luce, 1953–56,” Diplomatic History 28, no. 3 (June 2004): 407–39; and Alessandro Brogi, L’Italia e l’egemonia americana nel Mediterraneo (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1996), chaps. 2, 3, and 4.

11. Quoted Stephen Gundle, Between Hollywood and Moscow: The Italian Communists and the Challenge of Mass Culture, 1943–1991 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 90 (Berlinguer also qtd. ivi; see also 80); quoted Amendola and Romagnoli in Mtg. Direzione 28 February 1962, VD, APCI.

12. Decision Bureau Politique (hereafter Dec. BP) 24 May 1962, Archives du Parti Communiste Français, Seine-Saint-Denis, Paris, France (APCF). Quoted D. S. Bell and Byron Criddle, The French Communist Party in the Fifth Republic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 220; cf. Marc Lazar, “Le Réalisme socialiste aux couleurs de la France,” L’Histoire 45 (March 1982): 60ff; Roger Martelli, “De Gaulle et les communistes entre traditions et modernité,” in 50 ans d’une passione française: De Gaulle et les communistes, ed. Stephane Courtois and Marc Lazar (Paris: Balland, 1991).

13. Quoted John L. Gaddis, The Cold War: A New History (New York: Penguin, 2005), 77; quoted Eric Shiraev and Vladislav Zubok, Anti-Americanism in Russia from Stalin to Putin (New York: Palgrave, 2000), 13–14.

14. Lefranc, “Le nouveau nouveau monde,” Democratie nouvelle (March 1961): 74; Jacqueline Vernes, “Les USA face au défi économique de l’URSS,” Democratie nouvelle (July 1960): 54–61; Jean Bruteau, “Problemes de l’automatisation,” La Nouvelle Critique (September/October 1957): 21–34; Nicola Sarzano, “Siamo tutti Rockefeller,” Vie Nuove, 5 March 1964; Carlo Marcucci, “Le quattro lezioni dei giochi,” Vie Nuove, 17 September 1960; Antoine Casanova, “La doctrine sociale de l’Eglise et le marxisme,” La Nouvelle Critique 141 (December 1962). Attributing a corporatist outlook to Catholic reformism, see Bruno Trentin in meeting 28 February 1962, VD, APCI; see also Alfredo Reichlin a Segreterie, Federazioni e Comitati Regionali, 22 August 1962, Sezione Stampa e Propaganda (hereafter SSP), MF 494, APCI.

15. Marc Lazar, Maisons rouges: Les Partis communistes français et italien de la Libération à nos jours (Paris: Aubier, 1992), 73, see also 18–27, 329–40. Cf. Elena Aga Rossi and Gaetano Quagliarello, L’altra faccia della luna: I rapporti tra PCI, PCF e Unione Sovietica (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1997), 51–78. Cf. traditional accounts emphasizing differences, especially Thomas H. Greene, “The Communist Parties of Italy and France: A Study in Comparative Communism,” World Politics 26 (October 1968): 4; Donald L. M. Blackmer and Sidney Tarrow, eds., Communism in Italy and France (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975), especially the chapter by Sidney Tarrow, “Communism in Italy and France: Adaptation and Change.” See also Cyrille Guiat, The French and Italian Communist Parties: Comrades and Culture (London: Frank Cass, 2003).

16. See essays in Aga Rossi and Quagliarello, L’altra faccia della luna; Valerio Riva, Oro di Mosca: I finanziamenti sovietici al PCI dalla Rivoluzione d’Ottobre al crollo dell’URSS (Milan: Mondadori, 1999); Gianni Donno, La Gladio Rossa del PCI, 1945–1967 (Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino, 2001); Pietro di Loreto, Togliatti e la “doppiezza”: Il PCI tra democrazia e insurrezione, 1944–1949 (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1991); Elena Aga Rossi and Victor Zaslavski, Togliatti e Stalin: Il PCI e la politica estera staliniana negli archivi di Mosca (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1997); for balanced accounts on this issue, see Silvio Pons, “L’URSS e il PCI nel sistema della guerra fredda,” in Il PCI nell’Italia repubblicana, 1943–1991, ed. Roberto Gualtieri (Rome: Carocci, 2001); Marcello Flores, Sul PCI. Un’interpretazione storica (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1992), 68–82.

