Paris after the Liberation 1944-1949

round there was also a semi-official round, prompted partly by the large number of newspaper proprietors andeditors attracted to Paris. Some wielded enormous influence, often without the knowledge to use it well. Henry Luce, founder of
Time
magazine, was a shy man, ill at ease and sentimental. ‘Luce is a queer duck,’ wrote David Bruce on a subsequent occasion. ‘He gives the impression that he soaks up what one is saying without becoming mentally wetted by it. His youthful missionary background and his later enormous influence and affluence, combined with other factors, have complicated his personality. He appears driven by ambition and fanaticism to extremes of judgement.’ Henry Luce came round to the British Embassy, where he met Louise de Vilmorin and promptly fell ‘madly in love with her’. Duff Cooper was very amused, but he had more sympathy for Henry Luce than for Luce’s wife, Clare. Caffery had brought her over to the British Embassy after dinner in the first winter after the Liberation. ‘She is as pretty as ever,’ he wrote then, ‘and as self-satisfied, as tiresome, and as foolish.’ He had much more time for Mrs Ogden Reid, wife of the proprietor of the
New York Herald Tribune
and the real controller of the newspaper. ‘Mrs O.R. is a very sensible and well-balanced woman. She is what America has best to offer at the present time – and that is very good. Her husband is a drunken jackass and brays like one.’
    At the conference table, self-fulfilling suspicions were developing rapidly on both sides. Whenever the Americans stood up to Stalin over breaches of the Yalta agreement, he feared their confidence was based on a secret plan to use the atom bomb. He ignored the massive demobilization of their forces across the world.
    At the same time, the Americans underestimated Stalin’s paranoia and therefore misjudged his obsession with establishing a protective
cordon sanitaire
round the Soviet Union. They assumed that his moves towards controlling those countries of Central Europe and the Balkans occupied by the Red Army were motivated entirely by ideological imperialism. His refusal on 1 March to withdraw troops from northern Iran, within striking distance of the oilfields, was defensive in the context of his paranoid mentality.
    Five days after the 1 March deadline, Churchill made his ‘iron curtain’ speech at Fulton, Missouri. The reaction of the American press and public was unfavourable at the time. Truman refused to be drawn intothe ensuing debate, though he and senior officials in the United States government were already starting to think along similar lines. They had been strongly influenced by George Kennan, the Kremlinologist at their Moscow Embassy. He had sent a long telegram analysing the Soviet threat, which was a prelude to the policy of containment which he elaborated the following year.
    In Paris the Turkish ambassador, a shrewd observer, said that the Russian failure to evacuate Persia as agreed ‘was an irretrievable mistake because it resulted in the Americans developing a foreign policy’. It may not have actually developed the policy, but it certainly concentrated minds upon it. This would lead to the so-called Truman Doctrine in the spring of 1947, when America took over responsibility for the defence of Greece and Turkey on the collapse of British power in the region.
    There are much stronger grounds for tracing the development of the Cold War to Germany, which, even in its ruined and occupied state, remained the focus of Stalin’s nightmares. George Kennan acknowledged that Russia’s fears were understandable, in view of her terrible history of invasion by Mongol, Pole, Swede and French, as well as the two waves of German occupation within the last thirty years.
    Duff Cooper, who sympathized with the French fear of Germany – which was inevitably similar to that of the Soviet Union – was alarmed to hear in late May that the British chiefs of staff wanted ‘a strong Germany to fight Russia’. Two years before, when still in Algiers, he had submitted a plan for a European bloc based on Britain, France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg. He had vigorously pushed the idea; but Anthony Eden, terrified of upsetting Stalin, had opposed it. Cooper argued that at the end of the war the Russians would not be afraid of a Western European bloc. What terrified Stalin was the idea of a Western bloc dominated by the Americans and linked to a reconstructed