Man of the Hour

by Jennet Conant

  If the American people are to be deeply penitent for the use of the atomic bomb, why should they not be equally penitent for the destruction of Tokyo in the thousand-plane raid using M69 incendiary which occurred a few months earlier. (I may say I was as deeply involved with one method of destruction as the other, so at least on these two points I can look at the matter impartially.) If we are to be penitent for this destruction of Japanese cities by incendiaries and explosives, we should carry this point of view to the whole method of warfare used against the Axis powers.

  Niebuhr sent a conciliatory reply, acknowledging the council’s judgment “does not make sufficiently clear what was the conviction of most of us—that the eventual use of the bomb for shortening the war would have been justified.” He maintained, however, that the United States would have been in a “stronger moral position had we published the facts about the instrument of destruction, made a demonstration of its effects over Japan in a nonpopulated section, and threatened the use of the bomb if the Japanese did not surrender.” He also did not back down on the question of culpability. There was “too general a disposition to disavow guilt because on the whole we have done good—in this case defeated tyranny.”

  The heated exchange left Conant all the more convinced of the need to clarify the issue for the public at large. From the earliest days of the interventionist movement to the public unveiling of the Manhattan Project, and exemplified by his careful crafting of the Smyth Report explaining the scientific genesis and purpose of the new weapon, he had always been sensitive to the need to shape public opinion about the threat to national security and the necessary response. In his view, chronic controversy about the bomb could erode public confidence in the country’s leaders as a united and resolute group and compromise their atomic diplomacy. The American people, “notoriously nondocile,” as the playwright and FDR speechwriter Robert Sherwood once observed, had to be brought along every step of the way—whether it was casting aside isolationism, rising to the challenge of war, or accepting the responsibilities of a global power. In order to avoid being swamped by emotionalism and prevent a groundswell of antinuclear activism that could make the task of devising future policy that much more difficult, Conant felt the government needed to dictate the story of the bomb. Recognizing that history is written by the victors, yet always subject to challenge and the vicissitudes of time, he wanted to stake out the moral high ground—and more important, the judgment of posterity.

  He was less than happy that among the people influencing Americans’ early conceptions of atomic weapons were Hollywood executives. All that spring and summer, he had been fielding inquiries about Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s The Beginning or the End, ostensibly the true story of the making of the bomb, which had Truman’s blessing. It featured a cast of square-jawed movie stars playing the Manhattan Project’s principals, including Hume Cronyn as Oppenheimer and Brian Donlevy—after Spencer Tracy turned down the role—as Groves.

  Against his better instincts, Conant had already cooperated with a The March of Time newsreel documentary about the bomb after Bush had persuaded him that as its August release coincided with the UN negotiations and could be “very useful” in publicizing “the necessity for action looking toward international collaborative control.” Conant had even agreed to reenact the congratulatory handshake after the Trinity test, posing prone on the faux-desert floor of a Harvard Square garage next to Bush and Groves and awkwardly clasping each man’s proffered palm over and over for the cameras. Recognizing that the project leaders had to be involved with the MGM picture, if only to mitigate the potential damage, Bush reluctantly signed the release form. But Conant, who “never liked mixing the grim matter of atomic energy with Hollywood romance,” stalled, only sending a letter stating he would consider signing if Bush did, just in case they needed to “take legal action.”

  It was the influential political commentator turned peace advocate Norman Cousins’s blistering editorial demanding accountability for the “crime of Hiroshima and Nagasaki” in the September 14, 1946, Saturday Review of Literature that finally drove Conant to call Bush and suggest it was time to mount a defense. As an architect of the country’s atomic strategy, Conant was incensed by the accusations that the bombings had been unnecessary and had been carried out to “checkmate Russian expansion.” Singling out the “leaders” who approved the attacks, Cousins demanded answers for their “refusal to heed the pleas of the scientists against the use of the bomb without a demonstration” and surrender ultimatum, and the decision to doom two cities in a country that was already on its knees.

  This last arrow found soft flesh. Only two days earlier, Admiral William F. “Bull” Halsey, commander of the Third Fleet during the war, had stated during a press conference that the bombings were a mistake because at the time they occurred Japan was on the verge of surrender. His remarks echoed the July report of the United States Strategic Bombing Survey on the effectiveness of Allied aerial attacks, which concluded that Japan would have been compelled to surrender before the end of 1945 and “in all probability” by November 1, “even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.”

  Conant found these reports deeply troubling. In light of all the evidence that had emerged in the past thirteen months, he had to concede that the defeat of Japan was inevitable: “That at the time of the Potsdam Conference, the signs of rapid deterioration of the Japanese situation were so clear as to be unmistakable to those who were privy to the latest intelligence.” But what did it mean to say Japan’s capitulation was inevitable? Though its army was beaten, how long would it take to break Tokyo’s code of honor and political will? What if, as reported, a faction of the military insisted on continuing the fight because it did not believe the terms of unconditional surrender adequately protected the emperor’s role as sovereign ruler, and its coup to topple the government had succeeded? How long would the war have raged on? Conant believed the argument that it was “unnecessary to use the bomb” was oversimplified and erroneous, and opened up “a whole spectrum of considerations, military and political.”