17. On how the war experience worsened the already poor “state vocation” of the Italians, the best sources are Ernesto Galli della Loggia, L’identità italiana (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1998), 59–84, and Silvio Lanaro, L’Italia nuova: Identità e sviluppo, 1861–1988 (Turin: Einaudi, 1989), 221–27.

18. On how the sense of statehood enhanced the sense of nationhood in France, see especially studies by Pierre Nora, Robert Gildea, Rogers Brubaker, and, most recently, Michael Kelly, The Cultural and Intellectual Rebuilding of France after the Second World War (1944–1947) (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).

19. On PCI’s lesson from Fascist totalitarianism and meanings of Partito nuovo see also Palmiro Togliatti, Opere, 1944–1955, vol. 5 (Rome: Ed. Riuniti, 1955), 80–108.

20. Gundle, Between Hollywood and Moscow, 12; Lazar, Maisons rouges, 333–34; cf. Jean-Paul Molinari, Les ouvriers communistes: Sociologie de l’adhésion ouvrière au communisme (Thonon-les-Bains: L’Albaron, 1991); on intellectual influence in both countries, see also the works by Marcello Flores, Nello Ajello, Albertina Vittoria, David Caute, Herbert Lottmann, Dominique Desanti, David Drake, Tony Judt, Pascal Ory, and Jean-François Sirinelli.

21. Research memo by George C. Denney Jr. to acting secretary of state, “SocialistCommunist Collaboration in France: A New ‘Popular Front’?” 6 August 1963, POL 12-1 France, Record Group (RG) 59, National Archives, College Park, MD (NARA); Intervention by Waldeck-Rochet at Mtg. Bureau Politique, in Dec. BP, 2 December 1965, APCF; Stephane Courtois and Marc Lazar, Histoire du Parti communiste français, 2nd ed. (Paris: PUF, 2000), 335. Regarding the contrast following Togliatti’s death in 1964 between the PCI’s right-wing led by Amendola and favoring the cooption of Socialist forces away from the center-left government, and the left wing, led by Pietro Ingrao, which viewed the Socialists as integrated into neocapitalist developments, and favored an anticapitalist coalition involving a possible alliance with Catholic forces, see especially Giorgio Amendola, “Il socialismo in Occidente,” Rinascita, 7 November 1964; Pietro Ingrao, “Un nuovo programma per tutta la sinistra,” Rinascita, 25 December 1965; cf. Grant Amyot, The Italian Communist Party: The Crisis of the Popular Front Strategy (New York: St. Martin’s, 1981), chaps. 3 and 10; Carlo Galluzzi, “I comunisti e il centro-sinistra,” Critica marxista 5 (1972): 93–109.

22. Rinascita, 28 December 1968; see also Luigi Longo, “Il movimento studentesco nella lotta anticapitalistica,” Il Contemporaneo, 3 May 1968; cf. Alexander Höbel, “Il PCI di Longo e il ’68 studentesco,” Studi storici 45, no. 2 (2004): 435–43; Jean-Jacques Becker, Le Parti communiste veut-il prendre le pouvoir? (Paris: Seuil, 1981).

23. Lazar, Maisons rouges, 129.

24. Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (New York: Penguin, 2005), 426; cf. François Fejtö, The French Communist Party and the Crisis of International Communism (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1967).

25. Palmiro Togliatti, “La via italiana al socialismo,” report to CC of 24 June 1956, in Palmiro Togliatti, Opere, vol. 6; Donald L. M. Blackmer, Unity in Diversity: Italian Communism and the Communist World (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1968), 125; Velio Spano, “Origini e lineamenti della nostra politica,” Rinascita, January–February 1957; Lazar, Maisons rouges, 90–106; Hélène Carrère d’Encausse, 1956. La déstalinisation commence (Brussels: Complexe, 1984). The best recollections on the intellectual defection among PCI member are the memoirs of Antonio Giolitti, Lettere a Marta: Ricordi e riflessioni (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1992). See also Nello Ajello, Intellettuali e PCI, 1944–1958 (Bari: Laterza, 1979), 401–13.

26. Quoted Courtois and Lazar, Histoire du Parti communiste français, 353. Cf. Dec. BP 27 August 1968, and letter Garaudy to Rochet, 2 September 1968, in Idem, APCF. On scandal, see PCF: Watson to State Dept., 16 May 1970, POL 12 FR, RG 59, NARA. Longo in mtg. Direzione 17 July 1968, mf 020, APCI.

