by James Grant
For some time Baruch tried to woo Lilienthal, who described an encounter they had had in April:
I had grimly determined that I would remember that he was the vehicle of our hopes, and that the choice seemed to me fantastic—his age, his unwillingness to work, his terrifying vanity—nevertheless he was the representative of this country. But I was not prepared, even so, for the flow of words about things quite irrelevant. Fully a fourth of the time (he talked almost continuously) he spent saying that it was a shame that the President had insisted on choosing him, that he had tried to get out of it, . . . that it should be a younger man, . . .
Of course, he didn’t believe a word of it, and it went on so long because I didn’t take my cue and assure him that he was the wisest man in the world, . . .
In the absence of assurances from him, Lilienthal wrote, Baruch furnished them himself, saying that he didn’t need to study the facts, that he wasn’t senile, and that he would “outfox” everybody.
“After about an hour of telling me these things, and urging me (with much palaver and praise put on with a trowel), I spoke up, but I had to fight to keep the floor. . . . I told him he was famous as Dr. Facts, and that without the facts carefully developed, these advisory groups were a menace.”
With that, Lilienthal wrote, Baruch seemed to lose his enthusiasm for the job, and for him. The old man “admitted that he was groping and that his impulse had simply been to ‘reach out’ (this accompanied by gestures) and take in those men who had given so much thought to the subject.”
The contribution that Baruch could make was one that seemed dispensable until he did it. This was the tempering of expert technical judgment with the wisdom of the years, and sometimes he performed it brilliantly. Once, after the deliberations began, he was talking with some military men about how long it might take another country to build an A-bomb. Someone said that he knew how long and that the number of years was “predictable.” Baruch, who had spent a lifetime on Wall Street seeing prophecies confounded, piped up to object. He said that in his experience it was hard to predict the future of anything, and it would be especially difficult in a field as new as atomic energy. Major General Leslie Groves, who had headed the Manhattan Project and presumably knew what he was talking about, insisted it would take five to seven years. In a report to Truman, Baruch passed on that expert view, said he couldn’t vouch for it, and guessed that the job might be done in less time than the general expected. The Soviets exploded their first bomb three years later.
In style and substance the Baruch and Acheson-Lilienthal groups were worlds apart. Acheson, a wit, made fun of Baruch’s clichés, and Acheson’s colleagues disparagingly called Baruch’s associates “Wall Streeters.” Once Baruch accused Acheson of secretly tape-recording him on the telephone. (He used to accuse Ickes of the same thing; and Morgenthau, in the Second World War, did produce some of the verbatim transcript quoted above.) Lilienthal, chief of the federally owned TVA, was irritated to hear Hancock say that the government couldn’t run a business. Again according to Lilienthal, the Baruch team let his side do all the talking, as if it were laying a trap. There Lilienthal probably did have a point, for Baruch could be a purposeful listener. While talking on the telephone and getting more information than he gave in return, he sometimes caught his secretary’s eye and gave her a wink, as if to say that he was winning.
On political issues Baruch and his group were generally to the right of Acheson and Lilienthal and their group. There was less trust of the Soviets on the Baruch side and more concern about property rights. One point of disagreement concerned the ownership of fissionable ore. In its report the Acheson-Lilienthal committee recommended that the international Authority take title to the world’s uranium mines. To this the Baruch team raised both philosophical and down-to-earth objections, Baruch, for instance, writing Byrnes in late March:
At least one hundred and twelve uranium-bearing minerals have been described. Some of them occur in at least ten states of the United States, and in twenty foreign countries. Many little prospected regions of Asia and Africa are known to be made up of rock, in which it would be reasonable to expect that uranium ore might occur. Riding herd on the production of these metals will take an “Authority” of a size to make a bureaucrat beam with pride.
Hancock pointed out that the authority would have to buy every mine in the South African Rand since uranium was produced as a by-product of gold. How could such a thing be paid for? What toll would it take on private enterprise? Searls, whose company, Newmont, owned stock in at least twenty nonferrous mining companies, heartily concurred with Hancock. It was Acheson who suggested a compromise solution. Instead of outright ownership by the Authority, why not “dominion”? Each side found the new word satisfactorily ambiguous.
