by Roy Jenkins
Did this point to short-sighted callousness on the part of Truman and all those around him, including the British? The charge of short-sightedness may have more validity than that of callousness. To evalute either, however, it is necessary to think oneself back into the circumstance of the time. Brutal though the world of the 1980s may be in some ways, and appalling beyond belief though the contingent nuclear threat may have become, the carnage actually experienced in the mid-1940s was qualitatively quite different from that to which countries at peace, or even engaged in sporadic guerrilla fighting, are habituated. Now an accident involving a hundred deaths rings around the world. Then an estimated 45,000 people had recently been killed in three days of ‘conventional’ bombing of Dresden. The comparable, and still more recent figure for the fire raids on Tokyo was 78,000. Dresden was unnecessary, but nobody thought that the war against Japan could be waged without such raids, and only one close advisor, Arnold, the Commander of the Army Air Force, believed that it could be won by them alone. The rest believed that victory would involve an invasion of the Japanese mainland. In the aftermath of the bloody battle for Okinawa General Marshall estimated that this would cost half a million American casualties. In any direction therefore there stretched a path of carnage.
The news that the Alamogordo test had been a success, and that the bomb was available for use, which reached Truman on the fourth day of Potsdam, came to him as a relief and not as a burden. It justified a huge secret investment of money and resources which had been made on executive responsibility alone. It assured a much quicker victory at a cost of many fewer American casualties, and probably of fewer Japanese ones too. It eliminated the (fairly faint) possibility of the Russians getting the bomb first. And, Truman felt, it strengthened his position in trying to handle Stalin during the remaining two weeks of the conference and beyond.
This did not mean that he intended to threaten the Russians with the use of the bomb against them. Indeed he waited another week before almost casually informing Stalin of its existence, and then did so in terms so vague that had Stalin not been already well-informed through his spy network it might have meant little to him. What it did mean was that the Americans ceased to have an interest in getting the Russians to enter the war against Japan, and were therefore no longer hobbled by this consideration in arguing with them about Poland and the other puppet régimes which they were imposing in Eastern Europe.5 Henceforward it was the Russians who wanted to get in before the peace, and the Americans who had become indifferent. This new freedom however only released the flow of American argument and not the peoples of Hungary, Bulgaria and Roumania, where the Russians remained firmly in occupation and control.
Truman half, but only half, realized the qualitative difference between the new bomb and the previous use of massive quantities of high explosive. He recorded in his diary for July 25th: ‘It is certainly a good thing for the world that Hitler’s crowd or Stalin’s did not discover the atomic bomb. It seems to me the most terrible thing ever discovered, but it can be made the most useful.’10 This immediately followed a passage in which he said that he had instructed Stimson to use it only against military objectives so that ‘soldiers and sailors are the target and not women and children’.11 (Quite how this was reconcilable with what happened at Hiroshima, and still less with Hiroshima plus Nagasaki, is difficult to see. In reality with a weapon of such force, the distinction was unsustainable.)
What had been deliberately decided by Truman and his advisers was that it should not be used against Tokyo or Kyoto. But this saved face and buildings of note, not lives. The second or Nagasaki bomb seems to have been dropped, five days after the Hiroshima one, under a single authorization and without intermediate civilian re-appraisal. (It was a bomb of a somewhat different type but its release could hardly have been justified on the need for further experiment.6) The issue here is tied up with whether more explicit warnings should have been given to the Japanese, both before Hiroshima and between then and Nagasaki, and whether indeed a demonstration in the waters of Tokyo Bay might have been equally effective.
These issues were in turn entangled with a dispute within the US Administration as to whether the unfortunate commitment to unconditional surrender could be interpreted sufficiently elastically to allow the Emperor of Japan to remain upon the throne. An undecisive approach to this, partly in deference to ‘progressive’ opinion, made it more difficult to send clear messages which might have achieved peace without carnage.7 The Americans were also subject to the inhibition that they started with a total of only four bombs. Nagasaki used up the last but one. They did not therefore feel that they had much margin to spare for error, explosions which did not occur, or demonstrations which failed to convince. Furthermore they were impatient to end the war before the Russians could become effectively involved, and start making in Asia the territorial and political demands which were disfiguring Eastern Europe.