27. Garaudy to Rochet, 2 September 1968, cit.; Courtois and Lazar, Histoire du Parti communiste français, 355; Colombi in Mtg. Direzione, 23 August 1968, mf 020. G. Marini, “La repressione della primavera cecoslovacca: dal ‘grave dissenso’ alla ‘riprovazione,’” in Luigi Longo: La politica e l’azione, ed. Giuseppe Vacca (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1992), 120; Alexander Höbel, “Il PCI, il ’68 cecoslovacco e il rapporto col PCUS,” Studi Storici 4 (2001): 1149 and 1164–65; see also Alexander Höbel, “Il contrasto tra PCI e PCUS sull’intervento sovietico in Cecoslovacchia: nuove acquisizioni,” Studi Storici 2 (2007): 523–50.

28. Mtg. Direz. 31 October 1968, mf 020, pp. 1085–86, APCI. Berlinguer in VD, 20 June 1969, mf 006, pp. 1722–29, Fondo Berlinguer, fasc. 81, APCI; Carlo Galluzzi, La svolta. Gli anni cruciali del Partito comunista italiano (Milan: Sperling and Kupfer, 1983), 211–14. Höbel, “Il PCI, il ’68 cecoslovacco,” 1168; Lazar, Maisons rouges, 144–47; Lilly Marcou, Le mouvement communiste international depuis 1945(Paris: PUF, 1980), 81–88.

29. In Mtg. Direzione 18 September 1968, mf 020, p. 939, APCI; see also Report Berlinguer to Political Bureau in Mtg. Direzione 16 November 1968, mf 020, p. 939, APCI. Based on newly released Soviet documents, Victor Zaslavsky has analyzed the postinvasion reaction of the Communist Party of Italy (PCI) on the relationship of the PCI and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) as part of the Boltzmann Institute’s international research project on the Prague Spring. Zaslavsky’s essay is hitherto only published in German. He comes to the conclusion that on the basis of the new perspectives it is necessary to correct our view of the relationship between the Communist Party of Italy and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union after the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. The PCI’s demonstrative protest against the invasion and its search for a “third way” strained its relationship with the CPSU. Italian Communists, like the Soviets, saw Communist identity grounded “in anti-capitalism and in demonizing social democrats.” Still the PCI did not see “the source and the epicenter” of the crisis in Moscow. Even the most liberal of Italian Communists had a hard time criticizing the Soviet view of the sovereignty of states. After all, such a critique would only have supported “deviationist forces on the right” and undermined détente policies. There was also a contradiction here in the recognition of the rights of oppressed peoples. Whereas the PCI and the global communist movement demanded the right of independence for peoples of the “Third World,” even including armed struggle, Zaslavsky contends that they denied the same right to the “victims of Soviet aggression.” See Victor Zaslavsky, “Die italienischen Kommunisten zwischen Widerstand und Resignation,” in Karner et al., Beiträge, 531–47. The author would like to thank the editors for this reference.

30. Dec. BP 14 August 1968, APCF; Höbel, “Il PCI, il ’68 cecoslovacco,” 1150–51; Silvio Pons, Berlinguer e la fine del comunismo (Turin: Einaudi, 2006), 11.

31. See, for example, Colombi in Mtg. Direzione 23 August 1968, mf 020, APCI; cf. Giuseppe Boffa, “La crisi cecoslovacca,” in Luigi Longo, cit., 114; Jeannette Vermeersch in Comité Central (hereafter CC), 20–21 October 1968, Ivry sur Seine, transcripts of audio CD n. 41 and 42, Cote AV: 4AV10/151, APCF.

32. Berlinguer in Mtg. Direzione, 18 September 1968, cit. 939. Sergio Dalmasso, Il caso “Manifesto,” e il PCI degli anni ’60 (Turin: Cric, 1989), 69–70.

