Meanwhile, Harvey Bundy had heeded Conant’s call to action. By early autumn, he had enlisted his son, “Mac”—now ensconced in a cottage behind the main house on Stimson’s Long Island estate, Highhold—to serve as the former secretary’s “scribe” and silent coauthor, and the two were busy digging out wartime diaries and memorandums and preparing the prescribed article. Conant had shrewdly advised against indulging in any polemics, and instead, inspired by Hersey’s example, suggested that a matter-of-fact narrative might be a more powerful way to communicate. He also mobilized a group of his former A-bomb colleagues to provide assistance. Harvey Bundy, Harrison, Groves, and Interim Committee secretary R. Gordon Arneson all submitted drafts of valid A-bomb arguments to help bolster Stimson’s case.
Since the job of defeating Japan appeared to require the heavy sacrifice of American youth, they agreed it should be a central tenet of their defense. War Department historian Rudolph Winnacker supplied the specific casualty estimates that would prove their point. He informed Stimson and McGeorge Bundy that the number of American troops killed in the European war had been 142,000, and the total US Army casualties (dead, wounded, and missing) in the entire Pacific war were 160,000. Prior to Hiroshima, those estimates had produced a final estimate of 132,500 to 220,000 casualties. (These figures do not include Army Air Force, Naval, and Marine Corps casualties.) What puzzles scholars is why the War Department did not provide them with the Joint War Plans Committee figures—planning documents probably shown to Stimson in mid-1945—which estimated that about 25,000 Americans would be killed if just the Kyushu invasion proved necessary, and about 46,000 would be killed and 170,000 wounded if both southern Kyushu and the Tokyo plain had to be invaded.
It is true that higher figures had been floated in the press. After Nagasaki, Winston Churchill declared that the bombings had saved well over 1.2 million Allied lives, including a million Americans. At the time, Groves acknowledged that Churchill’s estimate was “a little high,” though proud as he was of his contribution, he seemed to suggest it was only slightly less. Somehow, based on Winnacker’s numbers, Stimson and Bundy arrived at what would turn out to be the single most controversial sentence in the final article bearing the former war secretary’s name: “I was informed that [the two invasions] might be expected to cost over a million casualties to American forces.”
That particular sentence did not fall to Conant’s blue pencil, but many others did, and he sent a heavily edited manuscript back to young Bundy in late November, along with an eight-page letter full of suggestions from a skilled debater. “Eliminate all sections in which the secretary appears to be arguing his case or justifying his decision,” Conant instructed. “It will be very hard for anyone on the other side to challenge this article if [it] deals almost entirely with the facts.” He also wanted the piece to correct misinformation about the decision not to provide a demonstration or warning before actual combat use, rewriting the entire section himself. Stimson should also point out the “similarity in destruction” between the Tokyo fire raids and the atomic bombings. Conant suggested other revisions, including deleting “the problem of the emperor,” as well as the whole issue of the future of nuclear arms, as they “diverted from the general line of argumentation.” He had led the charge for the publication of the facts, but with typical arrogance felt he was best able to judge exactly how much transparency was good for the American public.
Stimson did not appreciate being put in the hot seat and was uncomfortable lending his name to what he called “the product of many hands.” Unsure whether or not to go ahead with it, he solicited the advice of his longtime friend and confidant Felix Frankfurter, with whom he had shared his grave misgivings about the bomb back in 1945. “Jim Conant felt very much worried over the spreading accusation that it was entirely unnecessary to use the atomic bomb,” he explained, adding he was the obvious choice to serve as the self-described “victim” who should defend the president’s decision. But he was loath to argue the legitimacy of nuclear weapons and wondered if it might be better to wait until his memoir was ready, when he could include it in a discussion of his growing horror of war in the twentieth century. “I have rarely been connected with a paper about which I have so much doubt at the last moment,” confessed Stimson, who was in poor health and could not help sparing a thought for his own legacy. “I think the full enumeration of the steps in the tragedy will excite horror among my friends who heretofore thought me a kindly old Christian gentleman but who will, after reading this, feel I am cold and cruel.”
The justice, a strong proponent of using the bomb to end the war, telegraphed Stimson his support: “ARTICLE PROVES THAT CLEAR THINKING, DUTY TO RESTRICT LOSSES, AND WISE COURAGE DICTATED THE DECISION.”
Conant was similarly enthusiastic after receiving an advance copy of the article in Harper’s magazine, assuring Stimson in late January, “It seems to me just exactly right, and I am sure it will accomplish a great deal of good,” adding that he was the “only one” who could have done it. “If the propaganda against the use of the atomic bomb had been allowed to grow unchecked,” he explained, “the strength of our military position by virtue of having the bomb would have been correspondingly weakened,” and that would scuttle any chance of international control:
I am firmly convinced that the Russians will eventually agree to the American proposals for the establishment of an atomic energy authority of worldwide scope, provided they are convinced that we would have the bomb in quantity and would be prepared to use it without hesitation in another war.