No semantical ingenuity could patch up the weightiest dispute of the spring. This concerned how the parties to the A-bomb treaty should be held to their word, and it went to the heart of Baruch’s approach to the problem of national security. He believed that his paramount duty as American representative to the UN was to the United States and its defense, not to the world and reformers’ hopes for it. Shortly after his confirmation he met with the Joint Chiefs of Staff to sound them out about the bomb. As he subsequently related, he found the military conservative, and he was no less so. Furthermore, he and Swope harked back to Wilson days and to Article X of the Covenant of the League of Nations, which stipulated that an attack on one member of the League should be considered an attack on them all. In their view the logic of that statement was as compelling in 1946 as it had been to Wilson in 1919. In mid-May, at the close of a meeting in Washington between Baruch and his associates and the Acheson-Lilienthal group, the recorded last words were Swope’s. He said (as the stenographer paraphrased him): “. . . a law without a penalty was useless.” For another thing, Baruch and he were agreed that the penalties for breach of the treaty should be laid out in advance. It would be easy, of course, for a violator to veto the use of United Nations sanctions against it. Baruch proposed to meet this contingency by suspending the right of the veto (available to permanent members of the Security Council) in cases involving the bomb.
The argument against sanctions, which the other side raised, was that they would guarantee Soviet rejection of the plan, nothing more. Baruch did his best to charm the opposition, going so far with Oppenheimer as to disown his own colleagues. (“Don’t let these associates of mine worry you,” he was quoted as saying. “Hancock is pretty ‘Right’ but [with a wink] I’ll watch him. Searls is smart as a whip, but he sees Reds under every bed.”) What he would not abandon was the need of automatic punishment. On May 18, after two days of face-to-face meetings at Blair-Lee House in Washington, the two sides went their separate ways, Baruch’s team to develop a policy, the Acheson group to disband; its work was done. Before adjournment, however, there was one last request from Baruch. “Write down what your Report means to you,” he told them. “It has been studied by every chancellory in the world, it has been commented on by the press all over the country. Now tell me what it means to you.” Lilienthal was dumbfounded. They had talked of almost nothing else for two days.
Alger Hiss, who in 1948 would be accused of conducting Soviet espionage by the former Communist Whittaker Chambers and in 1950 would be convicted of perjury, in that summer of 1946 suggested a program for Baruch in a memo to Acheson. It was an extraordinarily bland proposition. He should, Hiss wrote, base his opening remarks on the Acheson-Lilienthal report, but should offer no fixed position, instead inviting other nations to present their ideas and welcoming an “orderly discussion of such proposals by the Commission.”
Baruch declined this policy poached egg (if indeed it was ever presented to him) and developed his own ideas. In the end he accepted the Acheson-Lilienthal report with certain amendments. One was that the United Nations conduct a survey of the world’s mineral resources. This had been Searls’ idea; he thought it would test the tolerance of the Soviet Union to o
utside inspection in any circumstances. Another suggestion was that the UN’s disarmament inquiry encompass the field of conventional arms too, where the Soviets held the advantage. Baruch also asked for a recasting of the report’s language on mine ownership and for a definite statement on veto-proof sanctions. In conference with Byrnes, he lost on the survey and disarmament ideas but prevailed on ownership and sanctions. President Truman approved the finished product, paragraph by paragraph, on June 7.
This was a week before Baruch was scheduled to make his opening speech before the Commission at its temporary quarters at Hunter College in New York. While policy had jelled, the dramatic expression of it hadn’t. One day on a bench in Central Park with Swope and Eberstadt, Baruch explained that he wanted to convey the portentousness of the situation in his opening remarks. The next morning Swope was on the phone. “I’ve got your opening line,” he told Baruch. “It comes from the best possible source—the Bible.”