33. Marini, “La repressione della primavera,” 123–24; Dec. BP, 17 January 1969, APCF; letter Marchais to BP, 18 December 1969; quoted Philippe Fuchsmann, “Karl Marx, notre contemporain,” Cahiers du communisme 45, no. 2 (February 1969); see also “Communiqué du Bureau Politique sur un nouveau livre de Roger Garaudy,”

34. Amendola in Mtg. Direzione 7–8 May 1969, VD, mf 06; cf. Ufficio Segreteria, 2 September 1968, 1488, mf 020, APCI.

35. See, for example, Bufalini in Mtg. Direzione 18 September 1968, mf 020, APCI; cf. Pons, Berlinguer e la fine del comunismo, 9; Giorgio Amendola, “Il nostro internazionalismo,” Rinascita, 6 September 1968. Giorgio Napolitano in Mtg. Direzione, 8 November 1968, 1123, mf. 020, APCI. Report Billoux to Bureau Politique, in Dec. BP 7 August 1969, APCF.

36. Letter Charles Fourniau to Secretariat, 4 April 1968, Fonds Gaston Plissonnier 264 J, Box 2, and Dec. BP 14 August 1968, APCF; memo conversation Leroy-Favaro, 16 September 1968, Fonds Roland Leroy, 263 J 65, box 37, APCF; Tel. A-1564 U.S. embassy to the Department of State, 1 March 1968, POL 12 FR and Reinhardt to State Deptartment, 20 May 1965, POL 12 IT, RG 59, NA.

37. Amendola intervention at Central Committee PCI, in L’Unità, 28 August 1968.

38. Cf. Giorgio Amendola, “Il nostro internazionalismo,” Rinascita, 6 September 1968; on Amendola’s pro-EEC choices cf. Roberto Gualtieri, “Giorgio Amendola dirigente del PCI,” Passato e Presente 24, no. 67 (2006). On PCF’s persistent skepticism see Charles Fiterman, “Pour une Europe indépendante, démocratique et pacifique,” Cahiers du communisme 44, no. 2 (April 1968): 14–26. On U.S. fears of conflict with Moscow see Günter Bischof, “‘No Action’: The Johnson Administration and the Warsaw Pact Invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968,” in this volume.

39. Special Report CIA: “Italian Communist Party Draws Further Away from Moscow,” 25 October 1968, FRUS, 1964–68, XII: doc. 144.

40. On Paul VI, see Enzo Roggi, “Una pagina di storia rivelata: ‘Così Paolo VI scrisse a Ho Chi Minh,’” Circolo Partito Democratico RAI—Comunicazione, http://www.dsrai.it, accessed March 2008.

41. Luca Pavolini, “Autonomia e internazionalismo,” Rinascita, 26 July 1968.

42. Gundle, Between Moscow and Hollywood, 133; Pons, Berlinguer e la fine del comunismo, 13.

43. Ackley to State Department, 13 September 1968, POL 12 It, RG 59, NA; Berlinguer in Mtg. Direzione 5 December 1974, VD, mf. 073, APCI.

44. Tel. Paris embassy to Department of State, 10 October 1968, FRUS 1964–68, XII: doc. 84.

45. In general, on this topic see Valerio Riva, Oro di Mosca. I finanziamenti sovietici al PCI dalla Rivoluzione d’ottobre al crollo dell’URSS (Milan: Mondadori, 1999).

46. On redefinition of Soviet national security, see Matthew J. Ouimet, The Rise and Fall of the Brezhnev Doctrine in Soviet Foreign Policy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003). Amendola in Mtg. Direzione 8 January 1971, mf 017, APCI; cf. also for follow-up in the late 1970s toward more autonomy for the PCI: Gianni Cervetti, L’oro di Mosca (Milan: Baldini & Castoldi, 1993).

47. Berlinguer in Mtg. Direzione 16 November 1968, VD, mf 020, APCI.

48. Berlinguer in Mtg. Direzione 31 January–1 February 1973, VD, mf 041, 420–23; Nota Riservata Sergio Segre to Berlinguer, 12 March 1976, VD, mf. 239, Pajetta in Mtg. Direzione 18 July 1977 (afternoon), VD, mf. 299, Amendola in Mtg. Direzione 20 February 1979, 8, VD, mf. 7906, APCI.

49. On this point in general, see especially Pons, Berlinguer e la fine del comunismo, passim, and Gundle, Between Hollywood and Moscow, 158–64.