  After the ferocious battles for Iwo Jima and Okinawa, and mindful of the “terrible toll” of every additional day of fighting, Truman and Stimson—both World War I artillerymen—feared nothing more than the prospect of a long and bloody contest of ground forces.I “That nightmare was strong,” recalled McGeorge Bundy, the son of Stimson’s wartime assistant Harvey Bundy, who was helping the retired secretary of war with his memoir during the summer of 1946. The American leaders were “heavily affected by the fanatical tenacity of the Japanese on Okinawa and the demonstration of the willingness to die that was inherent in the kamikaze tactics newly adopted by Japanese fliers. What if this spirit, and not any rational calculation of odds against them, were to govern the decision of Japanese rulers?” They were disinclined to haggle with a regime that both FDR and Truman had denounced as criminal, and, as the latter told Churchill, did not have “any military honor after Pearl Harbor.”

  The president’s military advisors recognized the possibility of a collapse from within, and the impact of Soviet entry, but they always came back to the conclusion that using the new weapon was the one way to end the war quickly. Their dread of a drawn-out denouement was intensified by the lesson the Allies had learned with the Germans: the way that Hitler’s armies had fought on even after Patton swept across France, and surrender came only when Germany was physically overrun. As General Marshall observed grimly of the March 1945 bombing raid on the Japanese capital, “We had a hundred thousand people killed in Tokyo in one night, and it had seemingly no effect whatsoever.”

  Churchill, like Truman and his advisors, could not conceive of withholding the weapon that would eliminate the need for the invasion and spare so many lives. “There was never a moment’s discussion of whether the bomb should be used or not,” he wrote later. “To avert a vast, indefinite butchery, to bring the w
ar to end, to give peace to the world, to lay healing hands on its tortured peoples by a manifestation of overwhelming power at the cost of a few explosions seemed, after all our toils and peril, a miracle of deliverance.”

  Conant, who knew this to be the conviction of the men with command responsibility as the bomb became available, was impatient with after-the-fact assessments of Japan’s readiness to surrender, dismissing such talk as “Monday morning quarterbacking.” His only regret was that the bomb had not been completed earlier: “The difference between May and August 1945 was very large in terms of American casualties.” And if the war had ended in May, the Red Army would not have been ready to take on Japan, and Russia would not have a claim to the spoils of victory. The whole postwar situation would have been very different. But it was probably inevitable that in the urgent atmosphere of the summer of 1945 the new president would seize on the new weapon to speed the end of the war. “Truman could have canceled the plans to drop the first bomb, of course, any time up to a few hours before the departure of the plane carrying the weapon which would destroy Hiroshima,” Conant wrote. “He did not do so; neither Secretary Stimson nor any of his advisors recommended such a dramatic reversal of orders.”

  Conant saw no reason to second-guess their decision, but he did want to stifle the growing hue and cry. Given his proprietary feelings toward the Manhattan Project, he could not help taking some of the criticism personally. “I am considerably disturbed about this type of comment which has been increasing in recent days,” he worried to his old wartime colleague Harvey Bundy, now back at his Boston law firm of Choate, Hall & Stewart, on September 23, enclosing a clipping of the Cousins editorial, complaining about Halsey’s “unfortunate statement,” and obsessing about a lone paragraph in the journalist Leland Stowe’s new book about the failed effort to control the bomb, While Time Remains, which mentioned the “error of using it against the Japanese.”

  The problem, Conant continued in an uncharacteristically fretful and peevish three-page letter, was that the criticisms were coming not just from the “professional pacifists and . . . certain religious leaders,” but also from the general public “taking up the same theme.” Even if it was only a “small minority” of “verbally-minded” academics who were raising these questions, he was eager to reverse what he saw as a distressing trend. “This type of sentimentalism, for I so regard it, is bound to have a great deal of influence on the next generation.”

  He was particularly worried that doubts about the bomb could lead to a “distortion of history,” and people could come to believe a main reason for the bombings—and certainly the one on Nagasaki—was to test the new weapons. There was a “danger,” he warned, of repeating the revisionism that occurred after World War I, when it became “accepted doctrine among a group of so-called intellectuals” that America’s entry into the conflict was a great mistake brought about by greedy arms makers. A return to this kind of prewar isolationism would only create more obstacles to promoting international control. To set the record straight and demolish any remaining doubts, Conant outlined his idea for an aggressive public relations offensive. “It seems to me of great importance to have a statement of fact issued by someone who can speak with authority,” he began. “There is no one who could do this better than Mr. Stimson.”

  What Conant had in mind was a short article by the popular statesman “pointing out the conditions under which the decision was made and who made it.” Annoyed at having the Chicago scientists’ objections continually thrown in his face, he was also determined to show that some of the most senior and distinguished physicists had sat on the Target Committee and confirmed the decision to drop the bomb on Japanese cities. “I think it is important to show that while there was a small group of scientists who protested,” he told Bundy, the scientific leaders of the movement raised no objections to the proposed plan. “On the contrary, you will remember that in the presence of Oppenheimer, Lawrence, Compton, and Fermi, there was a discussion of the actual target to be chosen. I think it unfair for the scientists by implication to try to dodge the responsibility for this decision.”

