This Day in Diplomatic History (Waldheim Elected UN Head With US, Soviet Backing)

Dec. 21, 1971—Kurt Waldheim, recently an unsuccessful candidate for President of Austria, was selected as Secretary-General of the United Nations by the organization’s Security Council. His selection marked a rare alignment of interests between the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) and the United States during the Cold War. That should have made observers suspicious, but for the longest time, nobody made a peep about the politician-statesman’s service to the Nazi cause three decades earlier in Eastern Europe.

The death of novelist-essayist Shirley Hazzard last week reminded me forcefully of this anniversary. As a low-ranking UN employee starting in the early 1950s, she had become all too familiar with the organization’s moral cowardice, and Waldheim’s elevation to its highest post only represented the fulfillment of this inclination, she believed.

“The method for selecting secretariat leaders is the only UN official process that can be described as finely honed,” she explained in the scathing 1980 takedown “The League of Frightened Men,” later collected in We Need Silence to Find Out What We Think: Selected Essays (2016). “United Nations senior officers are systematically chosen for their very lack of moral courage and independent mind. The office of secretary general is the pinnacle on which this negative capability culminates. In Waldheim, the position has found its consummate expression.”

“The League of Frightened Men” concerned itself primarily with Waldheim’s craven kowtowing to human-rights abuses by authoritarian rulers such as the Shah of Iran and the USSR’s Leonid Brezhnev. Lost amid Hazzard's castigation (perhaps understandably, in a piece subtitled “Why the UN Is Useless”) was a telling detail about Waldheim’s past: in the mid-1930s, not long after the Nazi Anschluss (union) with Austria, he had joined the Hitler Youth, then later served on the Eastern Front of the German Army.

Six years after Hazzard’s article, a small Austrian publication, Profil, focused extensively on Waldheim’s Nazi past. Even then, investigative foreign pieces like this earn no notice unless picked up in a major American newspaper. Such was the case with the Waldheim story. The day after the Profil article, The New York Times ran a front-page story of such length that Hazzard could be forgiven for believing that piece had been “held in readiness” by the Newspaper of Record for an opportune time such as this.

Sometimes, nations elect to their highest office figures that foreign observers can only regard with astonishment and bafflement over how revelations of outrageous lies can be pushed to the side by voters. The most recent instance of this, of course, occurred last month in the United States. But Austria experienced a similar moment in 1986, when it rallied around newly elected Waldheim President, even after devastating proof had emerged of his deceit about his background. 

In his memoir In the Eye of the Storm, Waldheim engaged in a lie that could be—and was—quickly disproven: that, after he was wounded on the Russian front, he spent the rest of the war writing his doctorate at the University of Vienna. Instead, in short order, representatives of the World Jewish Congress determined that in early 1942, Waldheim was posted to the German high command in Belgrade and spent much of the war as an intelligence and administrative officer in the Balkans.

The question now became, what else might Waldheim have been concealing? The Balkans was notorious in WWII for being a killing ground. While hard proof of his direct involvement in these war crimes was lacking, it seemed entirely possible that he had known much, much more about his unit’s atrocities than he was letting on. Additional interesting speculation swirled around what influence his past might have had on his selection for the U.N. post. Had the Soviet Union used its knowledge of his activities to blackmail him? Had the U.S. then used him as a double-agent against the Kremlin?

By 1987, the United States Justice Department's placed Waldheim on its "watch list" of prohibited people—the first time in U.S. history that the head of a friendly country had been designated an undesirable alien suspected of war crimes with the German army in World War II. He remained a diplomatic pariah for most of the rest of his six-year term in office. 

It mattered little to most of his countrymen. More than a few identified with his words upon stepping down from his nation’s highest office in 1992: 

“The majority of them [his generation] were sent into a war that they did not want. They had to wear a uniform that, for many people, particularly the Jewish people, became a symbol for persecution, misery and death. I have learned how difficult it was for me as a member of this generation to make clear a contradiction that is hardly understandable for the generation born later—namely the contradiction to have rejected this regime from the first hour on, even though I lived under this regime and wore its uniform."

This Day in Diplomatic History (Xmas Peace ‘Ends’ War of 1812)

Dec. 24, 1814—The “Second War of American Independence” ended on a far less triumphant note than the first, but given all that had happened since the start of hostilities, the United States was fortunate that its five-man delegation, led by John Quincy Adams (pictured here in a portrait by Gilbert Stuart), signed a peace treaty in Ghent, Belgium on the basis of status quo ante bellum (a return to the conditions before war broke out).

I put the word “ends” in quotes in the headline for this reason: because of still comparatively primitive communications, word of the “Christmas Peace” (i.e., the Treaty of Ghent) did not reach New York City until February 11, 1815. The newly two-month lag not only allowed the Battle of New Orleans to occur, but also other smaller engagements before the War of 1812 actually concluded.