50. See for best archival record, Berlinguer in Mtg. Direzione 5 December 1974, cit.

51. Cf. Claudio Terzi, “The PCI, Eurocommunism, and the Soviet Union,” in The Italian Communist Party: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow, ed. Simon Serfaty and Lawrence Gray (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1980); François Hincker, Le parti communiste au carrefour (Paris: Albin Michel, 1981), 166ff; Jean Fabien, La guerre des camarades (Paris: Olivier Orban, 1985).

52. See Pons, Berlinguer e la fine del comunismo, 37; Irwin Wall “L’amministrazione Carter e l’eurocomunismo,” Ricerche di storia politica 1 (August 2006): 181–96. On contrasts between the PCF and PCI, see Amendola and Galluzzi in Mtg. Direzione 13 October 1977, VD, 273, 276, mf 304, APCI.

53. See, for example, Henry A. Kissinger, “Communist Parties in Western Europe: Challenge to the West,” in Eurocommunism: The Italian Case, ed. Austin Ramney and Giovanni Sartori (Washington, DC: American Enterprise for Public Policy Research, 1978), 183–96; and Mtg. of Sec. Henry A. Kissinger with representatives of foreign service class, 6 January 1977, Kissinger TelCons, 1973–77, Nixon Presidential Materials Staff, NARA.

54. Cf. tel. A-183 report by Shriver (Paris embassy), “The French Communist Party in Mid-1969,” 29 July 1969, POL 12 FR, RG 59, NARA.

55. See Longo in Mtg. Direzione 7–8 May 1969, VD, mf 006, APCI; Dec. BP 15 July 1972, APCF.

56. On this point, see in particular Federico Romero, “L’Europa come strumento di nation-building. Storia e storici dell’Italia repubblicana,” Passato e Presente 13, no. 36 (1995): 19–32; Bernard Brunetau, “The Construction of Europe and the Concept of the Nation State,” Contemporary European History 9, no. 2 (2000): 245–60.

57. Dec. BP 12 November 1970, APCF; cf. Thomas Gomart, “Le PCF au miroir des relations franco-soviétiques (1964–1968),” Relations Internationales 114 (Summer 2003): 249–66.

58. Gino G. Raymond, The French Communist Party during the Fifth Republic: A Crisis of Leadership and Ideology (London: Palgrave-McMillan, 2005), 60–63, and Alistair Cole, François Mitterrand: A Study in Political Leadership (London: Routledge, 1994), 74.

59. See the interventions by Pajetta and Berlinguer in Mtg. Direzione 12 September 1973, VD, mf 041, APCI; Antonio Rubbi, Il mondo di Berlinguer (Rome: Roberto Napoleone, 1994), 53–57; Agostino Giovagnoli, Il Caso Moro: Una tragedia repubblicana (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2005), 9–13.

60. Pons, Berlinguer e la fine del comunismo, xxi, see also 52–60 (Segre qtd. ivi 55).

61. Courtois and Lazar, Histoire du Parti communiste français, 380–82; David Drake, Intellectuals and Politics in Postwar France (London: Palgrave, 2002), 148–50; Jean Elleinstein, L’histoire du phénomène stalinien (Paris: Grasset, 1975); cf. the seminal book, Alexander Adler et al., L’URSS et nous (Paris: Editions sociales, 1978).

62. Drake, Intellectuals and Politics, 150–52; S. Khilnani, Arguing Revolution: The Intellectual Left in Postwar France (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), 151–53; cf. in general Arthur Marwick, The Sixties: Cultural Revolution in Britain, France, Italy, and the United States, 1958–1974 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); Carole Fink et al., eds., 1968: The World Transformed (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

63. See, for example, the intervention by Jean Kanapa in Comité Central 18–19 January 1974, transcripts from CC du PCF, Année 1974, CD 8, track 3, APCF.

64. Both quotes from Roger, The American Enemy, 405.

65. Memo conversation Raymond Barre (vice president of Commission of European Communities) with George S. Springsteen (deputy assistant secretary for European affairs), Abraham Katz, Director’s Office of OECD, European Community and Atlantic Political-Economic Affairs, 5 June 1968, FRUS, 1964–68, XIII: 699–705.

