V o L u m e I : a d

References

Kaufman, Burton I. Trade and Aid: Eisenhower’s Foreign Economic Policy, 1953–1961.

Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982.

Levinson, Jerome, and Juan de Onis. The Alliance That Lost Its Way: A Critical Report

on the Alliance for Progress. Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1970.

Rabe, Stephen G. The Most Dangerous Area in the World: John F. Kennedy Confronts Com-

munist Revolution in Latin America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina

Press, 1999.

Allied administrative body established to govern post–World War II Ger-

many. The Allied Control Council was agreed to by the three victorious

World War II allies, the United States, the Soviet Union, and Great Britain.

France became the fourth power to join the council in 1945. The council met

for the first time in Berlin on 5 June 1945 and was officially inaugurated on

30 August 1945.

The council was designed to function as the supreme governing, con-

trolling, coordinating, and administrative body cochaired by the four occu-

pation powers on German territory. Headed first by the four supreme Allied

military commanders, the council was supported by some 170 separate and

subordinate administrative and advisory bodies.

Each of the council’s four members held veto powers, and all major deci-

sions had to be reached unanimously. Due mainly to French and Soviet

obstructionism, significant decisions became virtually impossible to reach,

and the council’s administrative efficiency was hopelessly compromised. To

make matters worse, the commanders of the four occupation zones exercised

absolute and autonomous power on behalf of their governments in their

respective designated areas of Germany. By the summer of 1946, the com-

peting and often contradictory interests of the United States and the Soviet

Union over war reparations had rendered the council largely dysfunctional.

By 1949, the Allied Control Council of Germany virtually ceased to

function due to insurmountable differences among the four powers, diplo-

matic games, and a stalemate over currency reform in the western zones of

occupation. Although the United States introduced a proposal for an all-zonal

reform in January 1948 and linked its approval to a sixty-day ultimatum,

Washington in fact hoped that the Soviets would reject it. Indeed it was

Soviet Marshal Vasily Sokolovsky who first abandoned the Allied Control

Council on 20 March 1948, saving American General Lucius D. Clay the em-

barrassment of having to take this first step. Instead of objecting to currency

reform and other occupation issues via the council, the Soviets decided,

beginning in April 1948, to initiate a blockade of West Berlin by cordoning

off the three western sectors by both land and water routes.

Technically, the Allied Control Council continued to exist for decades,

because none of the four nations ever officially canceled its membership.

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Allied Control Council of Germany

Allied Control 

Council of Germany

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Attempts to revive the institution in the 1950s proved to be short-lived.

Finally, the so-called 2 + 4 Treaties of 1990 between the four Allied powers

and the two German states officially terminated the Allied Control Council.

Bernd Schaefer

See also

Berlin Blockade and Airlift; Clay, Lucius DuBignon; Germany, Allied Occupation

after World War II; Sokolovsky, Vasily Danilovich

References

Botting, Douglas. From the Ruins of the Reich: Germany 1945–1949. New York: Dutton,

1986.

Clay, Lucius D. Decision in Germany. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1950.

Mai, Gunther. Der Alliierte Kontrollrat in Deutschland 1945–48. Alliierte Einheit—deutsche

Teilung? [The Allied Control Council in Germany, 1945–1948. Allied Unity—

German Division?]. Munich: Oldenbourg, 1995.

Turner, Henry A., Jr. Germany from Partition to Reunification. New Haven, CT: Yale

University Press, 1992.

Influential American journalist who ardently advocated a hard line toward the

Soviet Union during the Cold War. Born in Avon, Connecticut, on 10 Octo-

ber 1910 into a prominent family, Joseph Alsop graduated from Harvard Uni-

versity in 1932 and then joined the New York Herald Tribune as a staff reporter.

After World War II, he collaborated with his brother Stewart on the syndi-

cated column “Matter of Fact,” which espoused the new internationalism of

their generation. The Alsop brothers parted company in 1958 over personal

and political differences.

An unabashed member of Washington’s cultural and social elite, Alsop

often threw elaborate parties at his fashionable home. An acquaintance of

George F. Kennan, Alsop was a staunch supporter of Kennan’s containment

policy toward the Soviet Union. In the 1950s he became particularly critical

of President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s efforts to restrain defense spending

and repeatedly warned of an impending missile gap with the Soviet Union.

Beginning in 1957, Alsop communicated his concerns about the alleged mis-

sile gap to Massachusetts Senator John F. Kennedy. In Kennedy’s 1960 pres-

idential campaign, during which he tried to assert that the United States had

not done enough to address Soviet advances, he found a natural ally in Alsop,

the man who would later claim to have coined the term “missile gap.”

Kennedy’s 1963 assassination shattered Alsop, but he nonetheless con-

tinued to support Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon B. Johnson. Alsop had single-

mindedly supported the war in Vietnam from its very start—as early as 1954,

when it was still largely a French enterprise—and he continued to do so as

Johnson expanded U.S. involvement. But Alsop was profoundly shaken as

he witnessed the American defeat there. Indeed, in 1975, five months before

Alsop, Joseph Wright

115

Alsop, Joseph Wright

(1910–1989)

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