June 16, 2008, 5:45 pm

Q & A: How the Airlift Changed Our Lives

By THE NEW YORK
TIMES

In June 1948, after the Soviet Union blockaded allied deliveries of supplies
to the Western sectors of Berlin, the United States and its allies launched what
became known as the Berlin Airlift, using transport planes to drop food and
supplies to Berliners. The airlift became a turning point in the cold war, when
the West pushed back against the Soviet Union’s quest for dominance in central
Europe. Here is an interview on that historic crisis with Andrei Cherny, the editor of Democracy, a journal, and the author of
“The Candy Bombers: The Untold Story of
the Berlin Airlift and America’s Finest Hour” (2008). Mr. Cherny was a
policy adviser and speechwriter in the Clinton White House.

Q. In the discussions today about the war in Iraq, you
hear experts rue the contrast between the American role there and the American
occupation of Germany after World War II. The implication is that the United
States did everything right 60 years ago — at least when it came to a
shoulder-to-shoulder solidarity against the Russians in the period right after
the war. Is that the real story?

A. When we see the vibrant, democratic Germany of today, it
is hard to remember that in the three years after the fall of the Nazi regime,
the American occupation was clearly failing. Gen. Lucius Clay, the American
military governor of Germany, had said the goal of the occupation was “to
establish and maintain democracy — American style,” but as the months went on
the number of Germans who agreed with the statement that Nazism was “a good idea
badly carried out” was rising, and the percentage who believed that America was
helping in the country’s reconstruction fell from 70 to 44 percent.

In the spring of 1948, Germans said they would prefer a government that gave
them “economic security” over one that guaranteed “free elections, freedom of
speech, press, and religion” by two to one. Little rebuilding had taken place in
a country that had been showered with U.S. bombs. The economy was barely
sputtering along. Rations were at starvation levels. Germans and American G.I.’s
looked at each other with suspicion, if not outright contempt. The security
situation was growing worse. Death from random violence and at the hands of
armed gangs had become so pervasive that Berlin had acquired the nickname of
“crime capital of the world.”

We got many things right in the occupation in those first years — including,
and unlike in Iraq, having a large enough force that we were able to tamp down
any possibility of an insurgency — but it was not until the Soviet blockade and
the Western airlift that the occupation turned around.

At the height of the blockade — when the security situation was its most
dangerous and rations had been more severely limited than before — Berliners,
for the first time, chose “freedom” over “economic security” by 54 percent to 40
percent. What had been the crime capital of the world a year earlier saw the
lowest crime rates of any big city in the Western world, in spite of terrible
hunger and deprivation.

Q. In retrospect, it seems impossible that the U.S.
would have failed to act forcefully against the Soviet move on Berlin. The
president, Harry Truman, and the generals — did they all agree that action had
to be taken? What was the position of the allies: Britain, France?

A. All of Truman’s advisers agreed that action had to be
taken in response to the Soviet blockade of Berlin, but the action most of them
supported — to one degree or another — was a retreat from Berlin.

Men like Omar Bradley and George Marshall had been the architects of victory
in World War II and understood military power. America, Britain, and France were
outnumbered by the Russians 62 to 1 in Berlin and its surrounding areas. The
Soviets had more troops within a few hours of the city than America had in the
world.

Avoiding a World War III that would result in the Soviets quickly overrunning
American forces and holding most of Europe was seen as a necessity. Thus when
Harry Truman announced in the Oval Office a few days after the Soviet blockade
that “we are going to stay — period,” his advisers reacted as if he had lost his
mind. Many of his advisers would continue to try to get him to change his mind.

As late as October of 1948, four months into the airlift, Bradley and Air
Force Gen. Hoyt Vandenberg pleaded with the National Security Council to begin
steps “leading to our withdrawal from Berlin” and a C.I.A. white paper for
President Truman concluded that the United States was now worse off than if the
airlift had never been attempted.

The huge effort had resulted in “making Berlin a major test of U.S.-Soviet
strength in the eyes of Germany and of Western and Eastern Europe, and
reaffirming a direct U.S. responsibility for the welfare and safety of the
German population of the western sectors of the city.” The very fact that the
airlift had so caught the imagination of Germans, Americans and all over the
world meant that “the U.S. is now committed, in Berlin, to maintaining a
strategic outpost on political grounds when, in the final analysis, that outpost
can be maintained only by force or with Soviet tolerance.”

It was Truman who kept up a stubborn insistence on finding a path between
appeasement and annihilation in spite of opposition from within his own
administration and from both sides of the political spectrum in the midst of a
difficult election year.

Q. In your research, what findings surprised you the
most? What challenged your preconceptions of this chapter in history?

