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The man who, along with his G.I.s, had to do most of the staying was a general from Georgia with sad brown eyes, courtly manners and a steel-trap will. He was General Lucius DuBignon Clay, Commander of U.S. Forces in Europe and U.S. Military Governor in Germany, and he had already made his voice heard. When the Russian squeeze on Berlin first began, he said: "The American troops under my command will use force of arms if necessary . . . I have firmly made up my mind that I will not be bluffed . . . Anxiety or nervousness among Americans here is unbecoming."
How It Started. How had the U.S. got itself into a fix where one general and 4,000 G.I.s were supposed to hold an outpost deep inside a Red sea of Russian power? The story goes back to the era when the U.S. felt that, in dealing with Russian Communists, it might be dealing with friends. In the warm, Olympian mists of Teheran and Yalta, the Big Three decided: 1) to split Germany into four zones under an Allied Control Council, rather than run it as a single occupation; 2) similarly to divide the rule of Berlin. In one way, the arrangement worked to the West's advantage—it kept the Russians out of the Ruhr. But it made Berlin into a potential time bomb.
It might have been smarter for the U.S. not to have gone to Berlin in the first place, or to have withdrawn two years ago when Berlin had not become a spectacular issue testing the West's firmness. Today those are academic questions, for the U.S. stands committed. The U.S. stake in Berlin is faith. Withdrawal would leave to despair—and to Soviet persecution—tens of thousands of anti-Communists whom the U.S. encouraged to speak their minds against the Reds. It would mean the retreat of an army which, however small, is the symbol of America's commitment to Western European safety. It would give the Russians a chance to rally all Germans around their old capital; that might wreck America's plans for a Western German state and a healthy Ruhr, on which the Marshall Plan depends. Last week's ruthless siege of Berlin was a siege of all of Germany and Europe as well.
That is the measure of General Lucius Clay's task in Germany. He carries it out without anxiety or nervousness, despite the fact that for frequent lack of a definite U.S. policy (or agreed U.S.-British-French policy), Clay has had to make his own. Said a Frankfurt barber last week: "I feel sorry for General Clay. Every Russian from Marshal Sokolovsky down to the last sentry seems to know what his government's policy is and what he's supposed to do about it. With the American Government I sometimes wonder whether it knows itself what it's doing."
No other American at this moment has the authority and responsibility for so many on-the-spot decisions that can determine whether or not the U.S. this year finds itself in World War III. A man less sure of himself than Clay would break under such conditions. But Clay eats well, likes to take walks in his flower garden, and is mildly contemptuous of insomniacs ("If they'd work harder they could sleep all right"). Says his tall, handsome wife Marjorie: "I am appalled—absolutely appalled—by his steadfastness of purpose."