Truman therefore allowed the two bombs to be dropped and the world to enter a new era; and he did so with a good conscience. At the time the decision did not lie heavy upon his mind, and he did not subsequently regret it. The case in his favour is considerable. He believed he was saving rather than sacrificing lives by acting as he did, and he may well have been right. Certainly no alternative figure with whom the ultimate decision could conceivably have rested-Roosevelt, Churchill, Attlee-would have acted otherwise. Equally certainly he did not offend Stalin or provide the Soviet determination to catch up by dropping the bomb. Stalin, when told by Truman at Potsdam what he broadly already knew, answered that he hoped the Americans would make good use of the weapon against Japan. What spurred the Russian nuclear programme was the knowledge that the Americans had the bomb, not their decision to use it. Possession Truman could not conceivably have concealed.
The case against him, Nagasaki apart, which in retrospect at least looks unnecessary and therefore inexcusable, is almost more one of style than of substance. He took the decisions and received the results of their being executed with an inappropriate lack of sombreness and sensitivity. He could be excused for not wholly foreseeing the qualitative nature of the change over which he was presiding. Very few people did. But he knew the immediate destructiveness, even if not the longer-term damage of the weapon he had unleashed. His reaction on board USS Augusta, when news of the successful attack on Hiroshima came through, which was that of rushing round the ship and proclaiming the news with glee, does not sound right. Nor does his laconic diary comment on the White House staff conference on the morning after Nagasaki ‘Nothing unusual to discuss.’8 No doubt a wringing of hands would have served no purpose other than that of self-indulgence. But he was too brutal about those with less strong stomachs. When Robert Oppenheimer, a key figure in the development of the bomb, expressed remorse a few months after its use, Truman told Acheson that he had no patience with such a ‘cry-baby’.12
All this must be seen against the background of the death, starvation and disease on an unprecedented scale, not in America, but over much of Europe and Asia, which was Truman’s inheritance as President, and which he had just observed in Germany. Truman’s state of mind was not perhaps of central practical importance. The bomb was dropped. The war was won. Truman was back in Washington after five weeks. He had survived his first -and last—international conference. His popularity was still high. But his honeymoon was over. The hard slog of routine presidential life was beginning.
6
TRUMAN BATTERED
September 1945 to November 1946 was the nadir of Truman’s presidency. Most things went wrong. His Gallup poll rating achieved a spectacular decline from 87% to 32%, and this sustained plunge in the popularity of himself and his administration culminated in a crushing Democratic defeat in the mid-term Congressional elections. The Republicans gained control of both chambers for the first time since 1928. They were 246 to 188 in the House and they edged ahead by 51 to 45 in the Senate.
All this was bad enough, although popularity, except cruc
ially in November 1948, was rarely the hall-mark of the Truman achievement. What made it worse, however, was that during this early period a large proportion of the misfortunes were his own fault. It was rarely a case of statesmanlike decisions, deliberately taken and courageously sustained, being too longsighted for the short-term whims of a war-weary electorate. Much more was it a question of an administration ill at ease with itself, both at Cabinet and at White House staff level, allowing an uncertain president to stagger from one ill-prepared decision to another.
The Cabinet was inexperienced after the changes of the summer of 1945. It became more so with the retirement of Stimson that September, the resignation of Ickes in February 1946, the promotion of Vinson in April, and the sacking of Wallace in September. Thereafter, of Roosevelt’s Cabinet officers, only Forrestal remained, and he knew little of domestic politics. Byrnes was not inexperienced, but his relationship with Truman never recovered from his failure to keep the President informed of the developments at the long Moscow meeting of foreign ministers in December 1945. Thereafter he was always operating on borrowed time, with Truman anxious to replace him with Marshall as soon as was propitious after the completion of the General’s China mission. Byrnes privately submitted his resignation, ostensibly on medical grounds, on April 16th, 1946, and on May 9th Marshall in Shanghai agreed, through the agency of Eisenhower, to become Secretary of State when the President wished. Although Byrnes had set a date of July 1st, the changeover was allowed to drag on, as was Marshall’s mission, until early 1947.
