Fear Itself (111 page)

132
New York Times,
February 10, 1946. As the legislation unfolded, the Soviet Union denounced what it called a reprise of “the Japanese system” and argued that this approach showed that “the United States are not seeking the establishment of international collaboration in the sphere of atomic energy.” See
Chicago Daily Tribune,
March 21, 1946.

133
E. Blythe Stason, “Law and Atomic Energy,”
Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science
249 (1947): 94.

134
Walter Gellhorn, “Security, Secrecy, and the Advancement of Science,” in
Civil Liberties under Attack,
ed. Clair Wilcox (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1951), pp. 85–86.

135
The other four members were Robert Bacher, a Cornell University physicist who had worked closely with Robert Oppenheimer at Los Alamos; Sumner Pike, director of the Fuel Price Division of the Office of Price Administration since 1942; Lewis Strauss, a New York lawyer who served as assistant to the secretary of the navy during World War II; and William Waymack, editor of the
Des Moines Register and Tribune.
On Lilienthal’s views, see R. L. Duffus, “Lilienthal Charts a Fateful Course,”
New York Times,
November 17, 1946. Lilienthal’s association with the TVA and his reputation as a planner led to charges during his confirmation hearings in early 1947 by the Republican majority leader, Ohio’s Robert Taft, that he was “a New Dealer,” and by New Hampshire Republican Styles Bridges that he was “an appeaser of Russia.” The main opponent was Tennessee’s Democratic senator Kenneth McKellar, who had long resented Lilienthal for protecting civil service rules at the TVA. The
New York Times
commented that the reasons for this opposition, primarily by Republicans, included worries by oil interests “that the ex-head of the TVA would be inclined to push atomic energy as a publicly owned power source at the expense of electricity and oil”; the chance to embarrass President Truman in the run-up to the upcoming election season; and “the fact that Lilienthal is of Jewish descent. That fact, it is reported, has been the subject of discussion among some Senators.” See
New York Times,
February 16, 1947.

136
Stason, “Law and Atomic Energy,” pp. 95–98.

137
Byron S. Miller, “A Law is Passed: The Atomic Energy Act of 1946,”
University of Chicago Law Review
15 (1948): 799, 780. A careful summary of the similarities and differences among the different bills that were considered within the framework proposed by President Truman was published during the period of lawmaking by the executive secretary of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. See Meyerhoff, “Domestic Control of Atomic Energy,” pp. 133–36.

138
Such was the case, for example, when the House adopted an amendment offered by May of Kentucky, which was backed energetically by Robert Lee Sikes of Florida and Harold Cooley of North Carolina, to require the head of the commission’s Division of Military Applications to be an active army officer.

139
Chicago Daily Tribune,
July 13, 1946.

140
Congressional Record,
79th Cong., 2d sess., July 19, 1946, p. 9482.

141
With a cohesion score of just 22.

142
Congressional Record
, 79th Cong., 2d sess., July 16, 1946, p. 9141.

143
Ibid., July 17, 1946, pp. 9261, 9253. It was Short who had moved earlier in the day to kill the bill by recommitting it to the Military Affairs Committee. This was a closer-run vote, failing by 146–195. While the great majority of votes to recommit, 128, were Republican, a few southern Democrats—Harold Cooley of North Carolina, Carl Durham of North Carolina, John Folger of North Carolina, Andrew Jackson May of Kentucky, John Rankin of Mississippi, and Robert Thomason of Texas—voted with them, arguing that the bill did not do enough to fight Communism because it put the commission in civilian hands and gave the federal government too much power with which to constrain the market economy. For a discussion of the passage of the bill in the House following the attempt to kill it, see
New York Times,
July 21, 1946.

144
Johnson,
Congress and the Cold War,
p. 8. For a consideration of how these powers worked in practice in the 1950s, see H. L. Nieburg, “The Eisenhower AEC and Congress: A Study in Executive-Legislative Relations,”
Midwest Journal of Political Science
6 (1962): 115–48.

145
These representatives served in the Republican 80
th
Congress. With the Democratic majority restored in both the House and the Senate for the 81st Congress, elected in November 1948, the Democratic membership increased to ten. In the Senate, Millard Tydings of Maryland was added to the party’s cohort, while in the House, Paul Kilday of Texas replaced Lyndon Johnson, who had just been elected to the Senate. In turn, Johnson replaced Tydings, and thus returned to the committee, in the 82d Congress. Russell served longest, from 1946 to 1970.

146
Herbert S. Marks, “Congress and the Atom,”
Stanford Law Review
1 (1948): 27–29.

147
Cited ibid., p. 29.

148
Los Angeles Times,
July 25, 1946. The Soviet Union, like the other permanent members of the Security Council, had pledged at San Francisco to use the veto sparingly, only when its most vital interests were at stake. In the UN’s first year, it blocked majority decisions eight times by its veto, essentially on minor matters where its preferences were being outvoted.

149
Feaver,
Guarding the Guardians,
pp. 110–11.

150
Chicago Tribune,
January 29, 1947. The Smyth Report “was startling” even to the scientists who had worked on the bomb in a compartmentalized way. See H. H. Goldsmith, “The Literature of Atomic Energy of the Past Decade,”
Scientific Monthly
68 (1949): 295. On its security limits, see David Kaiser, “The Atomic Secret in Red Hands? American Suspicions of Theoretical Physicists during the Early Cold War,”
Representations
90 (2005): 33.

