by Oliver Stone
With the nuclear issue looming large, scientists descended on Washington to promote international control of atomic energy and prevent military control of atomic research. Wallace supported their efforts, testifying before the Senate Special Committee on Atomic Energy that the May-Johnson bill, by providing for military oversight of peacetime nuclear research, would set up the “most undemocratic, dictatorial arrangements that have ever . . . been proposed to the Congress in a major legislative measure.”14 Its passage would threaten to deliver the American people into the hands of “military fascism.”15 Wallace further pressed Truman to remove control of U.S. atomic weapons from Leslie Groves and require authorization of the president, secretary of state, secretary of war, and secretary of the navy before they could be used. Wallace feared that given Soviet-hater Groves’s unilateral control over the nuclear arsenal, he might launch an atomic attack on his own authority.
Such a fear was not as farfetched as it might seem. In late 1945, Groves openly advocated a preemptive attack against the Soviet Union. He reasoned that the United States had two choices. It could quickly reach an agreement with the Soviets ensuring that nobody use atomic bombs under any circumstances. But such an agreement, he believed, would necessarily entail “the abandonment of all rights of privacy—that of the home, the laboratory and the industrial plant throughout the world including the United States.” Failure to reach an agreement, however, would mean the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union all having atomic bombs. In that case, he contended, “The United States must for all time maintain absolute supremacy in atomic weapons, including number, size and power, efficiency, means for immediate offensive use and defensive against atomic attack. We must also have a worldwide intelligence service which will keep us at all times completely informed of any activities of other nations in the atomic field and of their military intentions.” That would lead to an atomic arms race. But he didn’t think that “the world could . . . long survive such a race.” Therefore, he concluded, the United States should not permit any potential rival “to make or possess atomic weapons. If such a country started to make atomic weapons we would destroy its capacity to make them before it had progressed far enough to threaten us.”16
The scientists, in their efforts to achieve international control of atomic power and to ensure civilian control at home, always viewed Wallace as their most trustworthy ally in the administration. Oppenheimer visited him in October and voiced the scientists’ distress over the growing tension with the Soviet Union and the fact that Byrnes was using “the bomb as a pistol to get what we wanted in international diplomacy.” He knew the Russians would respond by very quickly developing their own bomb. Oppenheimer complained that “the heart has completely gone out of” the scientists. “All they think about now are the social and economic implications of the bomb.” Wallace was shaken by seeing Oppenheimer so agitated: “I never saw a man in such an extremely nervous state as Oppenheimer. He seemed to feel that the destruction of the entire human race was imminent.” Wallace shared Oppenheimer’s concern about the precarious nature of the international situation and encouraged him to speak directly with Truman. Unsettled by the encounter with Oppenheimer, Wallace commented, “The guilt consciousness of the atomic bomb scientists is one of the most astounding things I have ever seen.”17
Oppenheimer took Wallace’s advice and met with Truman six days later. The meeting could not have gone worse. Truman stressed national considerations in passing an atomic energy act; Oppenheimer pressed for international control. The meeting ended disastrously with Oppenheimer’s confession of guilt over the bomb.
Wallace persevered in his effort to mitigate the influence of Truman’s conservative advisors, who preferred confrontation with the Soviet Union over continuing the wartime alliance. They saw malign intent in every Soviet action. Wallace encouraged Truman to understand how his words and actions looked to Soviet leaders. Following the cabinet meeting the day after Truman’s unfortunate encounter with Oppenheimer, Wallace stayed behind to speak with the president. He again urged Truman to be evenhanded with Great Britain and the Soviet Union and to offer the Soviet Union a loan comparable to the one the United States had offered Great Britain. He compared U.S. dictating election results in Cuba and Mexico to the way the Soviets exerted control over the Balkan states. Truman, as always, agreed completely with Wallace’s analysis of events.