Stimson’s essay brilliantly achieved America’s propaganda needs, highlighting the decisive role of the bomb in securing a humane victory, discounting the Soviet contribution to defeating Japan, and distracting attention from the political and strategic aims of American wartime policy—from keeping the Russians in line to the long-term diplomatic impact of nuclear fission—that had been foremost for himself and Bush from the start of the bomb effort and which were nowhere to be found in the eleven-page article.
“The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb,” which appeared in the February 1947 issue of Harper’s, proved an extraordinary success, far exceeding Conant’s expectations. The critical reception was overwhelmingly positive, and the piece was reprinted in hundreds of other magazines and newspapers around the world without charge, according to an editor’s note, because of its “exceptional public importance.” The New York Times commended the seminal article’s historical contribution, noting, “Mr. Stimson shows [the reasoning of the War Department] was grim but irrefutable.”
Truman also approved. Hoping to avoid ending up on the wrong side of history, he praised Stimson for clarifying the situation “very well,” allowing him to reassure himself with the obfuscation—which over time has accrued the status of myth—in the Harper’s piece that he had saved a million American fighting men compared with the fraction of lives lost in two Japanese cities that were devoted “almost entirely” to war work. In the years that followed, Truman usually placed the number at about half that, perhaps thinking it sounded more plausible, trotting it out whenever the critics piled on: “The men who were on the ground doing their jobs share my opinion that their lives and the lives of a half million other youngsters were saved by dropping the bomb.”
Stimson’s description of the thoughts and actions of American leaders leading up to the “decision” made for riveting reading and was all the more compelling because it seemed to be an open, honest first-person account based on his “clear recollection.” In simple, eloquent prose, he asserted that American leaders had little alternative but to use atomic weapons to secure Japanese capitulation with the minimum loss of life on both sides. While he would not “gloss over” the death of “over a hundred thousand” Japanese at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the decision to drop the bomb had been “carefully considered,” an advance warning or demonstration had been deemed “impractical” and involved “serious risks,” and, in the end, they were all agreed it was �
�our least abhorrent choice.” He added somberly, “No man, in our position and subject to our responsibilities, holding in his hands a weapon of such possibilities . . . could have failed to use it and afterwards looked his countrymen in the face.”
The article ended with a moving plea to abolish war:
In this last great action of the Second World War, we were given final proof that war is death. War in the twentieth century has grown steadily more barbarous, destructive, more debased in all its aspects. Now, with the release of atomic energy, man’s ability to destroy himself is nearly complete. The bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended a war. They also made clear that we must never have another war. This is the lesson men and leaders everywhere must learn, and I believe that when they learn it, they will find a way to lasting peace. There is no other choice.
Conant extolled Stimson’s rhetorical tour de force in public appearances over the winter of 1946–47. He strove mightily to allay people’s doubts about the necessity of the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki—“We had no bombs to waste,” he told audiences again and again—putting the best face on atomic weapons policy and maintaining a calm patriotic front despite the darkening nuclear reality. “I have certainly been well received so far,” he wrote Patty, sounding weary but relieved as he plowed through a February speaking tour in the West.
Similarly, Stimson always supported Conant, whom he regarded as one of the more “realistic” scientific leaders, who did not flinch when the time came to make a tough call. As he informed the news commentator Raymond Swing that February, “President Conant has written me that one of the principal reasons he had for advising me the bomb must be used was that that was the only way to awaken the world to the necessity of abolishing war altogether. No technical demonstration, even if it had been possible under the conditions of war—which it was not—could take the place of the actual use with its horrible results.”
Crowing about their essay’s effectiveness in rebutting the damaging assertions of the A-bomb dissenters, Mac Bundy wrote Stimson, “We deserve some sort of medal for reducing these particular chatters to silence.” The two would go on to collaborate on Stimson’s 1948 memoir, On Active Service in Peace and War, in which the aging statesman attempted to further defend his role. The coauthors only succeeded in temporarily quieting the controversy. In time, the critics would rebound with a vengeance, challenging the exaggerated “over a million” casualty estimate and the authoritative explanation they sought to enshrine. As General Marshall would later observe, Stimson “generously took a greater share of responsibility than was fair” in attaching his name to the Harper’s article.
While the Stimson essay probably remains to this day the single most influential account of the use of the bomb, revisionist historians from Barton J. Bernstein, to Gar Alperovitz, to Martin J. Sherwin have provided detailed analyses of why it is a misleading and deeply flawed version of the difficult choices facing the key members of Truman’s inner circle. In his decisive study of their deliberations, Sean L. Malloy shows that by asserting that they had only two alternatives—a bloody invasion or the use of atomic weapons to compel surrender—Stimson and Bundy presented a virtually unassailable case in favor of dropping the bomb. To ensure continued public support, or at least acquiescence, Conant and the other unacknowledged contributors sought to exclude any unsettling connections between the decision to use the bomb against Japan and the diplomatic uses of the bomb in imposing their will on the Soviet Union. They also entirely elided the fundamental moral question of whether targeting cities—with either incendiaries or nuclear warheads—was ever legitimate when so many noncombatants would die in the process. Notably, Stimson never addressed why the Nagasaki bomb could not have been delayed.
