–
“Pechenga.” Harry Truman spat out the unfamiliar name as if it were the filthiest word in the world.
“That’s right, Mr. President.” George Marshall nodded. Truman thought the Secretary of Defense was almost as much a Great Stone Face as Andrei Gromyko. Dorothy Parker had famously said that some actress ran the gamut of emotions from A to B. Truman hadn’t seen that actress perform. But by comparison to her, Marshall got stuck halfway between A and B.
“Pechenga!” Truman said it again, even more disgustedly this time. “It sounds like the noise a pinball machine makes.”
“Yes, Mr. President.” Marshall sounded resigned. He was an extraordinarily able man. As Secretary of State, he’d developed the Plan that bore his name and helped keep Western Europe’s ravaged postwar economies from collapsing. Before that, he’d been a five-star general and Army Chief of Staff under FDR.
Truman wondered whether Marshall compared him to Roosevelt. No, on second thought, Truman didn’t wonder any such thing. He knew damn well Marshall compared him to Roosevelt. The man would have been even less human than he was if he didn’t. What Truman really wondered was what Marshall thought, comparing him to his illustrious predecessor.
He didn’t ask. He would never ask. He would go on the rack and let a torturer tear out his fingernails before he asked. But he wondered. He would have been less human than he was if he didn’t.
“Pechenga.” Now Marshall said it. His index finger pinned it down on a large-scale map of Europe, as if he were an entomologist mounting a butterfly on a collecting board. “Formerly Petsamo in Finland, till the Russians took it away when they knocked the Finns out of the war. A little more than fifty miles west of Murmansk. About as far northwest as you can go and stay in the USSR.”
“And where the goddamn Russians took off from when their bombers blasted Britain and France,” Truman ground out.
“And Germany,” Marshall reminded him.
“And Germany,” Truman agreed sourly. “But the Prime Minister is screaming in my ear, and so is the President of the Fourth Republic. The Germans aren’t part of the NATO treaty. I have an easier time ignoring them than I do with the English and French.”
“The treaty does say that an attack against one signatory is the same as an attack against all signatories.” Marshall knew what it said. It had been negotiated while he was Secretary of State, even if the dickering wasn’t done till Dean Acheson took over for him at the start of Truman’s full term, the one he’d won himself.
“I know. I know. I know,” Truman said. “And if I didn’t know, they’re reminding me-at the top of their lungs. And so I am going to have to do something to Russia. If I don’t, the treaty is dead in the water, and I can have the joy of watching all the countries in Western Europe line up to hop into bed with Joe Stalin.”
The slightest twitch of one eyebrow on George Marshall’s craggy face said Franklin D. Roosevelt wouldn’t have talked about countries hopping into bed with other countries. FDR would have found some properly diplomatic way to say the same thing. Well, good for FDR. Truman called them as he saw them, and worried about diplomacy later.
After pulling his features back to expressionlessness, Marshall said, “I’m afraid that’s much too likely, sir. With the Communists already so strong in France and Italy-”
“I know,” Truman said one more time. “And so I was thinking of striking this Pechenga place. It’s where the Russian bombers came from, so it naturally draws our notice. We can drop a bomb there if we want to, blow up the air base, look heroic to our allies, and not endanger even Murmansk, let alone any of the really big Russian cities.”
“I don’t know if it’s enough to make England and France happy, and I don’t know that Stalin won’t feel obliged to retaliate against an American target, or more than one American target,” Marshall replied, plainly picking his words with care. “I also don’t know that he won’t order his armies forward-they’re at the border and ready to move, remember.”
“I do remember.” Truman scowled. “Dammit, George, all my other choices look worse. If I do nothing-we just talked about what will happen then. And if I bomb Russia back to the Stone Age, I know the free half of Europe will get badly hurt, too. We won’t get off scot-free ourselves, either. I don’t believe Stalin can do unto us as we can do unto him, but I don’t believe we’ll stop everything he throws our way, either. If you can tell me I’m wrong and make me believe you, I’ll give you a great big kiss.”
“Is that a promise or a threat, Mr. President?” Marshall asked, deadpan. Truman guffawed, more from surprise than at the quality of the crack. The Secretary of Defense owned a sense of humor after all!
“Never mind what it is,” Truman said. “The way it looks to me is, we have three choices: no response, limited response, and all-out response. If the limited response doesn’t seem the best of the three, you’d better tell me right now.”
Marshall inhaled, then blew out the breath without saying anything. After inhaling again, he said, “When you put it that way, sir, I must agree with you. Whether Stalin will recognize the limited nature of the reply, though, or whether our friends will find it too limited…” He shrugged.
“God knows what will happen before it does. He’s the only One Who can pull that off,” Truman said. “The rest of us, we have to try something and then see what happens. This isn’t a good choice, but it’s the best one we have now. Since we do agree on that, let’s get rolling.”
“I was thinking some of the planes should fly out of England and others out of France, sir,” Marshall said. “It seems fitting.”
“It does, yes.” Truman paused a moment. “Not out of Germany?”
“What do you think, sir?”
The President answered his own question: “No, not out of Germany. Okay, get things started. You will know the orders to issue.” If anyone in the whole world knew more than George Marshall about how American armed forces around the world worked, Truman had no idea who it might be.
“I’ll send them out right away.” Marshall hesitated, then said, “It might have been better to accept the loss of our forces in North Korea, then bring in enough reinforcements to stabilize the situation. The choice we’re facing now wouldn’t seem so…stark.”
“If I’d let the Red Chinese get away with slaughtering them all, McCarthy and Taft and the rest of the Republicans would have crucified me, and who could blame them?” Truman said. “Don’t get me wrong. You have a point, and a good one. All I can tell you is, it seemed like a good idea at the time. You didn’t say no then, not that I recall.”
“No, I didn’t,” the Secretary of Defense agreed. “Now we’ve got a tiger by the ears, though, and we’d better hang on tight or it will swallow us.”
“We’ll need to put Alaska on highest alert,” Truman said. “If Stalin does decide to play tit for tat, that’s a likely place for him to do it. Plenty of space, not many people-it’s a lot like Pechenga. If we can keep the Russians from getting through, that’s a feather in our cap.”
“Good point. I think we’re already at the maximum there, but I will make sure,” Marshall said. “Is there anything else, sir?”
“Not off the top of my head. I’ll phone you if I think of something,” the President said.
The Secretary of Defense nodded, dipped his head once more in lieu of saluting, and strode out of the White House conference room.
“Pechenga.” Truman still made the name sound like an obscenity. He scowled at the map. An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth? Not a big enough eye or tooth to make the Europeans happy. Well, wasn’t diplomacy the art of leaving everyone dissatisfied? If it is, I win artist of the year, Truman thought.
–
Leon carried a blue book up to Aaron Finch. He climbed into his father’s lap in a rocking chair and said, “Read!” He was only a little more than a year and a half old. He didn’t say a whole lot of words yet. He had that one, though. And he always seemed sure of what he wanted-in which he took after Aaron.