The effects of Wallace’s repeated interventions were usually short-lived. Truman’s other advisors discerned a more threatening pattern in Soviet actions and succeeded in convincing the president to view the world through their prism. By November, they were referring to Wallace and Truman’s progressive friends as “Reds” and telling Truman, “Don’t pay any attention to what those ‘Reds’ want you to do.”18
Meanwhile, Soviet leaders were pursuing their own agenda: securing their gains in Eastern Europe and Asia, rebuilding their shattered economy, and making certain that Germany and Japan never again posed a threat to Soviet security. They were well positioned to act on those interests. With Communists having played a leading role in antifascist resistance movements, beleaguered Europeans often welcomed Soviet troops as liberators. Communist party membership soared across Europe. Communists won more than 20 percent of the vote in France, Italy, and Finland in 1945. With European populations uprooted, homeless, hungry, and unemployed, the prospect seemed ripe for further Communist gains. In Italy, where 1.7 million joined the party, real wages in 1945 were barely a quarter of 1913 levels and GNP was at 1911 levels. Undersecretary of State Dean Acheson worried that Europe would turn toward socialism, leaving the United States isolated: “They have suffered so much and they believe so deeply that governments can take some action which will alleviate their sufferings, that they will demand that the whole business of state control and state interference shall be pushed further and further.”19
But the Soviet Union, adhering to wartime understandings and hoping to maintain the wartime alliance, went out of its way to restrain its frustrated Communist allies in China, Italy, France, and Greece. In early 1946, a Gallup Poll found that only 26 percent of Americans thought the Soviets sought world domination. Thirteen percent thought the British did.20
During these early postwar months, Truman vacillated in his attitude toward Stalin, often likening him to Boss Pendergast in Kansas City. Others did likewise. Even Averell Harriman, a fierce critic who worked with Stalin as ambassador during the war, recognized the complexity of his personality:
It is hard for me to reconcile the courtesy and consideration that he showed me personally with the ghastly cruelty of his wholesale liquidations. Others, who did not know him personally, see only the tyrant in Stalin. I saw the other side as well—his high intelligence, that fantastic grasp of detail, his shrewdness and his surprising human sensitivity that he was capable of showing. . . . I found him better informed than Roosevelt, more realistic than Churchill, in some ways the most effective of the war leaders . . . for me Stalin remains the most inscrutable and contradictory character I have ever known.21
With tensions over Poland having eased, Germany would provide an early test case for postwar cooperation. After Germany’s surrender, the Allies divided the country into Soviet, U.S., British, and French zones. Roosevelt had first supported the Morgenthau Plan for “pastoralization” of Germany to ensure that it never again posed a threat to its neighbors. “We have to be tough with Germany,” he told Morgenthau in August 1944. “We either have to castrate the German people or you have got to treat them in such a manner so they can’t just go on reproducing people who want to continue the way they have in the past.”22 But the United States reversed itself once it became convinced that restoration of the German economy would be key to overall European recovery. This placed the Western powers at odds with the Soviets, who feared German revitalization and were busy stripping the eastern zone of assets to ship back to the Soviet Union. These conflicting interests impeded the creation of a unified Germany, thereby
planting the seeds for later conflict, while Germans struggled to eke out a living regardless of which zone they lived in.