The cold war historian James Hershberg reads into these omissions darker motives, and portrays Conant’s campaign to defend the decision as vaguely conspiratorial, designed to manipulate public attitudes and conceal that the primary purpose of the bombings was to impress the Soviets and preserve the power of the American nuclear monopoly in the postwar years. “Conant’s reaction,” he argues, “and that of others around him, revealed the depth of fear among those responsible for the birth and maintenance of America’s nuclear policy that the lurking, inchoate, anomic terror of living in the strange new atomic age might coalesce into an unstoppable demand for the elimination of America’s nuclear arsenal—or, almost as damaging, vitiate its diplomatic usefulness. Then as later, this antibomb sentiment was seen as playing into the hands of the Russians and their infernal, expedient demands for immediate nuclear disarmament.”
What Conant, Stimson, and the other defenders aimed to do was shift the debate from the threat of the bomb to the threat of war. “America was heading into a period marked by US-Soviet rivalry, not one of global cooperation,” contends Hershberg, “and if the negotiations were doomed, then it was time to resume the job of building atomic weapons, not dismantling them.”
McGeorge Bundy, who went on to become a respected scholar and policy maker, maintains that Conant’s and Stimson’s motives were simpler—and more honorable. They wanted to reassure Americans that the decision had been judiciously conceived, that the overriding purpose was to shorten the war, and at the same time dramatically announce the age of nuclear weapons and the need to control the atom to avoid future wars. If they “claimed too much for the process of consideration,” as Bundy acknowledged in his own reckoning of the decision in 1988, perhaps it was because this “preemptive purpose,” along with the compulsive secrecy, had made them slow to explore the various options: warnings, demonstrations, targets, and diplomatic leverage. “What is true—and important—is that these same decision makers were full of hope the bomb would put new strength into the American power position,” he wrote. “They would have been most unusual men if they had thought it irrelevant” and ignored the weapon’s diplomatic advantages in dealing with the Russians and helping to cement the peace.
Above all, they wanted to build Americans’ confidence that the government could be trusted to make wise choices about nuclear weapons, both in the recent past and in the present, and continue to advance what they believed to be sound policy. “The bomb did not win the war, but it surely was responsible for it ending when it did,” concluded Bundy. “To those who cheered at the time—and they were the vast majority—that was what mattered most. The bomb did shorten the war; to those in charge of its development, that had been its increasingly manifest destiny for years.”
* * *
I. As the historian Wilson D. Miscamble notes, “The losses in Hiroshima and Nagasaki assuredly were horrific, but they pale in significance when compared to the estimates of seventeen to twenty-four million deaths attributed to the Japanese during their rampage from Manchuria to New Guinea.”
CHAPTER 19
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First of the Cold Warriors
Dr. Conant is a man who has no doubts about the superiority of the democratic beliefs he is defending. It is this unshaken and unshakable belief which makes him unafraid.
—Saturday Review
It was Harvard’s first full commencement since the end of the war. Behind the traditional mace bearer, General George C. Marshall, revered as the “organizer of victory” and five months into his tenure as Truman’s secretary of state, led the procession of 1947’s doctoral candidates and dignitaries making their way into the Yard. For the past two years in a row, Marshall had been too busy to come to Cambridge to claim his degree, and right up to the final week in May, it had seemed he might send his regrets. Then, on May 28, he had casually informed Conant that he would be present for the 1947 ceremony. Although unable to give a formal address, he would “be pleased to make a few remarks in appreciation of the honor and perhaps a little more.” He gave no indication he had anything else in mind, not even at the dinner at the president’s mansion the night before, and Conant had gone to bed unaware he had anything so “epic making” planned. But word of Marshall’s appearanc
e at the university leaked—Dean Acheson had tipped off a handful of journalists, worried that the press might doze through the academic exercises and not give the story the play it deserved—and that morning’s New York Times reported, “He is expected to deliver a speech that perhaps will include an important pronouncement on foreign affairs.”
The crowd of fifteen thousand did not expect to see history made. They had simply come to see one of the country’s most admired soldiers and statesmen. As it turned out, however, Marshall chose that fine June afternoon at Harvard to launch his massive European Recovery Program, a $17 billion transfusion that would become known as the Marshall Plan. After a few polite preliminaries, the old general fumbled for the speech in his jacket pocket and for the next twelve minutes rarely looked up from the prepared text he read from the podium.
“I need not tell you, gentlemen, that the world situation is very serious,” he began, speaking softly and at times inaudibly. Marshall explained the fundamental issues at stake in simple terms: Europe was in crisis. Ten years of war had destroyed its cities, factories, mines, and railroads, amounting to the “dislocation of the entire fabric of the European economy.” The poverty and chaos would lead to further political and social disintegration unless they broke the “vicious cycle” and restored people’s confidence in the future of their countries and in Europe as a whole. The consequences for the United States, and the “possibilities of disturbances arising as a result of the desperation,” should be apparent to all. While he never specifically mentioned the Soviet Union, it was clear the danger to the European democracies came from the rapacious Russians, who were setting up dictatorships in all the territories they had occupied during the war and subverting political cohesion in the region. “It is logical,” Marshall stated, “that the United States should do whatever it is able to do to assist in the return of the normal economic health in the world, without which there can be no political stability and no assured peace.”
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