On June 14 Lilienthal was thinning carrots in his vegetable garden when his wife called him into the kitchen to listen to Baruch. The voice, reading Swope’s words, came over the radio:
We are here to make a choice between the quick and the dead.
That is our business.
Behind the black portent of the new atomic age lies a hope which, seized upon with faith, can work our salvation. If we fail, then we have damned every man to be the slave of Fear. Let us not deceive ourselves: we must elect World Peace or World Destruction.
Science has torn from nature a secret so vast in its potentialities that our minds cower from the terror it creates. Yet terror is not enough to inhibit the use of the atomic bomb. The terror created by weapons has never stopped man from employing them. For each new weapon a defense has been produced, in time. But now we face a condition in which adequate defense does not exist.
Science, which gave us this dread power, shows that it can be made a giant help to humanity, but science does not show us how to prevent its baleful use. So we have been appointed to obviate that peril by finding a meeting of the minds and hearts of our peoples. Only in the will of mankind lies the answer.
It is to express this will and make it effective that we have been assembled. We must provide the mechanism to assure that atomic energy is used for peaceful purposes and preclude its use in war. To that end, we must provide immediate, swift, and sure punishment of those who violate the agreements that are reached by the nations. . . .
Lilienthal reached for pencil and paper with muddy hands and proceeded to take notes. The familiarity of the speech gratified him—its points were mostly drawn from his and Acheson’s report—but the sanctions talk disturbed him. Later Oppenheimer called. The physicist said that he had endorsed Baruch’s “Fourteen Points” but that the punishment portion of the talk had unsettled him too. He pointed out that it was a far cry from the “international cooperative development” theme of the Acheson-Lilienthal report and expressed doubt as to Baruch’s negotiating faculties. Lilienthal was sympathetic.
Editorial reaction to the speech was enthusiastic—the Manchester Guardian declared that in Baruch’s (and Swope’s and the Bible’s) quick-or-dead opening “rhetoric and truth were perfectly fused”—but the Soviet response was cool. Andrei Gromyko, speaking for the USSR, invited the United States to destroy its A-bombs, to suspend production of new ones, and to share its scientific secrets as an earnest of good faith. Although willing to entertain the idea of punishment for an atomic outlaw, he was unyielding on the question of the veto. Gromyko was a guest of Baruch’s at the second Joe Louis–Billy Conn fight in mid-June. As the champion was pounding the helpless Conn, the Russian leaned over to his host and said, “Conn must wish he had the veto.” Neither then nor later did the Soviet Union consent to open its boundaries to international inspection, to relinquish any real power to an international Authority, or, in general, to hasten the Marxist jubilee of the withering of the state.
Baruch never broke his impasse with the Soviets, but he did make some inroads on unfriendly Americans. One of these was Oppenheimer, who didn’t approve of Baruch’s diplomacy but agreed to advise the American contingent at the UN. Once Oppenheimer and Lilienthal shared an inside joke at Baruch’s expense. The joke was that Baruch had reported glowing progress to Truman—the vote in the Commission stood at 10–2, he was supposed to have said, with only the Soviet Union and Poland, its satellite, opposed. The point of the story was that the nation most critical to the success of the talks had been alienated—unnecessarily, they thought.
Late in July, Lilienthal agreed to fly up to the Adirondack Mountains to visit Baruch at Camp Uncas, once a retreat of the senior J. P. Morgan’s. He went with a heavy heart and only with some urging. An intermediary had brought him the message that Baruch needed help and was hurt that Lilienthal had hung back. At “camp,” which was staffed by five servants and a nurse, they talked for two days, Lilienthal this time doing most of the listening. (Apropos of the rustic splendor, Baruch remarked, “If it is good enough for Old Man Morgan, it is good enough for us, I guess.”) The transformation in Lilienthal was striking. Before setting out he had dreaded the prospect of Baruch’s “confusion and vagueness.” In his company he was charmed. An entry from his diary on the second day of his visit, July 29:
He [Baruch] has no illusions, I find, about how little progress there has been made, nor any notion that the 10-to-2 vote means anything. And he knows how terrible the alternative to no agreement will be. I had today by far the most satisfactory talks I have ever had with him—more relaxed, more interesting. . . .
