Because they demonstrated that the U.S. could stand up to totalitarianism, and that Americans would put their lives on the line to keep more people from becoming subjects of the Great Leader?
Because the military buildup projected in NSC-68--the build-up that Acheson thought was very necessary--had not a snowball's chance in hell of getting through the Congress before Kim Il Sung's tanks rolled south?
Because Harry Truman repeatedly and publicly told Acheson that he did good in the crisis at the start of the Korean War?
My assessment is that these three reasons weighed about equally in Acheson's mind in impelling him toward the judgment that those two weeks were "glorious." But I could be wrong: Acheson's mind is hard to read--I still don't know what he intended in the summer of 1941 in closing off exports of oil to Japan...
Brad DeLong ------------------------
Fascinating guys, fascinating. But consider this.
When Frank(?) Fukayama came out with his 'End of History' essay in the early Nineties, I had just bought George Kennan's _Sketches of a Life_. I haven't read anything else of Kennan's. It turns out he is much too prolific for me to follow. But in Sketches, he lays out his early State Department days attached to the Moscow embassy during the Twenties and then his later re-appointment to Berlin. So he saw the development of both Stalin and Hitler. I got the impression that he began his career as a moderate leftist or idealist liberal and became less and less liberal in his foreign policy views after his experiences in Moscow and Berlin.
One point in Sketches, is that Kennan remained oddly enough, very attached to Russia, but not the Soviet Union. Under Acheson, after the war, Kennan was a central figure in developing and articulating the cold war posture of containment and it's auxiliary features of anti-communism in the the third world. He left the State Department under the building cloud of the McCarthy Committee. Kennan was even at that point enough of a traditional American liberal to be a target of anti-communist hysteria. Kennan, within the confines of US political culture, is a 'dove', perhaps even a moderately left dove at that--but only in relation to the 'kill them all' school of US diplomacy. On the other hand, Henry Liu is correct to point out that in the US 'hawks' and 'doves' only divide out this way over the use of which weapons of mass destruction to employ. Doves seem to favor extreme economic manipulations, covert acts of political terror and, if push comes to shove, then massive air, sea, and land assaults. Hawks, on the other hand seem to prefer saturation bombing and nuclear weapons from start to finish. But I think this cold war and Vietnam era distinction is and was more or less a propaganda device to mask just how nasty and how powerful the US government can be on the world stage.
But I would like to point out something that I became convinced of while I was reading Kennan and Fukayama. The US posture as imperialist world power was brought to fruition in the Roosevelt administration. It was under FDR that virtually all the governmental infrastructure necessary to make the executive branch a tool for implementing a thorough going imperialism, was put into place in the Thirties. So, I think whoever said this occurred in the post-WWII era is wrong. Of course that infrastructure was improved on and vastly expanded, but along already prescribe lines.
Originally, I am sure this internal development was created to gear up the bureaucracy for world scale war on two fronts. But in the process it must have been obvious to those involved (including Kennan) that these developments were the foundation of a global based imperialism. It was during the Thirties that the State Department and various other agencies were turned into the planning and policy arms of an imperialistic military-industrial complex--the very same one that Eisenhower noted some quarter century later ('58-60?). While most people assume this complex was predominately devoted to developing physical science, mathematics, and engineering applications in military weapons, there was another branch to this complex.
This other branch was the cultural propaganda and policy apparatus arm. Or if you are paranoid, call it the internal security apparatus. The people and academic fields in this branch were almost exclusively drawn from the social sciences and humanities. Their job was to develop the economic and social policies and its attendant 'national policy' propaganda to mobilize all the reluctant bourgeoise institutions of the country for world war. That is to say, they are the ones who created our image of what the 'United States of America' is today--a single minded entity devoted to world domination--no matter what our internal difficulties or needs.