A. What most surprised me in researching my book “The Candy
Bombers” was the extent to which the Berlin crisis and Harry Truman’s upset
victory in 1948 were intimately intertwined. Most scholars who have looked at
the Berlin airlift make only glancing reference to the presidential election
going on at the same time. And the conventional wisdom — and the history as told
in just about every previous work about the 1948 election — is that Harry Truman
won re-election with a “give ‘em hell” campaign of populist economics and paeans
to the New Deal. Or that he won because of the farm crisis or by appealing to
labor voters. Or that he won because his opponent, Thomas Dewey, looked like the
little man on the wedding cake.

While all of these, it is true, played a part, it turns out that Harry Truman
won in 1948 on the issue of national security — by exploiting a very real fear
of war and by battling for the soul of the Democratic Party.

While Truman was far too honorable to change his policies because of the
coming election, the looming balloting affected what he did in the Berlin crisis
in ways large and small, including when it came to the original “October
Surprise” – his last-minute effort to send Supreme Court Chief Justice Fred
Vinson to Moscow to bring Joseph Stalin a message of peace.

At the same time, the conflict with the Soviet Union, the fear of an
approaching war, and the siege of Berlin shaped most every aspect of that
election and were subjects of vociferous argument between the candidates. They
determined the strategies of each of the various contenders — with the exception
of the single-issue campaign of the segregationist Strom Thurmond. The daily
banner headlines of dire news from Berlin dominated newspapers’ front pages and
weighed on the minds of the voters. And it was the issue of war and peace that
would ultimately decide the election.

Far from political disputes stopping at the water’s edge, some ways in which
national security was used in 1948 could be ripped from the political noise of
our post-9/11 campaigns. Today it is jihadism, then it was Communism. The
Republican National Committee chairman at the time said that Americans had a
choice “basically between Communism and Republicanism” and that the Democratic
Party’s heart had been captured by “a radical group devoted to Sovietizing the
United States.” Republican campaign pamphlets showed the Democratic donkey
wearing a turban decorated with a hammer and sickle. Truman got in on the act
and continually castigated Dewey and the Republicans as Communist tools.

The biggest way that the Berlin crisis contributed to Truman’s victory was in
his battle with the third-party candidate and former vice president, Henry
Wallace. If pundits and politicians thought that Harry Truman was sure to go
down to defeat it was because the Democratic Party was split between these two
former vice presidents of F.D.R. Indeed, for a long period, more Democrats
wanted Wallace than Truman to be the 1948 nominee.

Over the course of 1947, the year before the election, Henry Wallace filled
stadiums across America with hundreds of thousands of adoring supporters who
paid to see him speak. It was a bigger political phenomenon than what we saw
with the Howard Dean campaign of 2003 or Barack Obama in 2007. At Wallace’s
third-party convention, young liberals like George McGovern thrilled to his
oratory. But what he preached — that America should abandon Berlin to the
Soviets, that American foreign policy initiatives like the Marshall Plan were
unilateralist, and that we should not interfere with Russian actions in Eastern
Europe — was very much at odds with Truman’s policies.

To win in November, Truman had to convince Democrats and liberals that he —
not Wallace — had the right approach to dealing with the Soviets. The Berlin
Airlift was a big part of that message. If Wallace had continued to receive the
double digit support he was registering in the polls before the blockade — in
fact, if he had received 70,000 more votes in the right states — Dewey would
have won the election. His support crumbled mostly because of what was occurring
in the skies over Berlin.

Q. How did you become interested in this period? Why is
it important for
people your age — maybe all ages — to remember this
particular change of
events?

A. About four years ago, the news was filled with stories of
Abu Ghraib and torture and a descending situation in Iraq, and there had been a
series of polls showing that people around the world had the lowest opinion of
the United States ever recorded. I began to wonder: if America is doing the
wrong things in the world, when were we most clearly doing the right thing? If
we are at a low ebb of our standing in the eyes of people in other nations, when
were we most beloved and admired and trusted around the world?

The answer of the “Berlin Airlift” came to me pretty quickly. But I didn’t
know that much more about it than the sentence or few paragraphs that textbooks
and even many histories of the postwar era gave this enormous undertaking that
held the world’s attention and marked a turning point of the cold war.

No one had ever set out to tell the story of the airlift as something more
than a diplomatic crisis or a mechanized operation but as a story of people —
some famous, some unknown — and a story of how Americans came to accept the
mantle of world leadership, how they got past the mutual enmity with the
Germans, and how they inspired others around the world. This was the story I was
looking for because from it we would be able to get some guidance that was
relevant to where America is today.

American history often gets reduced to the same series of events, images and
sound bites, but so many fascinating, dramatic moments in our history are
largely forgotten. The Berlin Airlift is one of those periods — one with a set
of flawed characters who were able to rise above their personal limitations when
it mattered most.

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