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234 chapter fourteen Entangling Alliance The military transport plane carrying Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson touched down at Washington’s National Airport at about 4:45 p.m. on April 4, 1949. The ¶ight from Philadelphia, where just several hours earlier the secretary had commissioned the cruiser USS Roanoke, had taken nearly an hour. After threading his way through rush-hour traf¤c, Johnson’s driver dropped him off at the Commerce Department auditorium on Constitution Avenue just in time to witness a historic ceremony in the blue-and-gold splendor of the crowded hall. On the ¶ag-bedecked stage stood the new secretary of state, Dean Acheson, ¶anked by President Truman and Vice President Barkley, and eleven other foreign ministers from Europe and Canada. Johnson watched intently as Acheson and the representatives of the member nations solemnly af¤xed their signatures to a treaty which would join them together in a collective security arrangement known as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or NATO.1 There was no doubt that the rati¤cation and implementation of the new defensive agreement, which was the West’s answer to the Soviet military threat, would stir considerable controversy in the days ahead. Although Johnson had assumed of¤ce only one week before the treaty was signed, he was briefed suf¤ciently on its rami¤cations to realize that the United States was stepping out in a bold new direction as it prepared to depart from Thomas Jefferson’s famous admonition that the nation should avoid entangling alliances.2 Under the NATO treaty, the signatories pledged “to unite their efforts for collective defense” in order to provide for the stability and well-being of the North Atlantic area. The treaty called for peaceful settlement of disputes among members, but the heart of the agreement and the most controversial part was Article 5, which provided “that an attack against one or more of them entangling alliance 235 . . . shall be considered an attack against them all.” Most signi¤cant, Article 5 also said that in the event of an attack, each nation “will assist” by taking “such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.”3 At a state dinner that evening at the Carlton Hotel, President Truman toasted the foreign ministers who had signed the new North Atlantic Treaty, saying, “we have really passed a milestone in history today.”4 For the United States his words were particularly apt; America had never before agreed to a permanent alliance during peacetime. The initiative for the North Atlantic Treaty had not come from Truman or the State Department but from Ernest Bevin, Britain’s foreign minister. Early in 1948, Bevin proposed the idea of a mutual defense treaty as a way to contain new threats of aggression from the Soviet Union, and his concept was endorsed by Secretary of State George Marshall and Undersecretary Robert A. Lovett. Lovett and Republican senator Arthur Vandenberg had played the leading roles in bringing the United States into an alliance with the nations of Europe.5 Together , the two drafted what became known as the Vandenberg Resolution, a sense-of-the-Senate resolution which was passed on June 11, 1948. It was vaguely worded but it constituted a radical transformation of American foreign policy, moving the nation away from unilateralism toward multilateralism and effectively committing the United States to an alliance with the nations of Europe. The Vandenberg Resolution or, as Chip Bohlen called it, the VandenbergLovett Resolution, was formalized a year later in the North Atlantic Treaty.6 Although Truman was neither an initiator nor a particularly ardent proponent of the North Atlantic Treaty, he looked upon it with favor in part because it would allow the United States to reduce its military presence in Europe and thus save money. He knew that by signing the treaty the United States would have to provide substantial monetary assistance to the Europeans, but he believed that this would be cheaper than maintaining a huge number of ground troops in Europe for the foreseeable future.7 Notwithstanding his economy-driven motives, the April 4, 1949, signing ceremony turned out to be a triumphant occasion for President Truman. However , as Woodrow Wilson’s experience of three decades earlier had shown, a treaty means nothing if it is not rati¤ed. With that thought in mind, Truman asked Lovett to quietly continue to work with Senator Vandenberg and others to prepare...

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