Special Section: In Search of History

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schools, more health insurance, more equality. The most democratic and responsible government in Europe was the British government; it promised its people most. The most autocratic government in Europe was West Germany—and its autocrat was the U.S. Army. England, France, Belgium, had governments that could vote on how many hours went into a working week, and what maternity benefits should be, and how many days or weeks of vacation people should have. In Germany, Lucius Clay and his advisers decided that Germans must work a 48-hour week, and work they did. The U.S. Army said the Germans must rebuild their factories, roads and bridges first; meanwhile, let them shiver in cellars, ruins and rags; no housing or clothing until they earned their way back.

It was years before I could fully measure the results of the Law of Unintended Consequences. When I first reported Europe, shortly after the war, the British standard of living was roughly three times that in refugee-crammed West Germany. Since then, somehow, England has gone its jovial way across its pleasant plateau of civility, but Germany has boomed. The average per capita income in victorious England had risen to $3,871 thirty years later—while in defeated Germany it had reached $7,336, and the gap was widening. Somehow, the severity with which the Americans policed Germany and directed the flow of aid proved more fruitful than the affection and support we gave the free government of the English people to do as they wished with our billions.

Nobody could have envisioned that what was being done in the reconstruction of Europe and Asia would result in the rise of Germany and Japan—and that 30 years later, our two former enemies would threaten, like giant pincer claws, America's industrial supremacy in the new trading world we had tried to open to all.

Ike Decides to Take the Plunge

In early 1952, the curtain had already risen on the U.S. presidential campaign, but the most talked of potential candidate was off in Europe, serving as Commander in Chief of the three-year-old North Atlantic Treaty Organization and refusing to commit himself. A very special luncheon in Paris finally convinced White that Dwight D. Eisenhower was going to run:

From the fall of 1951, we correspondents had begun to report the parade through Paris of movers-and-shakers trying to see Eisenhower. There was our old friend Paul Hoffman returning for a visit in 1952; there were Thomas E. Dewey and Herbert Brownell, purse-lipped; there was Harold Stassen, open to the press as always, hoping the headlines of his visit would amplify his importance. There was Henry Cabot Lodge, so sure of his own Massachusetts Senate seat (which he was to lose to John F. Kennedy that year) that he felt he could spend full time on the Eisenhower campaign. But none could come away with a flat-out quotable commitment from Dwight D. Eisenhower that his hat was in the ring.

Time wore on into the primary season, into his surprise New Hampshire victory, but Eisenhower's position was still obscure. Those of us who, as military correspondents, were accredited to his headquarters at Marly-le-Roi outside Paris were sternly instructed that anyone who brought up politics, or Eisenhower's candidacy, in the general's presence, would be forthwith escorted out of his presence. Bang. Finally, Ike yielded. He would accept the invitation