#: 497288 S7/JFK Debate  [POLITICS]
    03-Mar-96  11:35:15
Sb: Prouty Critique 5
Fm: D.T. FUHRMANN 71301,527
To: ALL

continued.....part 5


Prouty touches briefly on the Potsdam conference, stating that the new
president was completely at the mercy of those previously mentioned
wall-street bankers, and particularly under the influence of Edwin Pauley, a
conservative California oil man and Democratic Party fundraiser. 
According to Prouty "his job was to see that the new President adhered to 
the course already planned for the "Cold War" world.  References?  
Documentation?  Evidence?  None.  What Prouty doesn't mention or describe 
is Pauley's role in the Truman administration, which was to resist Soviet 
demands for massive reparations against Germany.  Why bother, since it 
has no relevance to the tale Prouty is telling us.

Truman, who named Edwin Pauley to replace a Roosevelt appointee as head 
of the US delegation to the Reparations Commission, was told by Truman 
that the German economy should be maintained adequately to provide at least a
subsistence standard of living for the German people without creating an 
American obligation to maintain this level or to finance German
reparations.[SOURCE: Robert J. Donovan, "Conflict and Crisis: 1945-1948," p
78.  Donovan goes on to describe Pauley's role, and the reasons behind it:

"Pauley attacked the tentative $20 Billion reparations figure as 
unrealistic.  Backtracking from the Yalta agreement, he proposed 
eliminating a fixed total for reparations. Instead each claimant would be 
entitled to a certain percentage of what was available for reparations.  
By the time of Potsdam the Americans contemplated a reparations plan that 
would, in Pauley's words, be "more limited in scope."[footnote in source 
text] American officials never had relished the idea of large transfers 
of reparations from West Germany to the Soviet zone.  Neither had the 
British. [footnote in source text]

"Several things had happened that justified in American eyes a more limited
reparations policy, however badly it may have set with the Soviets.

"While reparations negotiations were still pending, for example, the Soviets
had begun wholesale removal of German equipment from their own zone.  Indeed
there were reports of Soviet removals from the American zone.[footnote in
source text]  The president said that during his Berlin tour he had seen
plants whose equipment had been seized by the Soviets and loaded on
flatcars.[footnote in source text]"  [SOURCE: Robert J. Donovan, 
"Conflict and Crisis: 1945-1948," p 78]

In two references (Donovan's, noted above, and Herbert Feis's "Between 
War and peace: The Potsdam Conference," 1960] I consulted there was ample 
discussion of Edwin Pauley's role as head of the US delegation to the 
Reparations Commission, as well as consider discussion of the other 
aspects of the Potsdam meetings. If Pauley played a sinister role, we 
have only Mr. Prouty's say-so for it. Prouty tells the reader nothing of 
Pauley's actual role amnd virtually nothing of the Potsdam meetings 
themselves, but declares this man was a pernicious eminence grise over 
Truman.  Good scholarship on Prouty's part? Persuasive evidence in 
support of his assertions?  You make the call.

Prouty mentions the decision to use the atomic bombs on Japan (page 22),
ending once and for all the considerable controversy which has always
surrounded  those decisions and events by stating: "The consensus that 
guided Truman's decision was that the bomb should be used, as much to 
impress the Soviets and the rest of the world with their overwhelming 
power as to further crush the hapless Japanese." OK.  Maybe so.  But is 
there any reference or source offered for this unqualified declaration? 
We are given an definitive assertion without any mention to the vast 
literature on this rather controversial subject.  Good scholarship?  
Persuasive case?  You make the call.

Prouty also asserts that "As a gesture of hospitality, the Japanese had 
opened the American prisoner-of-war camps in Japan weeks before the bombs 
were dropped, and hundreds of Americans wandered freely throughout Japan, 
waiting for the day when the first American transport aircraft would 
arrive to carry them away."(page 22f)  I wonder about this as other 
sources indicate that the Japanese had already issued orders to execute 
all prisoners-of-war in the event of Allied landings on the home islands. 
And, of course, Prouty offers no sources or references for his claims.

On page 25 we once again have the assertion "With the decision already 
made to turn the Soviet Union almost overnight, from a wartime ally to a 
"peacetime" adversary, it became necessary to create an organization that 
could, in time of "peace," continue the eternal conflict using the 
networks of agents and spies in Eastern Europe that had been established 
by the Allies and by the Nazis during the war." There is no sense of any 
Soviet role, no indication of what might have been going on in the 
territory under the control of the Red Army.  Prouty simply ignores the 
Russians, as if they were merely pawns or one of those blow-up punching 
toys with the weighted bottoms. He talks of a decision, but has yet to 
provide any clear indication of who made it, when, and what the context 
and content of those deliberations might have been. He offers no 
references or sources, and lord knows there are plenty of them on the 
origins of the Cold War (among the best I know of are John Gaddis' 
"Strategies of Containment" and "The United States and the Origins of 
the Cold War: 1945-1947."  Also well-worth reading is George Kennan 
"Memoirs: 1925-1950," D.F. Fleming's somewhat dated "The Cold War and Its 
Origins," and particularly Daniel Yergin's "Shattered Peace: The Origins 
of the Cold War and the National Security State."  There is a wealth of 
scholarship representing a wide range of views on this topic; that.  
Prouty's failure to even mention any is, IMO, telling.

continued.....in part 6......