The Untold History of the United States

by Oliver Stone

  92 William E. Leuchtenberg, In the Shadow of FDR: From Harry Truman to George W. Bush (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983), 1.

  93 Harry S. Truman, Memoirs by Harry S. Truman: 1945: Year of Decisions (New York: New American Library, 1955), 31.

  94 Lloyd C. Gardner, Architects of Illusion: Men and Ideas in American Foreign Policy, 1941–1949 (New York: Quadrangle Books, 1970), 56.

  95 Walter Millis, ed., The Forrestal Diaries (New York: The Viking Press, 1951), 36–37.

  96 LaFeber, The American Age, 417–418.

  97 Truman, Memoirs by Harry S. Truman: 1945, 25–26.

  98 Donald C. Watt, Succeeding John Bull: America in Britain’s Place, 1900–1975 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 105.

  99 Robert H. Ferrell, ed. Off the Record: The Private Papers of Harry S. Truman (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1980), 17.

  100 Truman, Memoirs by Harry S. Truman: 1945, 21, 104.

  101 Gar Alperovitz, The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb and the Architecture of an American Myth (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), 197.

  102 Hasegawa, Racing the Enemy, 57.

  103 Truman, Memoirs by Harry S. Truman: 1945, 86; Gardner, Architects of Illusion, 58–59.

  104 Truman, Memoirs by Harry S. Truman: 1945, 95.

  105 “Memorandum by Mr. Charles E. Bohlen, Assistant to the Secretary of State, of a Meeting at the White House, April 23, 1945,” in Foreign Relations of the United States, 1945, vol. 5 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1967), 253.

  106 Truman, Memoirs by Harry S. Truman: 1945, 87.

  107 “WPB Aide Urges U.S. to Keep War Set-up,” New York Times, January 20, 1944.

  108 Robert H. Ferrell, Harry S. Truman: A Life (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1994), 200.

  109 Truman, Memoirs by Harry S. Truman: 1945, 99.

  110 Arnold A. Offner, Another Such Victory: President Truman and the Cold War, 1945–1953 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 33.

  111 Gaddis, The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1941–1947, 205.

  112 Truman, Memoirs by Harry S. Truman: 1945, 102–103.

  113 Gaddis, Russia, The Soviet Union, and the United States, 157.

  114 Gaddis, The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1941–1947, 227.

  115 Martin J. Sherwin, A World Destroyed: Hiroshima and the Origins of the Arms Race (New York: Vintage, 1987), 172–174, 180–183; Elizabeth Kimball MacLean, Joseph E. Davies: Envoy to the Soviets (New York: Praeger, 1992), 136–140; Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas, The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made: Acheson, Bohlen, Harriman, Kennan, Lovett, McCloy (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986), 279.

  116 “Durable World Peace Fervent Aim of Stalin,” Atlanta Constitution, June 22, 1945; “Russia Seen Eager for Lasting Peace,” New York Times, June 22, 1945.

  117 Don Whitehead and John Beals Romeiser, Beachhead Don: Reporting the War from the European Theater, 1942–1945 (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), 355–356.

  118 Harold Denny, “First Link Made Wednesday by Four Americans on Patrol,” New York Times, April 28, 1945.

  119 Leffler, For the Soul of Mankind, 34.

  120 C. L. Sulzberger, “What the Russians Want—and Why,” New York Times, June 10, 1945.

  121 Editorial, “Russia’s Children,” Washington Post, January 1, 1945.

  122 “First Lady Gathers Books for Russians,” New York Times, July 1, 1945.

  123 “‘I Am an American’ Is Powerful Password in Poland or Russia,” Washington Post, March 4, 1945.

  124 George Gallup, “New Confidence in Russian Aims Shown in Poll,” Los Angeles Times, March 11, 1945.

  125 Melvyn P. Leffler, “Inside Enemy Archives: The Cold War Reopened,” Foreign Affairs 75 (July–August 1996), 123.

  126 Alexander Werth, Russia at War (New York: Dutton, 1964), 768.

  127 Anita Kondoyanidi, “The Liberating Experience: War Correspondents, Red Army Soldiers, and the Nazi Extermination Camps,” Russian Review 69 (July 2010), 438.

  128 Leffler, For the Soul of Mankind, 29.

  129 Offner, Another Such Victory, 54.

  130 “America and Russia,” Life, July 30, 1945, 20.

  131 Gardner, Architects of Illusion, 58.

  CHAPTER 4: THE BOMB: THE TRAGEDY OF A SMALL MAN

  1 Paul Fussell, “Thank God for the Atom Bomb: Hiroshima: A Soldier’s View,” New Republic, August 26 and 29, 1981, 28–30.

  2 Robert E. Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins: An Intimate History (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1950), 605.

  3 Roger M. Macklis, “The Great Radium Scandal,” Scientific American 269 (1993), 94–99; Spencer R. Weart, Nuclear Fear: A History of Images (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 50–52.

  4 H. G. Wells, The World Set Free (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1914), 152.

  5 Barton J. Bernstein, “Introduction” in Toward a Livable World: Leo Szilard and the Crusade for Nuclear Arms Control, ed. Helen S. Hawkins, G. Allen Greb, and Gertrud Weiss Szilard (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), xxvi.

  6 Allan M. Winkler, Life Under a Cloud: American Anxiety About the Atom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 36.

  7 Arthur Holly Compton, Atomic Quest: A Personal Narrative (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956), 49.