The first major superpower conflict erupted in the Middle East, not Europe, as Stalin moved to expand Soviet influence in Iran and Turkey at declining Britain’s expense. The Middle East had assumed increased strategic significance following completion of the Suez Canal in 1869 and the introduction of long-distance air routes in the early twentieth century. English historian Arnold Toynbee described it as “the shortest route between the two chief concentrations of population and power in the world of the twentieth century”: India, East Asia, and the Pacific on the one hand, and Europe, America, and the Atlantic on the other. He explained that “command of the Middle East carried with it the power of keeping open the direct routes between those two geographical poles, or closing them, or forcing them open again.”23 The Soviet Union had long coveted the Turkish Straits, which would have allowed it access to the Mediterranean, and Stalin believed that he had won that concession from Roosevelt and Churchill during the war. He now pressured Turkey to build joint military bases in the straits. The ensuing conflict, like everything else in the Middle East, revolved around oil. At the start of the war, the United States accounted for 61 percent of overall world oil production. Great Britain controlled 72 percent of Middle Eastern oil, the United States only 10 percent. The United States now sought a bigger share in the Middle East. Saudi Arabia held the key to U.S. ambitions. In 1943, the United States extended lend-lease aid to the oil-rich sheikdom. The following year, Saudi King Ibn Saud granted the United States permission to construct an air base at Dharan.24
In a 1944 meeting with British Ambassador Lord Halifax, Roosevelt drew a map of Middle Eastern oil holdings and informed Halifax that Iranian oil belonged to Great Britain, Saudi oil to the United States, and Iraqi and Kuwaiti oil to both. The following year, Roosevelt concluded a deal with Ibn Saud pledging U.S. support in return for exclusive access to Saudi oil. Truman understood the importance of maintaining U.S. control of this vital resource. In August 1945, Gordon Merriam, Chief of the State Department Near East Division, alerted Truman to the fact that Saudi Arabia’s oil resources were “a stupendous source of strategic power, and one of the greatest material prizes in human history.”25
Iran was another prize. In September 1941, tired of Reza Shah Pahlavi’s erratic behavior and questionable loyalties, Britain and the USSR invaded and occupied the country, forcing Reza Shah into exile and replacing him with his twenty-one-year-old son.26
Having eyed Iran’s rich oil reserves since the 1920s, the United States now maneuvered to expand its influence, offering lend-lease aid and sending in civilian and military advisors. In 1943, Secretary of State Cordell Hull explained to Roosevelt why it was essential to limit British and Soviet power: “It is to our interest that no great power be established on the Persian Gulf opposite the important American petroleum developments in Saudi Arabia.”27
Like Great Britain and the United States, the Soviet Union did indeed have designs on Iranian oil. Stalin wanted to develop the oil fields in northern Iran. He also worried about the security of the Soviet Union’s Baku oil fields, which were only a hundred miles north of the Russo-Iranian border. Stalin pressed Iran for oil concessions comparable to those granted to Great Britain and the United States and, with troops remaining in the country from World War II, supported a separatist uprising in Iran’s northern provinces to force Iran’s hand.
Churchill, meanwhile, itched for a confrontation with the Soviet Union. A rabid anti-Communist and unabashed imperialist, Churchill had tried to draw the United States into military engagement with the Soviet Union as far back as 1918. Though forced to defer his long-sought confrontation during the war, he pounced as soon as the opportunity presented itself. Soviet probes in Iran and Turkey had threatened the British sphere in the Middle East and Mediterranean, and Great Britain’s hold on India seemed precarious. The exposure of a Soviet atomic espionage ring in Canada in early February added credibility to warnings issued by Forrestal, Leahy, and other hard-liners. A speech that month by Stalin raised further hackles, though it was actually much less inflammatory than Soviet expert George Kennan and others contended.
Truman and Churchill gesture from a train en route to Fulton, Missouri, where Churchill would deliver his bellicose “Iron Curtain” speech in early March 1946.
