The same press that delights in trashing the Bush administration for its handling of postwar Iraq didn't much like the way President Harry Truman was managing the post-World War II occupation of Germany, either.
To be sure, postwar coverage 57 years ago was overwhelmingly patriotic - and voices of dissent were relatively rare. But the Web site Instapundit.com has unearthed several stark exceptions.
The widely read Saturday Evening Post, for example, featured this headline on the cover of its Jan. 26, 1946, issue: "How We Botched the German Occupation."
The report oozed doom and gloom about the most successful postwar military operation in the history of mankind.
Here are excerpts from the Post's report by Berlin correspondent Demaree Bess, written just seven months after VE Day:
"Everywhere I’ve traveled recently in Germany I’ve run into Americans, ranging from generals down to privates, who ask perplexedly, 'What are we Americans supposed to be doing here? Are we going to take over this place and stay here forever?'"
Bess continued:
"Judging by reports received here from the United States, this perplexity of Americans in Germany is matched by the perplexity of Americans at home. We have got into this German job without understanding what we were tackling or why.
"Imagine how incredulous we would have been if anybody had told us - even so recently as five years ago - that hundreds of thousands of Americans would be camped in the middle of Europe in 1946, completely responsible for the conduct and welfare of approximately 20,000,000 Germans?
"How does it happen that even some of our topmost officials in Germany admit that they don’t know what they are doing here?"
The Post's Berlin correspondent went on to report that Secretary of State Cordell Hull was feuding with Secretary of War Henry Stimson - shades of the continuing reports of friction between Donald Rumsfeld and Colin Powell.
The report also lamented that the Truman administration was beset by leaks that threatened to undermine a coherent postwar occupation policy - a complaint not unlike what the press said about last week's leak of the notorious Rumsfeld memo.
Then, as now, France was intent on undermining U.S. efforts, with the Post reporting: "The French, unconvinced that the atomic bomb has opened an entirely new era, are insisting upon establishing buffer states between themselves and Germany. To this end, they’re trying to make a friend of the Germans in their zone and to encourage them to organize separatist movements."
At one point reporter Bess complained that the U.S. occupation had degenerated into "planned chaos."
Instapundit offers another report from the April 1947 issue of the magazine Foreign Affairs, in which future CIA chief Allen Dulles complained that prospects for democratic reforms in postwar Germany looked bleak.
"The defeat of Nazism has removed one of the obstacles to the democratization of Germany; but it has not created a democratic Germany," wrote Dulles. "Nor is there much basis for the belief that democracy will develop in Germany under present conditions of defeat, hunger, idleness and despair."
That prediction from one of the postwar era's wise men turned out to be 180 degrees wrong.
But it's particularly valuable today - as a reminder that even at the moment of America's greatest triumph, the media's doom-and-gloomers were working overtime.
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