Before his visit Lilienthal had diarially referred to Baruch as “Old Man” or “Baruch.” At Camp Uncas he fell into the usage “Mr. Baruch.” They returned to New York together on Baruch’s chartered DC-3.
What change the course of the arms race might have taken had Stalin visited Baruch at Morgan’s lodge is a matter for conjecture. (Baruch in fact wanted to pay a call on the Soviet dictator, but for one reason or another he never got around to it.) Baruch thought that there might be a little more progress if the American plan, which Swope had taken to calling the Baruch plan, got the publicity it deserved. He got after Acheson to distribute it through US embassies and consular offices, and he asked Gromyko why it hadn’t been published in full in the Soviet press. Lack of newsprint, the diplomat said. In that case, Baruch said, he would be glad to furnish any amount required; the suggestion fell flat.
Baruch and his colleagues were pessimistic on the outlook for an agreement before the negotiations started. By late summer or early autumn, if not before, Baruch had resigned himself to impasse. In August Charles W. Thayer, a Foreign Service officer with some experience in Moscow, warned him that the Soviets were incapable of trusting American officials: “Repeated efforts over a period of twenty years would seem to prove that the Russians will not trust any foreigner unless he is in jail, dead, or a member of the Communist party.” In a meeting on September 10, Swope declared that the problem was the Russians, and Baruch suggested a step-up in American production of atomic bombs. In a report to Truman on September 17, he summarized the divergent positions of the United States and the Soviet Union and concluded that there appeared to be no common ground. The United States, he reminded the President, had proposed international controls on atomic energy and veto-proof punishment of violators. The Soviets declined to relinquish any of the prerogatives of sovereignty. Baruch wound up: “We cannot afford to base national security on the assumption of success in our negotiations.”
Henry A. Wallace, the Truman Administration’s Secretary of Commerce, agreed that they wouldn’t succeed, but he blamed Baruch for that state of affairs, not the Soviets. He thought that Baruch’s fixation with the procedural question of the veto and with the hypothetical question of punishment obscured the fundamental business of choosing between the quick and the dead, and he recommended that the United States take steps to destroy its bombs and share its secrets right away. These views he had sent to Truman in a July mem
orandum. (A sample from it: “Is it any wonder that the Russians did not show any great enthusiasm for our plans? Would we have been enthusiastic if the Russians had a monopoly of atomic energy, and offered to share the information with us at some indefinite time in the future at their discretion if we agreed now not to try to make a bomb and give them information on our secret resources of uranium and thorium?”) On September 12, in a speech at Madison Square Garden, Wallace virtually presented a new Administration foreign policy, his own. He said in part, “The tougher we get, the tougher the Russians will get.” On September 18, to Baruch’s horror, the July memorandum was published, including the passages critical of the Baruch plan. Secretary of State Byrnes, who was in Paris espousing the official Administration line toward the Soviets, and Baruch, who was expressing the same policy in New York, wanted to know what was what. Baruch visited the President and said courteously that either Wallace must go, he (Baruch) must go, or Wallace must recant. The next day, September 20, Wallace went, but Baruch still wanted his apology. He said that the offense to be regretted was not the public row, as unhappy as that was, but the jumbling of the facts. Wallace refused to apologize, the two men exchanged charges in the press, and there the matter died.
The bluntest foreign charge of the season, hurled in late October by Vyacheslav M. Molotov, the Soviet Foreign Minister, was that Baruch was personally the leader of US imperialism. Five months later, in March 1947, an accusational balance was struck when a woman walked into the office of the FBI in New York and said that Baruch was the “main agent for Soviet Russia and had already given the secret of the atomic bomb to them.”
All sides to the bomb negotiations repeated themselves fruitlessly through the autumn. In November there was some more secret talk about Baruch going to Moscow to see Stalin, but again no mission resulted. On December 13, Byrnes gave Baruch approval to seek a vote on the plan he had introduced in June. The day agreed upon was December 30.