Fear Itself (108 page)

128
U.S. Department of Commerce,
National Associations of the United States
(Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1949).

129
Truman,
The Governmental Process,
p. 59.

130
Ibid., pp. 50–51.

131
Theodore J. Lowi,
The End of Liberalism: Ideology, Policy, and the Crisis of Public Authority
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1969), p. 72.

132
Ibid., p. 123.

133
E. E. Schattschneider,
The Semi-Sovereign People: A Realist’s View of Democracy in America
(New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1960), p. 35.

134
This occurred despite the first preference of black leaders to refuse this choice. See Dona C. Hamilton and Charles V. Hamilton,
The Dual Agenda: Race and Social Welfare Policies of Civil Rights Organizations
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1997). For a superb consideration of the broken link between labor and civil rights, see Risa L. Goluboff,
The Lost Promise of Civil Rights
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010).

CHAPTER 11
“WILDEST HOPES”

1
The site is now part of the White Sands Missile Range.

2
James G. Hershberg,
James B. Conant: Harvard to Hiroshima and the Making of the Nuclear Age
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993, pp. 231–32.

3
Quickly, “the cloud reached a height of 41,000 feet, 12,000 feet higher than the earth’s highest mountain,” and the silence was broken by a “mighty thunder” and “a wave of hot wind.” See William L. Laurence,
Dawn over Zero: The Story of the Atomic Bomb
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1946), pp. 10–11. The test went forward only after Edward Teller was able to reassure the leaders of the Manhattan Project that it would not set off a chain reaction that might engulf the world. See Edward Teller (with Allen Brown),
The Legacy of Hiroshima
(New York: Doubleday, 1962), p. 16.

4
George Kistiakowsky was a Harvard University chemist who had participated in the Manhattan Project by leading a team that developed the lenses that compressed plutonium uniformly in order to achieve a critical mass.

5
This report to the Department of War is cited in Laurence,
Dawn over Zero,
pp. 193–94. Oppenheimer was far more reserved. Conant’s eight-page handwritten account records how, upon the detonation, Oppenheimer cited the Bhagavad Gita: “I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” Farrell also reported how “the lighting effects beggared description. The whole country was lighted by a searing light with the intensity many times that of the midday sun. It was golden purple, violet, gray, and blue. It lighted every peak, crevasse and ridge of the nearby mountain range with a clarity and beauty that cannot be described but must be seen to be imagined. It was that beauty that the great poets dream about but describe most poorly and inadequately.” Both Oppenheimer and Farrell are cited in Hershberg,
James B. Conant,
p. 233.

6
These islands, as well as the Marshalls and the Carolines, had been mandated to Japan by the League of Nations after World War I.

7
Robert S. Norris,
Racing for the Bomb: General Leslie R. Groves and the Manhattan Project’s Indispensable Man
(Hanover, NH: Steerforth Press, 2002), pp. 313–24; see also Gary Wills,
Bomb Power: The Modern Presidency and the National Security State
(New York: Penguin, 2010), p. 43.

8
Laurence,
Dawn over Zero,
p. 224.

9
Gregor Dallas,
1945: The War That Never Ended
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), p. 571.

10
Laurence,
Dawn over Zero,
pp. 229, 241, 236–37.

11
John W. Dower,
Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1999), pp. 45–46, 36.

12
New York Times,
August 15, 1945;
Life,
August 27, 1945, pp. 25, 21.

13
Samuel P. Huntington,
The Common Defense: Strategic Programs in National Politics
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1961), p. 35.

14
TABLE Ed26–47, “Military Personnel on Active Duty, by Branch of Service and Sex: 1789–1995,”
Historical Statistics of the United States
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Tony Judt,
Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945
(New York: Penguin, 2005), p. 109. Army readiness dropped even further, to seven active duty divisions, by the time the Korean War broke out in June 1950. See Stetson Conn, “Changing Concepts of National Defense in the United States, 1937–1947,”
Military Affairs
28 (1964): 7.

15
John Lewis Gaddis, “Comment,” in the
AHR
Forum on Melvyn P. Leffler, “The American Conception of National Security and the Beginnings of the Cold War, 1945–48,”
American Historical Review
89 (1984): 383.

16
Judt,
Postwar,
p. 109.

17
Isaiah Berlin,
Washington Despatches, 1941–1945: Weekly Political Reports from the British Embassy,
ed. H. G Nicholas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), pp. 613–14.

18
See Peter Clarke,
The Last Thousand Days of the British Empire
(London: Penguin, 2008), pp. 400–403.

19
Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones,
The CIA and American Democracy
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), p. 28.

20
It took nearly a year for the United States to abolish its blacklist of individuals and companies forbidden to trade with the United States because they had traded with one or more of its enemies during World War II. The Truman administration took this step on July 8, 1946.

21
On the toll of the war and the absence of American worry about the USSR as an enemy, see Melvyn P. Leffler,
A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992), p. 5.

22
A 1947 Council on Foreign Relations report observed that from the time President Truman appointed Byrnes to lead the State Department on July 3, 1945, until the spring of 1947, “save for the brief experience of the Potsdam Conference, which his position as chief executive required him to attend, Truman left foreign affairs largely to his Secretary of State.” See John C. Campbell,
The United States in World Affairs, 1945–1947
(New York: Harper and Brothers, 1947), p. 17.