It would have been much better for the change to have been made much more quickly after Truman lost confidence in Byrnes. In a curious way the damage was exacerbated by the fact that there was no consistent policy difference between President and Secretary of State. They were both in mid-stream without a paddle. They had left the bank of belief in the unity of the wartime alliance, but neither had reached the other bank of wishing to create a new Western alliance, with Britain, basically enfeebled by the war but undevastated and with a continuity of political régime even if not of government, inevitably the initial second partner. Truman had taken Churchill to Fulton, Missouri, in March and had presided benevolently over the ‘iron curtain’ speech with its remedy of an Anglo-American partnership. A few days later, however, he had distanced himself from it, and in September he swallowed without difficulty the passage in Henry Wallace’s Madison Square Garden speech which said: ‘I am neither anti-British nor pro-British—neither anti-Russian nor pro-Russian.’ Nonetheless he had initially thought Byrnes too soft with the Russians, and then perhaps too hard. Throughout the summer of 1946 the President was playing with the idea of giving them a substantial loan. The fact of the matter was that Truman and Byrnes had become too suspicious of each other ever to be in exactly the same ideological place at the same time.1 The mutual distrust compounded what would in any event have been a uniquely difficult period of adjustment for American foreign policy.
The handling of nuclear policy was almost equally uncertain. During the war Roosevelt had made a conscious decision not to share atomic secrets with the Russians. Truman’s early post-war position was in favour of such sharing in exchange for a mutual agreement to stop further development and undertake that none of the three main powers (this was in order to include Britain) would use the bomb without the agreement of the other two. Stimson’s final act as Secretary of War was to bring a memorandum advocating such a course before a cabinet meeting on September 21st. This led to an animated two-hour discussion and a fairly even split. Stimson was supported by Acheson (in Byrnes’s absence), Wallace, Schwellenbach and Hannegan. Most of the new Truman nominees—Vinson, Clark and Anderson—argued the other way. So, with particular virulence, did Forrestal. What was more to the point was that Truman regarded himself as firmly committed to the Stimson side. ‘Anyway I’ll have to make a decision’, he wrote to his wife after describing the line-up, ‘and the Ayes will have it even if I’m the only Aye. It is probably the most momentous one I will make.’1
His actions did not live up to the promise of his words. He had begun somewhat badly at Potsdam when his laconic announcement to Stalin of the American possession of the bomb omitted any suggestion of shared knowledge or international control. Then under pressure of a hostile Congressional and press reaction to the Stimson proposal, probably inspired by Forrestal, which he skilfully presented as an initiative of the ‘soft’ Wallace rather than of the ‘hard’ Stimson, Truman resiled, or at least postponed.
