Authentically Liberal

In response to the far left's soft policy toward Soviet-directed communism, centrist liberals organized the Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) in early 1947. Although they later came under fierce attack by right-wing Republicans as being soft themselves, these liberal anticommunists in fact provided seminal thinking and political muscle during the most creative period of U.S. foreign-policy making in history. In addition to Humphrey, the ADA's founding generation included Eleanor Roosevelt; Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.; John Kenneth Galbraith; the great union leaders Walter Reuther and David Dubinsky; and the United States' leading Protestant theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr. (Niebuhr's stunningly prescient writings, which called on Americans to seek a morally better universe while recognizing the impossibility of achieving it, set the theme for Beinart's book.) On domestic policy, members of the ADA were unabashed New Dealers; on civil liberties, they were very liberal; and on civil rights, they were well ahead of their time. But on foreign policy, the ADA's members "broke ranks [with the far left], declaring [the ADA's] opposition to communism overseas, and its refusal to cooperate with communists at home," Beinart writes. "They altered American history and committed themselves to a new liberalism."

The ADA was a perfect match and an important source of intellectual and political support for the legendary foreign policy team of Harry Truman's administration: Dean Acheson, George Marshall, George Kennan, Averell Harriman, Paul Nitze, Clark Clifford, Will Clayton, and, of course, Truman himself. In the eighteen months following the creation of the ADA, events in Europe -- the rape of Czechoslovakia, Stalin's blockade of Berlin, communist show trials and purges -- confirmed the worst fears of the ADA's founders and the Truman administration. Truman's response -- which included the Marshall Plan, the Truman Doctrine, the formation of NATO and the modern National Security Council system (including the creation of the Defense Department and the CIA), and the Point Four program (the first foreign-aid project aimed specifically at the developing world) -- was a nearly pitch-perfect blend of military, ideological, political, and economic programs to meet the threat on every front. Liberal anticommunist foreign policy leadership reached its apogee in June 1950, when Truman ordered U.S. forces to defend South Korea after the North Korean army crossed the 38th parallel. It is ironic that today's Republican leaders, whose predecessors mocked and fought Truman, single him out as a role model.

THE GREAT SCHISM

After discussing the presidency of John F. Kennedy -- whose masterful handling of history's only nuclear confrontation between superpowers deserves revisiting in light of the current Iran crisis -- Beinart turns to the Vietnam War era, when the pursuit of a laudable but unattainable goal led to the breakup of the mainstream Democratic consensus into factions represented by two powerful Democratic senators, Henry "Scoop" Jackson, of Washington State, on the right and George McGovern, of South Dakota, on the left. The split has continued, with different players, right up to today.

Vietnam also broke up the original ADA, many of whose founders became leading opponents of the war. But not all liberal Democrats turned left. In this regard, Beinart understates the importance of the rise of the neoconservative movement during the administrations of Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. The original neoconservatives were all Democrats (most of them followers of Jackson) who continued to support the war in Vietnam and felt that Carter was not tough enough with the Soviet Union. Led by Jeane Kirkpatrick and Richard Perle, they attacked their Democratic colleagues ferociously, and eventually signed up with Reagan, who, as a former New Deal Democrat himself, understood the cultural and political roots of Franklin Roosevelt's coalition.

The prevailing sentiment among most of my left-wing Democratic colleagues at the time was "good riddance." After all, the neoconservatives were angry, nasty, and soft on right-wing dictators such as the Philippines' Ferdinand Marcos and the Argentine generals. Even worse, they had been wrong on Vietnam, the defining issue for an entire generation of Americans. At first, they seemed to be not much more than a group of minor hothouse intellectuals. As the new Carter administration began controversial arms control talks with Moscow, Leslie Gelb (then head of the State Department's Bureau of Politico-Military Affairs) tried to bring Perle into the Carter-Cyrus Vance State Department in an attempt to create a broad coalition in the style of those Truman and Kennedy had built. But Gelb's efforts were rejected by Vance and his advisers. (Reagan, by contrast, gave Nitze a key negotiator's job, a shrewd move that turned an opponent of arms control into an advocate.)

At the time, few Democrats recognized the long-term costs of the neoconservatives' departure to the Republican Party. But the costs were real -- not only for the Democrats but for the country as a whole. The entry into the Reagan camp of this critical group of center-right and right-wing national security Democrats simultaneously eroded the Democratic Party's credibility with the public on national security and ended the dominance of the Richard Nixon-Henry Kissinger-George H. W. Bush wing of the Republican Party (the so-called realpolitik school).