66. Georges Marchais, “De faux révolutionnaires à démasquer,” L’Humanité, 3 May 1968; Rochet report “Les événements de mai-juin 1968,” CC 8–9 July 1968, Nanterre, Cote 4AV10/128, transcript from CD n. 18, APCF; cf. Annie Kriegel, Les communistes français (Paris: Seouil, 1985), 317–42; Roger Martelli, Mai 68 (Paris: Messidor/Editions Sociales, 1988); for connection with Prague Spring and Soviet influence on the PCF’s perceptions of May events cf. Gael Moullec, “Mai 1968, le PCF et l’Union Sovietique: Notes des entretiens entre les dirigeants du PCF et l’ambassadeur soviétique en France,” Communisme 53–54 (1998): 151–64.

67. Giorgio Amendola, “Necessità della lotta sui due fronti,” Rinascita, 7 June 1968; Amendola in meeting Direz. 6 June 1968, VD, mf 020, APCI; Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Il PCI ai giovani!” (October 1968), in Empirismo eretico (Milan: Garzanti, 1981), 151–59, also highlighted in Höbel, “Il PCI di Longo e il ’68 studentesco,” cit., 442. On “strategia dell’attenzione,” see Luigi Longo, “Il movimento studentesco nella lotta anticapitalistica,” in Rinascita-Il Contemporaneo, 3 May 1968. In general, see Sidney Tarrow, Democracy and Disorder: Protest and Politics in Italy, 1965–1975 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989); Robert Lumley, States of Emergency: Cultures of Revolt in Italy from 1968 to 1978 (London: Verso, 1990); Paul Ginsborg, A History of Contemporary Italy: Society and Politics, 1943–1988 (London: Penguin, 1990), chap. 9; and Luisa Passerini, Autobiography of a Generation, trans. Lisa Erdberg (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1996).

68. Jeremi Suri, Power and Protest: Global Revolution and the Rise of Détente (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003). On de Gaulle in this sense see Georges-Henri Soutou, “Paris and the Prague Spring,” in this volume.

69. Quoted Judt, Postwar, 421. Cf. Gerd-Rainer Horn, “The Changing Nature of the European Working Class: The Rise and Fall of the ‘New Working Class’ (France, Italy, Spain, Czechoslovakia),” in Fink et al., 1968.

70. Occhetto in Direzione nazionale della FGCI, “Atti del convegno nazionale degli studenti universitari comunisti: Firenze, Palagio di Parte Guelfa, 17-18-19 marzo 1968,” in Nuova Generazione, 6 July 1968, pp. 63–66; also in Höbel, “Il PCI di Longo” (Longo quoted ivi 438).

71. Achille Occhetto, A dieci anni dal ’68, interviewed by Walter Veltroni (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1978), 90–94.

72. Courtois and Lazar, Histoire du PCF, 355–56; cf. Pierre Grémion, Paris/Prague: La gauche française face au renouveau et à la régression tchéchoslovaques, 1968–1978 (Paris: Julliard, 1984); “Communiqué du Bureau Politique sur un livre de Roger Garaudy,” Cahiers du communisme 46, no. 1 (January 1970): 117–18.

73. Quoted in Drake, Intellectuals and Politics, 135; cf. Ian H. Birchall, Sartre against Stalinism (New York: Berghahn, 2004), 199–220.

74. Giuseppe Vacca, “Politica e teoria nel marxismo italiano degli anni sessanta,” in Il marxismo italiano degli anni sessanta: La formazione teorico-politica delle nuove generazioni, ed. Istituto Gramsci (Rome: Editori Riuniti-Istituto Gramsci, 1972); Albertina Vittoria, Togliatti e gli intellettuali: Storia dell’Istituto Gramsci negli anni cinquanta e sessanta (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1992).

75. Quoted Judt, Postwar, 403, and Raymond, The French Communist Party during the Fifth Republic, 159. Cf. Fuchsmann, “Karl Marx, notre contemporain,” cit., 78–88; cf. Bernard Brillant, “Intellectuels: Les ombres changeantes de Mai 68,” Vingtieme Siecle 98 (2008): 89–99; Gramsci, Lukacs, and Luxemburg were also rediscovered in the 1960s; they all disagreed with most Leninist practices.

76. Gianfranco Corsini, “L’America del dissenso,” Il Contemporaneo/Rinascita, March 1966.

77. Memo by Union des Ecrivains (to Cultural section BP), “À Propos de la Politique Culturelle,” 2 February 1971, drafted by Bernard Pingaud, Fonds Roland Leroy, 263 J 65, APCF.