This is a much more difficult to analyse aspect to FDR's build up, but it essentially created our whole idea of the US as a world superpower. For this purpose, there was a great deal of overhaul in the way the federal government viewed and dealt with the national level of economics, public education, social institutions, and mass media. What made this development in the Thirties so ironic was that it was the neophyte Marxist, the part-time Communist, and the fellow traveler in the social sciences and humanities (also of course union leaders and various corporate big-wigs) who were enlisted in creating this branch of an imperial military-industrial complex. After all, the State Department, national security agencies, and the domestic agencies devoted to economic and social policy don't recruit Physics majors. They were and are looking for people in the social sciences and humanities--especially economics and history--that is specialists in other people's political economies and histories. For example, George Kennan was a Russian History major.
While I was reading Kennan and Fukayama, I was also re-reading Ernst Cassirer's _The Myth of State_. And worst still had gone back over many of George Orwell's war essays. I would strongly urge anyone interested to read all these guys together the way I did by accident. The view is astonishing. You end up with a much more clearly defined idea of just what a modern 'State' is and how it is created. Bottom line--our idea of a State is primarily the product of a educational propaganda and mass media industry which indirectly services the State and draws its authority from it--through certifications, credentials, and other nicely done up badges and banners. In other words we live within a mythological envelop of images and powers, daemons, and creatures of our own creation. Newspeak is real. The Myth of State is such a creation and that it can actually weald vast power does not mitigate its imaginary status in the slightest. It is real enough to get people to fight and die for its sake, as if the State were something divine, even beneficent, and would eagerly do the same for any of us---add big laugh here.
I was fascinated with these writers because at the time I was trying to understand how a national military state could be abolished by the mere act of the public mind, as communist Eastern Europe or later the Soviet Union seemed to be abolished. Well, if the State is a fabricated product of the collective imagination, then it only takes a change in that imaginary world to abolish it. It is not so much that Fukayama, Kennan and Cassirer detail out this insight, but rather together they give a view upon it, which isn't really completely present in any one of their writings. In any event, the core creation of the State, is the imaginary entity called The State. Cassirer argues that it is the use of mythological thinking that leads to the horrors of national states like nazis Germany. Kennan believes that he and his generation created the cold war of superstates, and Fukyama believes that history disappeared when the ideologic war between superstates, embodied as Capitalism and Communism was won by Capitalism.
Put all them all together. The Nazis were not the only ones or even the best at creating the myth of State--we were! We created the most compelling and most believed image of what a modern state is supposed to be and we did that under FDR--that's what all the liberal social sciences and humanities people were for--generating that ideal image and making it into a tangible force of human history. After the war there was no 'ideological' battle except within government committee meetings. The cold war was a quite material affair waged with military power and control of whole national economies. That this quite bloody, brutal, and power mad era was merely an 'ideological' battle of wills, or a cultural contest is pure propaganda, fabricated by both sides to mask precisely the sort of cruel military actions behind it and to mask the equally nasty international economic manipulations that attended these actions. History hardly ended when one side accumulated control over more economies and had bigger and nastier weapons than the other. It hardly seems a victory if you consider, we were just better liars, better at fabricating the myth of State as the embodiment of Civilization itself--the grandest mythological creation of them all.
When I say we were better liars, what I mean is our cultural complex composed of mass media and communication that generates and sustains these mythological creatures, was and is far more compelling and believable than any another. Obviously we are still at our mythos in full conviction. Just turn on the news and watch Bagdad nights.
Chuck Grimes
PS. From Henry Liu:
The Chinese revolution in 1949 started a witch hunt in domestic America politics. In anticipation of Republican attack, Acheson commissioned the China White Paper (August, 1949) by the State Department, a 1,500-page apologia on "who lost China" with a 8,000-word letter of transmittal written personally by Acheson to President Truman, which was immediately attacked by Mao Zedong in no less than 3 separate essays...
Correction. The Red witch hunt in the US was on long before China or Acheson. It goes back to at least the turn of the Century when anarchists were throwing bombs, unions were organizing around Marxist lines, and various black and women's movements toyed around with 'socialist' ideas. The Twenties was a heyday for jailing Commies, just as it was the high point for lynchings in the South under Jim Crow and race riots in the North.
OTOH, I won't argue that China didn't provide a great excuse for the re-vitalization of a by then, traditional US anti-Commie scare.