It might be said that the British lost at the negotiating table what they had gained on the battlefield. The Americans, particularly Adams and fellow negotiator Henry Clay, might have felt annoyed with each other behind closed doors, but they preserved a united front before the British and held on grimly until circumstances turned more favorable. In addition, they represented a variety of regions and political interests (even a moderate Federalist, James Bayard, was present), and President James Madison gave them more or less maximum freedom to maneuver.

In contrast, the British government handicapped itself even from the start by repeating the same mistake they had done in dealing with Adams’ father and his fellow envoys in peace negotiations to end the American Revolution 30 years before: It sent inexperienced, lackluster negotiators, this time including an admiralty lawyer, an admiral and a young Undersecretary for War and the Colonies). Furthermore, unlike the American team (trusted by Madison by necessity because of the ocean between them), His Majesty’s government insisted that its team consult with them continually before agreeing to any terms.

For much of the five-month period of the negotiations, Madison was probably sorry that he had not gone back to Congress in 1812 and asked it to rescind its declaration of war once news reached it that one of the stated war causes, interference with American trade with France, had been eliminated as a result of Britain ending its Orders in Council curbing neutrals’ shipping to France and its continental allies. Thereafter, much of the war had gone badly indeed for the Americans—particularly on land, where the British had captured Detroit and, in late August 1814, even invaded Washington and burned the White House.

As a result, the British were initially in no mood to give anything away. In fact, their backs stiffened considerably, as they demanded territory in northern Maine, demilitarization of the Great Lakes and navigation rights on the Mississippi.

The reserved, intense Adams might have been dismayed by Clay’s late-night carousing, but one of the Kentuckian’s pastimes, gambling, proved helpful in the talks. As an aficionado of the game “Brag,” Clay excelled at bluffing. And so, at a particularly thorny point in the negotiations, he let it be known that he would be packing his bags and going home. The British team’s tone then moderated, at least somewhat.

What strengthened the American position the most, however, as I noted in a prior post, was Thomas Macdonough’s victory at Plattsburgh in September, which forced an end to the invasion of New York. That, coupled with Americans’ unexpectedly staff resistance at Baltimore’s Fort McHenry, led the British to contemplate with growing dismay the prospect of a war thousands of miles away that would increasingly drain the treasury’s coffers.

The turning point on the British side came when the government asked for the advice of its victor in the Peninsular campaign in Spain against Napoleon, the Duke of Wellington. Though the “Iron Duke” would later show, as Prime Minister, his reactionary tendencies, on this occasion his military background allowed him to speak credibly and realistically. He not only expressed reluctance to lead a strengthened military force in Canada when the British couldn’t even control the Great Lakes, but pointed out that the British government could not insist on its stance of uti possidetis (right of possession of what was taken in battle): “You can get no territory; indeed, the state of your military operations, however creditable, does not entitle you to demand any.”

At that point, the British agreed to the American terms of status quo ante bellum. In the end, both the Americans and the British (with their Canadian colonists) could claim to have gotten something, though it hardly justified the lives lost to this point. 

The British and the Canadians had turned back American attempts to seize Canada and could now concentrate on repairing the damage left by the Napoleonic Wars (along with stamping out the French emperor’s return to power by finally defeating him at Waterloo the following year). The Americans had not won a single concession on any of the stated war causes—including the impressment of U.S. sailors and the rights of neutral U.S. vessels—but they retained the Great Lakes, allowing them to continue their expansion into the Midwest and their rise as a continental power, with the threat of any future British resort to force now removed. Moreover, the U.S. had extricated itself from a conflict that one of the negotiators, Albert Gallatin, had recently been forced to tell Madison would have to be continued without any financial assistance from any European power.

The one group that lost at the negotiating table were Britain's Native-American allies. Even before the final phase of the talks, one British negotiator, Henry Goulburn, indicated that they were “but a secondary object…As the Allies of Great Britain she must include them in the peace…But when the boundary [for Britain’s proposed buffer state along the Great Lakes] is once defined it is immaterial whether Indians are upon it or not.  Let it be a desert.  But we shall know that you cannot come upon us to attack us without crossing it.”

 

But Clay, the leader of the trans-Allegheny faction that had formed the backbone of the Congressional “war hawks,” dug in his heels on ceding any part of the Northwest Territories. In the end, all that the Native-Americans could come away with in the treaty was language entitling them to “all possessions, rights and privileges which they may have enjoyed, or been entitled to in 1811”—a clause that was nonenforceable without a clearly-drawn map of their land reserves. 

 

The Massachusetts Historical Society is in the midst of an extraordinary project: putting on Twitter the voluminous diaries of Adams. I have used those Twitter posts to recreate the account by perhaps the greatest diplomat in American history of how the treaty was concluded:

“Peace, between the United States and Great Britain, signed at the house of the British Plenipotentiaries. A few mistakes in the Copies were rectified & then the six Copies were signed and sealed by the… British & the… American Plenipotentiaries. Lord Gambier delivered to me the three British Copies [of the treaty]… which he said he hoped would be permanent; and I told him [Lord Gambier] I hoped it would be the last Treaty of Peace between Great-Britain and the United States.”

