William L. Shirer, who had a CBS radio news shows as well as a newspaper column, took on a recent column by the Alsop brothers, Joseph and Stewart, who also were Herald Tribune contributors, on US reaction to Soviet demands. The Alsops had reported that the US government was pulling its punches in its dealings with the Soviet Union out of fear of “provoking the most violent kind of crisis.” They had gone on to say that unless the Soviets abandoned its “new imperialism” the world would be divided soon again into two armed camps. Shirer surmised that the Alsops, who were socially and politically well-connected, accurately reflected the opinion of US policy makers, whom he noted seemed to feel that it was only the “new imperialism” that presented a threat.
He also reported Walter Lippmann's response to the Alsops in another Herald Tribune column in which Lippmann wrote no sane man makes it his policy to precipitate "the most violent kind of crisis." Six days later, Shirer reported, at the tail end of a Berlin dispatch from Times correspondent C.L. Sulzberger, was a comment that the flare-up over Iran was being seized upon by the US government to run up anti-Soviet feeling. According to this theory, the US officials felt that the era of goodwill between the two countries had continued too heavily into the post-war world, which was making it difficult for the US to pursue a harder line and this was why they were making a big fuss over the continued occupation of the northern provinces by Soviet troops a big issue.
Shirer went on to write that Secretary of State James F. Byrnes had been chastised by the Truman administration over his recent trip to Moscow. In Shirer's opinion, Byrnes believed that “compromise with a new Russia, which was flexing its great muscles after the victory” was both possible and desirable. Only time would tell if he was right, but in the meantime he was being pushed into adopting a hard line by those who felt he had “given in” to Russian demands and he had been threatened with replacement if he didn't toughen up.
Shirer blames a number of factors for this anti-Soviet attitude. One was domestic politics with the Congressional elections imminent. Another was a “hysteria” against Russia among some of the highest government advisers. And another was the strength of anti-Soviet feeling among “certain well organized groups of citizens” (e.g the Catholic church). And he wrote there were other sincere but misguided citizens who believed “without reason” that the Russians were on the march and had to be stopped while we had the military advantage and the atomic bomb.
Shirer went on to dismiss scare headlines about Russian troops on the march in Iran as US propaganda. The US government he wrote had adopted a sense of urgency that they had not shown over Hitler's march into the Rhineland, Austria or Czechoslovakia. The supposed crisis had since come and passed. Meanwhile the UN Security Council was not debating the true issue in Iran, the age old struggle between Britain and Russia over the country's oil. As a result, the rift between the Western powers and Russia had widened. Shirer sneered that “the very persons who had been so congenitally blind to the threat to us of Nazi Germany were so quick to sense what they were now sure was a threat to our national interests from Soviet Russia.” Shirer, however, seemed congenitally blind to the equally paradoxical option of rescuing Europe from one brutal totalitarian regime only to present much of the world as a gift to another. In the case of Iran, the purity of Soviet motives was put in question by its efforts to create two new People's Republics in the occupied regions.
Shirer would soon lose his radio sponsor and subsequently his radio show and find himself on the blacklist. The Right Wing accused him of Communist sympathy for his frequent apologetics for Soviet foreign policy. He did downplay Soviet imperialism and the totalitarian nature of its government fairly consistently. While not glorifying Stalin, he frequently questioned the motives of those who attacked the Russian dictator or his policies. Meanwhile he harshly criticized the foreign policy of the Truman administration for being too confrontational while the Right was attacking it for being too accommodating to the Communists. In his own mind, he most likely felt he was presenting a balance to the hardliners by pointing out the hypocrisy and exaggerations of their propaganda rather than supporting Stalin.
There is absolutely no evidence that Shirer was ever a Communist and he persistently denied that he was a Communist sympathizer. Like many who had covered foreign affairs in the Thirties, as well as many who had followed the developments, he had been appalled by the failure of the Western democracies to take the threat of Hitler seriously at a time when he could have been stopped. In contrast they saw Stalin and the Communists as implacable foes of Fascism. Shirer had seen the horrors of the Nazi regime first hand as a Berlin correspondent. The hesitancy of the Western powers appeared to many as a complicity with evil for which they blamed British imperialists, American business interests, anti-Semites, America Firsters, knee-jerk anti-Communists and Nazi sympathizers within these governments, who would rather have a Hitler than a Stalin or who felt that the fate of Europe was none of America's business. For many of this cohort, including Shirer, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact came as a shock, but in time, like most True Believers, they found ways to explain it away. Maybe Stalin was buying time. It wouldn't have happened if the Western democracies had been more willing to forge an early alliance with the Soviet Union. Wasn't ceding Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia and chunks of Poland and Romania to Stalin better than seeing these nations fall to Hitler? Like others who held this world view, he carried an antipathy and suspicion of policymakers in the West and a degree of sympathy toward the Soviet Union into the postwar period. They thought the real danger was the possibility of a Fascist resurgence in Europe. Franco, not Stalin, was their bogeyman. Stalin might not be perfect but he was less of a threat to peace, according to this line popularized by the United Front, than the warmongers within our own government. This did not mean that they were supporters of the Soviet style of government or enemies of Western democracy. They saw themselves as realists and pragmatists rather than as Communist sympathizers,
Shirer's landmark book, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, written during the years that he found trouble finding work, is praiseworthy in its vivid description of Berlin under Hitler, but simplistic in its analysis of the reasons behind Hitler's rise. And Shirer was homophobic. While he gave detailed accounts of Nazi barbarism, not only did he ignore Nazi persecution of gays, astoundingly he portrayed homosexual “perverts” and “degenerates” as a key part of the Nazi movement.
Byrnes, whom Shirer praised in this article eventually was dismissed from his cabinet post but by then he had abandoned reconciliation to become overly confrontational in his dealings with Moscow. He was not exactly the fine fellow of Shirer's commentary. In his later role as governor of South Carolina he was a staunch segregationist, although in terms of Southern politics a moderate who, for instance, opposed the Ku Klux Klan and other extreme manifestations of racism so prevalent in his home state. Although he spent almost all of his political career as a Democrat, he supported Eisenhower over Stevenson in 1952 and Strom Thurmond's switch in party affiliation and served as a key architect of Nixon's Southern Strategy to win the South for the GOP.