151
U.S. Atomic Energy Commission,
In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer: Transcript of Hearing before Personnel Security Board. Washington. D.C., April 12, 1954 through May 6, 1954
(Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1954), p. 69.

152
David M. Hart,
Forged Consensus: Science, Technology, and Economic Policy in the United States, 1921–1953
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), pp. 184, 190.

153
Miller, “A Law Is Passed,” p. 821. For a discussion along these lines, see Michael S. Sherry,
In the Shadow of War: The United States since the 1930s
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), p. 137.

154
Millis,
Arms and the State,
pp. 159–60.

155
Harry S. Truman, “Our Armed Forces Must Be Unified,”
Collier’s
, August 26, 1944, p. 63.

156
Cited in Millis,
Arms and the State,
p. 146.

157
See http://trumanlibrary.org/publicpapers/index.php?pid=508&st=&st1=.

158
Key works that focus on the complex process that ultimately culminated in the National Security Act of 1947 as an instance of fierce bureaucratic infighting between the army and navy, and as a struggle to find the right balance between a tightly integrated military and civilian control, include Demetrios Caraley,
The Politics of Military Unification: A Study of Conflict and the Policy Process
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1966); and Hogan,
A Cross of Iron
, pp. 23–68.

159
Robert H. Connery, “American Government and Politics: Unification of the Armed Forces—The First Year,”
American Political Science Review
43 (1949): 40.

160
Cited in Hogan,
A Cross of Iron,
pp. 34, 36.

161
Elias Huzar, “Reorganization for National Security,”
Journal of Politics
12 (1950): 130.

162
Hogan,
A Cross of Iron,
p. 65.

163
A useful summary of these agencies and functions can be found in Gus C. Lee, “The Organization for National Security,”
Public Administration Review
9 (1949): 36–44. For a discussion of the planning activities of the National Security Resources Board, see Robert Cuff, “Ferdinand Eberstadt, the National Security Resources Board, and the Search for Integrated Mobilization Planning, 1947–1948,”
Public Historian
7 (1985): 37–52. The NSRB and the Munitions Board, which produced the benchmark
Industrial Mobilization Plan for 1947,
were assessed by Ferdinand Eberstadt as “far more advanced in our planning than even those people who keep in touch with industrial mobilization would have believed possible” (p. 45).

164
Memorandum to Joint Psychological Warfare Committee, October 24, 1942; cited in Tim Weiner,
Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA
(New York: Doubleday, 2007), p. 3.

165
Athan G. Theoharis et al.,
The FBI: A Comprehensive Reference Guide
(Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1998), p. 182. September 19, 1945; cited in Jeffreys-Jones,
The CIA and American Democracy,
p. 25.

166
On August 29, 1945, J. Edgar Hoover wrote to Attorney General Thomas Clark to complain about the potential loss of FBI functions in Latin America:

There have been certain developments in this situation in the last twenty-four hours, about which I wanted to advise you. I have ascertained that General William Donovan has recently seen President Truman and is writing him a letter with reference to a proposed program for the operation of a World-wide Intelligence Service. It is reasonable to assume, I believe, that the plan which General Donovan will advance to the President will be similar to the one which he has heretofore advocated and about which I have advised you in detail. From outside sources I have learned that Colonel Frank McCarthy, new Assistant Secretary of State, has discussed the FBI’s operation of the Western Hemisphere Intelligence Service with Secretary of State Byrnes. From the statements made by Mr. Byrnes to Colonel McCarthy, it appears obvious that the Secretary of State is not adequately or fully informed as to the nature, scope or effectiveness of the Bureau’s operations in this field.

See http://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1945
-
50Intel/d5.

167
I am relying here on Jeffreys-Jones,
The CIA and American Democracy;
Weiner,
Legacy of Ashes;
David M. Barrett,
The CIA and Congress: The Untold Story from Truman to Kennedy
(Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2005); and the CIA’s invaluable official history, written in 1952 and 1953 by its first official historian but not released for over a quarter of a century: Arthur B. Darling,
The Central Intelligence Agency: An Instrument of Government to 1950
(University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1990).

168
For a discussion of these concerns, see Sherman Kent,
Strategic Intelligence for American World Policy
(Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1965), p. 79. From 1952 to 1967, Kent, a Yale historian, chaired the Board of National Estimates in the CIA’s Directorate of Intelligence. See Robin W. Winks,
Cloak and Gown: Scholars in the Secret War, 1939–1961
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966).

169
Cited in Jeffreys-Jones,
The CIA and American Democracy,
p. 39; and Weiner,
Legacy of Ashes,
p. 24.

170
The text of NSC 10/2 can be found in Thomas H. Etzold and John L. Gaddis, eds.,
Containment: Documents on American Policy and Strategy, 1945–1950
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1978), pp. 126–28.

171
Anna Kasten Nelson, “President Truman and the Evolution of the National Security Council,”
Journal of American History
72 (1985): 360–78.

CHAPTER 12
ARMED AND LOYAL

1
The structural advantage southern patterns of representation conferred on the Democratic Party was considerable. Democrats secured 52 percent of the popular vote for the House but fully 61 percent of the seats, thanks to the low-turnout, essentially one-party South.

2
This Democratic majority of 235–199, with one Farmer-Labor independent, was achieved despite a dead heat in the popular vote.

3
The only limit it imposed was the condition that the CIA not have any police functions within the United States.

4
Cited in David McCullough,
Truman
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), pp. 367–68.

5
Tim Weiner,
Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA
(New York: Doubleday, 2007), p. 41.