And so it has been.

 

This Day in Diplomatic History (New “People’s Republic” Sparks “Who Lost China?” Debate)

October 1, 1949—The world’s most populous country joined an expanding roster of nations under Communist rule, giving a patina of legitimacy to a burgeoning totalitarian regime in the Far East while inaugurating a whole new rancorous chapter in the Cold War in America.

Today’s Wall Street Journal featured a front-page article by Ian Johnson and Sky Canaves on China’s “fast-changing political landscape” and how it has affected art. Though most of the nation’s cultural institutions remain under the thumb of the Marxist regime, the art scene has spawned independent, edgy work—perhaps, the authors suggest, because the nation’s rulers wanted to secure the 2008 Olympics so badly that they decided to permit much of the art that interested Westerners.

Mao Tse-Tung, creator of the People’s Republic of China that was proclaimed on this date in Beijing 60 years ago, would have scoffed. "Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun," he was fond of saying.

The Journal article, I suppose, is evidence of how far the world has come. At the time of the proclamation of the “republic,” Western reaction fell into two camps.

The first, typified by journalist Edgar Snow, hailed the Chinese Communists as pure, sharing the struggles of the peasants they had now come to lead, after a drawn-out civil war with the hopelessly corrupt Chiang Kai-shek.

The second fell into hysterics, beginning a round of recriminations on “who lost China?” that would adversely affect American foreign policy for more than 20 years. This “China Lobby” consisted of major politicians and media moguls such as Henry Luce, who were connected to Christian missionaries in China and were deeply angry over what was about to befall them.

The loss of China to the Communists was felt so deeply in the U.S. for several reasons:

* Franklin D. Roosevelt had wanted a counterbalance to France and Great Britain among non-totalitarian powers that would not combine against American interests in the postwar period. He was already thinking that the alignment of colonial powers that existed before WWII would cease to exist afterward, and that it would be easier all around if these countries could be made to see the light of reason. China, therefore, was enlisted as an American ally. (It helped that, as the victim of Japanese aggression, it enjoyed great sympathy from the American public.) American military personnel closer to the situation realized that Chiang was a thorn in the American side. (One diplomat, Arthur Ringwalt, recalled in an oral history for the Harry S. Truman Presidential Library that General Joseph Stillwell called Chiang “The Peanut”—when, that is, he wasn’t calling him a “son of a bitch.”)

* Madame Chiang, Chiang Kai-shek’s wife (actually, his second—he divorced his first to marry the Wellesley grad), was a charming and strikingly attractive asset of her husband’s. The regime reaped a public-relations bonanza after her 1943 visit to the U.S.

* Communists had enjoyed virtually one unstoppable triumph after another in Europe. Losing one of the major countries in Europe expanded the influence of Marxism in an entirely new sphere.

During the war, State Department diplomats—the so-called “China Hands,” such as John Carter Vincent, John Stewart Service, John Patton Davies, and O. Edmund Clubb—had warned that Generalissimo Chiang was not using American aid to ward off the Japanese, as intended, but instead to bolster his own position against the Communists. Eventually, they came to feel overwhelmingly—and correctly, as it turned out—that Chiang was so corrupt and so weak that he had no chance against Mao Tse-tung.

After China fell, Republicans in Congress and the media, such as Luce, Robert Taft, Richard Nixon and Joseph McCarthy, used its loss to score points against the Truman administration. Though the “China Hands” were just being realistic about the dismal chances of success for Chiang, it was easy to paint them as starry-eyed.

Service, for instance, after visiting Mao at the latter’s headquarters in 1944, wrote: “'There is an absence of show and formality, both in speech and action. Relations of the officials and people toward us, and of the Chinese themselves, are open, direct and friendly. Mao Zedong and other leaders are universally spoken of with respect (amounting in the case of Mao to a kind of veneration).''

Such statements, taken out of context, opened these Foreign Service officials to accusations of Communist sympathies. All, however, were subsequently vindicated by Congressional investigations, though their careers were often sidetracked.

Ten years after the birth of Red China, Mao Tse-tung and Nikita Khrushchev quarreled, opening up a huge wedge among the major Communist powers. The “who lost China?” debate left American diplomats unable to exploit the opening, however, for fear of being thought soft on Communism.

It took Nixon—a man who, by virtue of his rise to power as a red-baiter, could not be tarred with this brush—to pry open the door, in the hope that the Chinese could a) influence North Vietnam to agree to better terms at the bargaining table, and b) scare the U.S.S.R. into agreeing to an arms-negotiation treaty (the SALT treaty).

The birth of Red China had far more harmful consequences, of course, for the people of China. No observer of Mao knew at this point that he was already proving one of the most ruthless leaders of the 20th century, eliminating all rivals in the Communist Party. Once in power, he was in a position to rival Hitler and Stalin among the great totalitarian killers of the 20th century. The number of his victims are believed to run anywhere from eight to 14 million.