23
On April 16, 1947, Baruch spoke to the legislature of his home state South Carolina when his portrait was being unveiled in the chamber. He proclaimed, “We are today in the midst of a cold war. Our enemies are to be found abroad and at home.” See
Washington Post,
April 17, 1947. Walter Lippmann,
The Cold War: A Study in U.S. Foreign Policy
(New York: Harper and Brothers, 1947).

24
Walter Lippmann,
U.S. Foreign Policy: Shield of the Republic
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1943), p. 164.

25
Lippmann’s and Roosevelt’s views are discussed, and both cited, in John Lewis Gaddis, “The Insecurities of Victory: The United States and the Perception of the Soviet Threat after World War II,” in
The Truman Presidency,
ed. Michael J. Lacey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 243.

26
In October 1945, Adm. Samuel Robinson, who had served as the navy’s production chief during the war and who was advocating the creation of a capable postwar intelligence unit on the model of the OSS, identified the USSR as just one of six leading potential enemies, the others being Germany and Japan, but also, remarkably, Brazil, France, and Great Britain. See Jeffreys-Jones,
The CIA and American Democracy,
p. 35.

27
Samuel P. Huntington,
The Common Defense: Strategic Programs in National Politics
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1961), p. 14. For a comprehensive overview, see Jack Stokes Ballard,
The Shock of Peace: Military and Economic Demobilization after World War II
(Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1983), pp. 27–72. America’s wartime pattern is placed in a comparative frame in E. J. B. Foxcroft, “Planning and Executing Resources Allocation—A Phase of War Administration,”
Public Policy
6 (1955): 158–81.

28
The only negative votes were cast by two midwestern Republicans, William Langer of North Dakota and Henrik Shipstead of Minnesota.

29
For a discussion, see Wilson D. Miscamble,
From Roosevelt to Truman: Potsdam, Hiroshima, and the Cold War
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 259–61.

30
Cited in Hershberg,
James B. Conant,
pp. 236–37. President Truman rejected the idea of sharing atomic secrets, a decision he reported on October 8, 1945. See G. Pascal Zachary,
Endless Frontier: Vannevar Bush, Engineer of the American Century
(New York: Free Press, 1997), p. 299.

31
Melvyn P. Leffler,
For the Soul of Mankind: The United States, the Soviet Union, and the Cold War
(New York: Hill and Wang, 2008), pp. 65, 59.

32
Congressional Record,
79th Cong., 1st sess., July 26, 1945, p. 8085.

33
Cited in Campbell,
United States in World Affairs, 1945–1947,
p. 523.

34
Brookings Institution, International Study Group,
The Administration of Foreign Affairs and Overseas Operations: A Report Prepared for the Bureau of the Budget and Executive Office of the President
(Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, June 1951), p. 5. For a contrary view, arguing that “long before the war in Europe ended in May of 1945, it was clear there would be no peace,” see Theodore H. White,
Fire in the Ashes: Europe at Mid-Century
(New York: William Sloane Associates, 1953), p. 393.

35
Brookings Institution,
The Administration of Foreign Affairs and Overseas Operations,
pp. 1, 9.

36
Ibid., p. 55.

37
Ibid., p. 35.

38
Laurence,
Dawn over Zero,
pp. 270–71.

39
Max Hastings,
Inferno: The World at War, 1939–1945
(New York. Alfred A. Knopf, 2011), p. 628.

40
Washington Post,
August 18, 1945. Arnold suffered five heart attacks during the course of the war.

41
James Agee, “The Bomb,”
Time,
August 20, 1945, p. 175.

42
Washington Post,
September 16, 1945.

43
New York Times,
November 8, 1945, November 17, 1945.

44
“The 36-Hour War,”
Life,
November 19, 1945, pp. 27–35. For an overview of how atomic weapons and nuclear war were portrayed by American artists after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, see Denise M. Rompilla, “From Hiroshima to the Hydrogen Bomb: American Artists Witness the Birth of the Atomic Age” (Ph.D. dissertation, Rutgers University, 2008).

45
The full text can be found in the
New York Times,
February 10, 1946. The Soviet quest to gain an atom bomb was hardly a secret. In November 1945, Foreign Minister Molotov declared that the USSR “would have atomic energy, too.” Embassy of the U.S.S.R., Washington,
Information Bulletin
, November 17, 1945, p. 8; cited in Campbell,
United States in World Affairs, 1945–1947,
p. 40. For an overview of “Stalin and the Shattered Peace,” see Vladislov Zubok and Constantine Pleshakov,
Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War: From Stalin to Khrushchev
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), pp. 36–77. We now know that Stalin made the bomb a high-priority project within a month of Hiroshima. See Zachary,
Endless Frontier,
p. 293.

46
New York Times,
February 10, 1946. For a discussion of the speech placed in the wider context of the decline of prospects for positive East-West relations, see Robert Dallek,
The Lost Peace: Leadership in a Time of Horror and Hope, 1945–1953
(New York: HarperCollins, 2010), pp. 182–83.

47
John Lewis Gaddis,
George F. Kennan: An American Life
(New York: Penguin, 2011), p. 216. Stalin, in this period, “was vacillating, saying contradictory things, pursuing divergent policies. Historians violently argue about Stalin’s motivations and his goals precisely because his rhetoric and his actions were so inconsistent.” See Leffler,
For the Soul of Mankind,
p. 33.

48
Cited in Gaddis,
George F. Kennan,
p. 217.

49
For a useful discussion, see Judt,
Postwar,
pp. 103–4.