Anti-Soviet sentiments were clearly on the rise in early March 1946 when Churchill spoke in Fulton, Missouri, with Truman sitting on the platform. His bellicose words delivered a sharp, perhaps fatal, blow to any prospects for postwar comity:
From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. . . . Police governments are prevailing . . . in a great number of countries . . . the Communist parties or fifth columns constitute a growing challenge and peril to Christian civilization. . . . I do not believe that Soviet Russia desires war. What they desire is the fruits of war and the indefinite expansion of their power and doctrines. 28
Stalin responded angrily, accusing Churchill of being in bed with the “warmongers” who followed the “racial theory” that only English speakers could “decide the fate of the whole world.”29
The speech aroused intense passions on all sides. Major newspapers were mixed in their reactions. The New York Times applauded Churchill’s harsh rhetoric, spoken “with the force of the prophet proved right before.”30 The Washington Post also found elements to applaud but criticized Churchill’s “illogical” call for an “international police force,” as “overdo[ing] the emphasis on force.”31
The Chicago Tribune agreed with Churchill’s analysis of what was occurring in Eastern Europe but sharply disagreed with his remedy and pounced upon his defense of British imperialism: “He proposes an alliance, half slave and half free, with the British empire representing slavery. He comes really as a suppliant, begging assistance for that old and evil empire and frankly expecting to get it on his own terms.” Such an alliance would require U.S. acceptance of “the enslavement and exploitation of millions of British subjects.” The Tribune lectured sternly that the United States should not use its power “to maintain British tyranny thruout the world. We cannot become partners in slave holding.”32
Several senators vigorously denounced Churchill’s defense of empire. Maine Republican Owen Brewster proclaimed, “We cannot assume the heritage of colonial policy represented by the British foreign and colonial office. Nine-tenths of the world is not Anglo-Saxon. We must consider how we are going to gain the confidence of the world that is not Slav or Anglo-Saxon. I fear an alliance with Britain would be the catalyst that would precipitate the world against us. We should orient American policy independently with the Russians.” Florida’s Claude Pepper observed, “He spoke beautifully for imperialism—but it is always British imperialism. I think his tory sentiments make him as much opposed to Russia as to a labor government in his own country. We want Anglo-American cooperation, but not at the exclusion of the rest of the world.” Pepper later joined fellow Democrats Harley Kilgore of West Virginia and Glen Taylor of Idaho in issuing a statement rejecting Churchill’s proposal for “an old fashioned, power politics, military alliance between Great Britain and the United States” that would “cut the throat of the UNO.”33 Pepper told reporters, “It is shocking to see Mr. Churchill . . . align himself with the old Chamberlain Tories who strengthened the Nazis as part of their anti-Soviet crusade . . . the people of the world who really want peace [must] take note of this Tory clamor in Britain and the United States which is building up war. The new British-American imperialism which Mr. Churchill proposes and defends makes us false to the very ideals for which both Nations fought.”34
Nor did the public clamor to support Churchill’s belligerent call. As one Washington Post reader asserted, “Senator Pepper and his colleagues should be congratulated on their courageous reply to the war-mongering speech of Churchill. Who is the President of the United States, Truman
or Churchill? Why should Churchill tell us what our policies should be when even the British people repudiated Churchill’s policies in the last election. Churchill is a warmonger and it is time that Senator Pepper told him so. We need a second Declaration of Independence from British rule.”35
Riding on the train to Missouri with Churchill, Truman had read Churchill’s speech in its entirety and heartily approved of its contents. But, in light of the outcry against Churchill’s pugnacity, he denied having advance knowledge of what Churchill would say. Truman’s boldfaced lies were quickly exposed by journalists.
Led by members of the Roosevelt family, New Deal progressives condemned Churchill and beseeched Truman to change course before it was too late. Speaking publicly, Eleanor Roosevelt deplored Churchill’s inflammatory remarks. James Roosevelt, Franklin and Eleanor’s oldest son, did likewise at a meeting of the Independent Citizens’ Committee of the Arts, Sciences and Professions. He declared, “Let us make clear to all the world that the Right Hon. Winston Churchill—now a guest in our country—speaks only for himself when he attacks world peace—when he proposes once again that mankind divide itself into two camps. Too often in the past his cronies—both here and abroad—have been outright reactionaries. It is up to us and to every peace-loving man and woman in the world to stand up now and repudiate the word, the schemes and the political allies of the Hon. Winston Churchill.” Roosevelt knew what Truman could do if he wanted to ease tensions: “I would like to see the Secretary of Commerce, Henry Wallace, fly to Russia.” Because of his reputation “for fairness and integrity,” Roosevelt explained, a personal mission from him to Stalin could do more for peace and understanding “than any number of sharply worded notes or communiqués.”36