erica also had an image of the Soviets as a government that had negotiated a separate peace with Germany in 1917, leaving the West to fight the war alone. Americans had also been unhappy with the many attacks on the American capitalist system, and such attacks were particularly unwelcome in the 1930s when capitalism was in trouble. The Stalinist purges of the 1930s were also remembered, as was the short-lived pact between Stalin and Hitler in 1939. Soviet hostility toward the United States also had deep roots. The Soviets remembered American opposition to the revolution in 1917. The U.S. had also sent troops into the Soviet Union at the end of World War I, and the Soviets believed this was to overthrow their system. Russia had been excluded from world affairs after World War I until World War II, and this was resented. The U.S. did not recognize the Soviet government diplomatically until 1933. Most Russians also deeply distrusted industrial capitalism. World War II seemed to bring the two together, but events in the war also more deeply separated them. Americans were hostile to the Soviet invasion of Finland and the Baltic states in 1939. There was also antipathy to reports of Soviet brutality. The Allies did not invade until two years after Stalin wanted, and the Russians suffered terrible casualties in the meantime.
The generation that brought the United States into international espionage and covert action and that established the CIA was rising to power by 1941 and included Dean Acheson, secretary of state under Truman; Robert Lovett, lawyer, and banker who served as Truman's secretary of defense and later an adviser to Kennedy; James Forrestal, secretary of the navy under Roosevelt and secretary of defense under Truman; John Foster Dulles, lawyer and secretary of state to Eisenhower; Allen Dulles, a lawyer and the longest-serving director of the CIA; and Walter Bedell Smith, chief of staff to Eisenhower during Worl...