  He also thought Stimson needed to elaborate the reasons why the proposal at the “eleventh hour” to stage a demonstration in an unpopulated area was rejected, and show that the difficulties were discussed—the risk of a dud loomed large—and that the scientists’ final conclusion was that they could find no acceptable alternative to military use. “I am quite unrepentant as to my own views about the matter,” Conant assured Harvey Bundy:

  “I expressed my views that the bomb should be used. I did so on the grounds (1) that I believed it would shorten the war against Japan, and (2) that unless it was actually used in battle, there was no chance of convincing the American public and the world that it should be controlled by international agreement. Nothing that has come to light since then has changed my opinion.”

  Conant’s letter to Bundy—the contentious tone, continuous harping on the facts, and insistence that he felt no guilt for the bombings—suggests that he doth protest too much, that he was perhaps a man in desperate search of vindication. As the historian Barton J. Bernstein observed, Conant placed great faith in the idea that a full accounting of the events of 1945, presented publicly and persuasively by a revered figure such as Stimson, then in his eightieth year, would acquit him of any responsibility and “affirm the rectitude of the American leaders and of the A-bomb decision.” Some modern historians, such as Paul Ham, like to cite Conant’s denials of any moral qualms over Hiroshima as a sign of his “pride and utter lack of remorse.” But it is worth noting that in his 700-page autobiography My Several Lives, Conant devotes just two and a half pages to the fateful decision. That such an abbreviated summary in no way reflects the agonizing internal debates, complex considerations, and uncertainty that resulted in one of the most terrible military actions ever undertaken by the United States would seem to speak less of pride than of pain.

  Whether Conant was impelled to act by his uneasy conscience, concern for his reputation and that of his fellow bomb trustees, or a combination of the two, “the criticism of Hiroshima rubbed a raw nerve in this usually unemotional man,” observed biographer James Hershberg.

  Not content with marshaling Stimson’s support, Conant ramped up the media blitz. He commissioned his old friend Karl Compton, who had just returned from Japan, to pen a parallel defense for the December issue of the Atlantic Monthly stating his conviction that dropping the bomb had avoided a costly invasion, brought the war to a rapid conclusion, and “saved hundreds of thousands—perhaps several millions—of lives, both American and Japanese.” The bomb, he asserted, provided the Japanese government with a “face-saving argument” for those who wanted to battle on: “It was not one atomic bomb, or two, which brought surrender. It was the experience of what an atomic bomb will actually do, plus the dread of many more, that was effective.”

  “I think it’s excellent, I have no suggestions or comments, only applause,” Conant wrote after reading a copy in mid-October. He was especially pleased by the extra publicity it would receive as a result of Truman’s personal endorsement in the form of a letter to the magazine. He hoped it would help offset the theatrical travesty produced by MGM, which Walter Lippmann had previewed at an October screening and excoriated as “a bad example of the vulgarization and commercialization of a great subject.”

  Outraged by the film’s callous treatment of Truman’s decision to bomb Hiroshima—the president is shown as unhesitatingly giving the order, stating, “I think more of our American boys than I do of all our enemies”—Lippmann wrote Conant, “I must say I am very much disturbed about its effect abroad, for it will certainly be taken as official government propaganda in view of the fact that the film could not have been made without the assistance of the War Department and leading scientists in the Manhattan Project.” Hoping to goad Conant into taking on the producers, he added waggishly, “You appear in it impersonated by an actor who certainly doesn’t look
like the president of Harvard University. If you have no other grievance against the film, you certainly have a grievance against the fact that, whereas as Groves has been transformed into a dashing, romantic cavalier, you have been deglamorized in the most unfair way!”

  Lippmann’s protests, together with Truman’s objections, succeeded in getting the president’s big scene reshot. (The film now includes mention of sleepless White House nights.) Conant was not satisfied. Nervous about the way he and the other project leaders were being presented, he placed responsibility for their predicament “squarely” on the War Department and Groves, who was paid $10,000 as a consultant (equivalent to $125,000 today). “Of course, the whole thing blows up Groves,” Bush agreed. “It may be the last straw that breaks the camel’s back in the army, but I believe he has no career there anyway. If I were in your place and the chap that depicts you is a moth-eaten-looking individual, I would just not sign [the release].”

  Betraying an intense concern for his public image even in this bland and innocuous popularization, Conant instead moved to block the release of the film. Turning to Baruch, he raised the possibility that The Beginning or the End “might endanger the international solution of the atomic energy problem” and asked if he could find a way of having the film “kept out of circulation.” After many alterations to the script for historical accuracy and emphasis, the banal final cut bored Lippmann almost as much as it did moviegoing audiences. Conant skipped the star-studded Washington premiere and cringed at the scathing reviews—Time noted its “cheery imbecility”—taking some comfort in the fact that his character barely made an appearance.