His hesitation, paradoxically in view of subsequent national attitudes, was reinforced by a tripartite meeting with Attlee and Mackenzie King of Canada which took place in Washington in mid-November. Attlee had urged a meeting earlier than Truman would have wished because he was under parliamentary pressure to seek international control. But his interest was in safeguarding British access to American knowledge rather than in extending it to the Soviet Union. ‘In my view’, he wrote in a preparatory memorandum, ‘an offer to do this now would not be likely to effect a change of attitude to world problems by the USSR. It would be regarded as a confession of weakness. The establishment of better relations should precede the exchange of technical information.’2
As this was also Byrnes’s position it effectively precluded any likelihood of agreement to go further along the lines of the Stimson memorandum. Whether Truman might have wished to do so at this stage is uncertain. What is the case is that in the view of Vannevar Bush, the chief technical advisor on the US side, the conference was remarkably ill-prepared by the Americans. ‘I have never participated in anything so completely unorganized or irregular’, he wrote to Stimson.3
Whether or not he was aware of this, Truman consoled himself with an odd thought in relation to himself and his principal guest: ‘Mr Attlee came yesterday and we had a brilliant—most brilliant I’d say—State dinner for him and Mackenzie King of Canada.’ Their great quality was that they were anglophone. ‘On the visit[s] of the President of Chile and de Gaulle it was a case of one sentence at a time to an interpreter,’ he added, ‘and by the time I’d arrive at the thought I’d wanted to express I’d forgot what was to be said and gone off on a tangent maybe. ‘4
Truman’s next nuclear initiative was to appoint Churchill’s friend, Bernard Baruch, as US representative to the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission, and to allow him to present the Baruch Plan to the UN in June 1946. This was an exercise in cynicism on Truman’s part, and of statesmanship on nobody’s part. Truman had no real respect for Baruch. ‘That stuffed shirt will have something more to do than sit on a park bench and pass out impossible advice’ he wrote to his wife about Baruch’s appointment, adding a little surprisingly: ‘There never was a greater egotist unless it was Franklin D.’5 The appointment was strongly opposed by Acheson and by Lilienthal. And Baruch’s proposals never had the slightest chance of being accepted by the Soviet Union. They were good propaganda within the United States. They were not serious diplomacy. They were based on the totally illusory view that Russia would accept, without a veto, the discipline of the then largely American-influenced UN majority. With their failure the road was open to the Soviet achievement of the A-bomb in 1949, the H-bomb in 1953 and the escalating equality of the 1960s and 70s.
A similar uncertainty of touch marked Truman’s approach to domestic problems. He knew very little economics. But that was not crucial. Sensible economic policies have been followed by technically ill-equipped political leaders almost as frequently as foolish ones by those who believed they were masters of the dismal science. Nor was there anything discreditable in the fact that as he sailed back across the Atlantic from Potsdam he had little idea whether the major domestic menace confronting the United States in the post-war world was inflation or deflation. It was perfectly reasonable to be prepared either for a threat of mass unemployment as the forces were demobilized and five million defence jobs disappeared, or for shortages and a wage explosion leading to a runaway pressure on prices. He did not foresee that it was
possible to achieve both together, but had he done so he would have been 30 years ahead of his time.
At first he was more inclined to fear slump. It was the need to counteract this threat which primarily informed his long message to Congress (the longest since Theodore Roosevelt) on September 6th. Three months later he had swung round and when asked at a press conference whether he regarded deflation as anywhere near as dangerous as inflation replied unambiguously ‘No, I do not.’6 Here again a flexibility as events developed could perfectly well be justified. What was more dangerous was that Truman lacked both any instinctive philosophical approach to economic problems and any structured group of advisers who themselves shared the same basic outlook.
Was Truman a New Dealer, or was he not? He had of course voted for all its most controversial aspects in the 1930s, but that may have owed more to party loyalty than ideological conviction. He was in favour of extensions of welfare provisions, and proposed several important ones that fall. But he was alleged to be unsound from a New Deal point of view on deficit financing (but so, it could be argued were Roosevelt and his Secretary of the Treasury: they preached virtue and practised sin) and he was not instinctively at home with the liberals who had been Roosevelt’s most enthusiastic supporters before ‘Dr New Deal’ was replaced by ‘Dr Win the War’. ‘Same bunch of Prima Donnas who helped drive the Boss to his grave are still riding his ghost,’ he wrote on his appointment sheet after a meeting with the Roosevelt National Memorial Committee on September 5th.7 And many of those who were close to him in these early days were pretty vehemently conservative. Snyder, even before his elevation to the Treasury, was probably the closest of the lot, both personally and as an economic adviser. His instincts were those of a business man and banker and they were not made any more liberal by the fact that his outlook was that of small town business and banking rather than of the Wall Street establishment.