78. On the PCF and “Malthusianism,” see adoption Resolution Veermesch in Decisions BP, 13 April 1956; see also Dec. BP, 30 November 1961, APCF; cf. Yvonne Dumont, “Les femmes, leurs problèmes et leurs luttes,” Cahiers du communisme 44, no. 1 (January 1967): 75–84; last quotation from Gundle, Between Hollywood and Moscow, 150.

79. See, in particular, comments by Sereni and Amendola in meeting Direzione 5 April 1967, VD, APCI.

80. Quoted in Pons, Berlinguer e la fine del comunismo, 43–44.

81. Judt, Postwar, 447–49. For a recent similar view see also the thorough analysis by Michael Seidman, The Imaginary Revolution: Parisian Students and Workers in 1968 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2004); for a different view, see Kristin Ross, May ’68 and Its Afterlives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). Ross and Seidman, however, concur on the importance of the transformative power that the media and the intellectual debate attributed to those events, regardless of their actual effects on French and Western life. See also, for most recent debate, Xavier Vigna, “Clio contre Carvalho. L’ historiographie de ’68,” RILI 5 (May–June 2008); Kristin Ross, Nicolas Hatzfeld, Antoine Artous, “Mai ’68: Le débat continue,” RILI 6 (July–August 2008). See also Robert Gildea, “1968 in 2008,” History Today 58, no. 5 (2008): 22–25, and Gian Carlo Marino, Biografia del sessantotto: Utopie, conquiste, sbandamenti (Milan: Bompiani, 2004).

82. Charles S. Maier, “The Politics of Productivity: Foundations of American International Economic Policy After World War II,” International Organization 3 (1977); David Ellwood, “The American Challenge and the Origins of the Politics of Growth,” in Making the New Europe: European Unity and the Second World War, ed. Peter M. Smith and M. L. Stirk (London: Pinter, 1993), 183–94; Richard F. Kuisel, Seducing the French: The Dilemma of Americanization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), chap. 4; Bryan Angus McKenzie, Remaking France: Americanization, Public Diplomacy, and the Marshall Plan (New York: Berghahn Books, 2003); Charles S. Maier, “The Cold War as an Era of Imperial Rivalry,” in Reinterpreting the End of the Cold War, ed. Silvio Pons and Federico Romero (London: Frank Cass, 2005).

83. On U.S. reactions to Communist politics and propaganda in France and Italy and for the comments in the following paragraphs, I am referring to Alessandro Brogi, Confronting Anti-Americanism: The United States’ Cold War against the Communists in France and Italy, forthcoming from the University of North Carolina Press.

84. Intelligence Report no. 6140, “The French Communist Party: Its 1952 Record and Prospects for 1953,” 30 December 1952, Office of Intelligence and Research, RG 59, NARA.

85. On these aspects, besides my forthcoming book, see also Kenneth Osgood, Total Cold War: Eisenhower’s Secret Propaganda Battle at Home and Abroad (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2006); and Volker R. Berghahn, America and the Intellectual Cold Wars in Europe: Shepard Stone between Philanthropy, Academy, and Diplomacy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001).

86. Kennan to Hooker, 17 October 1949, George F. Kennan Papers, box 23, Seeley J. Mudd Library, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ; Emmet J. Hughes, The Ordeal of Power: A Political Memoir of the Eisenhower Years (New York: Atheneum, 1963), 275–81.

87. See the documents cited in notes 53, 54, and 65 above.

88. J. William Fulbright, The Arrogance of Power (New York: Random House, 1966), 245–46; Meeting Kissinger with Representatives of Foreign Service Class, 6 January 1977, cit.

89. For a similar approach, see also the memoirs of President Carter’s ambassador to Italy, Richard N. Gardner, Mission Italy: On the Front Lines of the Cold War (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005).

90. On these diplomatic maneuvers see Brogi, Confronting Anti-Americanism; cf. argument in broader context in Alessandro Brogi, A Question of Self-Esteem: The United States and the Cold War Choices in France and Italy, 1944–1958 (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002). On G-7 and anticommunist strategy see also Duccio Basosi and Giovanni Bernardini, “The Puerto Rico summit of 1976 and the end of Eurocommunism,” The Crisis of Détente in Europe: From Helsinki to Gorbachev, 1975–1985, ed. Leopoldo Nuti (London: Routledge, 2008).