  8 Jeremy Bernstein, Hans Bethe, Prophet of Energy (New York: Basic Books, 1980), 73.

  9 Nuel P. Davis, Lawrence and Oppenheimer (New York: Da Capo Press, 1986), 130.

  10 Compton, Atomic Quest, 128.

  11 William Lanouette with Bela Silard, Genius in the Shadows: A Biography of Leo Szilard, the Man Behind the Bomb (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 245.

  12 Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (New York: Vintage Books, 2005), 185.

  13 Michael S. Sherry, The Rise of American Air Power: The Creation of Armageddon (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987), 172, 236.

  14 Henry A. Wallace, “The Price of Free World Victory,” in Henry A. Wallace, The Price of Vision: The Diary of Henry A. Wallace, 1942–1946, ed. John Morton Blum (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1973), 636.

  15 Anthony Cave Brown, “C”: The Secret Life of Sir Stewart Graham Menzies (New York: Macmillan, 1987), 481–484; Wallace, The Price of Vision, 385. In October 1945, Wallace recorded the following about Dahl in his diary: “He is a nice boy and I am very fond of him but necessarily he is working out problems from the standpoint of British policy, and British policy clearly is to provoke the maximum distrust between the United States and Russia and thus prepare the groundwork for World War III.” Wallace, The Price of Vision, 492–493.

  16 Culver and Hyde, American Dreamer, 298-300; “Costa Ricans Mass to Cheer Wallace,” New York Times, March 19, 1943; “Wallace Sees Evil If Few Hold Riches,” New York Times, April 20, 1943.

  17 George Gallup, “The Gallup Poll,” Washington Post, March 19, 1943.

  18 Edwin W. Pauley, “Why Truman Is President,” as told to Richard English. Copy in Harry S. Truman Library, Papers of Harry S. Truman, White House Central Files, Confidential Files. Referring to it as “The Pauley Conspiracy,” he comments, “If it was a conspiracy, I am proud to have been its organizer.”

  19 Steve Kettmann, “Politics 2000,” www.salon.com/politics2000/feature/2000/03/20/rice.

  20 Robert J. Lifton and Greg Mitchell, Hiroshima in America: A Half Century of Denial (New York: Avon Books, 1995), 196–197.

  21 Harry S. Truman, Dear Bess: The Letters from Harry to Bess Truman, 1910–1959, ed. Robert H. Ferrell (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1998), 80, 83; Ronald Takaki, Hiroshima: Why America Dropped the Atomic Bomb (Boston: Little, Brown, 1995), 109–111; Merle Miller, Plain Speaking: An Oral Biography of Harry S. Truman, 34–35, 51. One of the neighborhood boys, Morton Chiles, recalled that they “used to call Harry a sissy. He wore glasses and didn’t play our games. He carried books, and we’d carry a baseball bat. So we call
ed him a sissy.” When, years later, a young questioner asked him if he was “popular” as “a little boy,” Truman replied honestly, “Why, no, I was never popular. The popular boys were the ones who were good at games and had big, tight fists. I was never like that. Without my glasses I was blind as a bat, and to tell the truth, I was kind of a sissy. If there was any danger of getting into a fight, I always ran.”

  22 Arnold A. Offner, Another Such Victory: President Truman and the Cold War, 1945–1953 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 8.

  23 Ibid., 9.

  24 Arthur Sears Henning, “How Boss Rule and Roosevelt Named Truman,” Chicago Tribune, July 25, 1944.

  25 Culver and Hyde, American Dreamer, 364.

  26 Harry S. Truman, Memoirs of Harry S. Truman, vol. 1 (New York: Signet/New American Library, 1955), 21.

  27 Henry L. Stimson and McGeorge Bundy, On Active Service in Peace and War (Harper & Brothers, 1948), 635–636.

  28 Harry S. Truman, “Why I Dropped the Bomb,” Parade, December 4, 1988. Bart Bernstein, who brought this article to my attention, cautions that Margaret Truman’s editing may have influenced the wording.

  29 Barton J. Bernstein, “A Postwar Myth: 500,000 U.S. Lives Saved,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, June–July 1986, 38; David M. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 834.

  30 Henry L. Stimson, “The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb,” Harper’s Magazine, February 1947, 97–107.

  31 Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman, and Japan’s Surrender in the Pacific War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 37.

  32 Gar Alperovitz, The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb and the Architecture of an American Myth (New York: Vintage Books, 1996), 328.

  33 Richard B. Frank, Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire (New York: Penguin, 1999), 354.

  34 “Roosevelt in North Africa: The President Interrupts Historical Conference of Anglo-American High Command to Review U.S. Troops,” Life, February 8, 1943.

  35 Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins, 696.

  36 John W. Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999), 282–283.

  37 Hasegawa, Racing the Enemy, 52–53.

  38 U.S. Department of Defense, The Entry of the Soviet Union into the War Against Japan (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1955), 84.

  39 John W. Dower, Cultures of War: Pearl Harbor/Hiroshima/9-11/Iraq (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010), 227.

  40 Magic Diplomatic Summary SRS-1727, July 13, 1945, Records of the National Security Agency, Magic Files, Box 18, RG 457, National Archives.

  41 Barton J. Bernstein, “The Perils and Politics of Surrender: Ending the War with Japan and Avoiding the Third Atomic Bomb,” Pacific Historical Review, February 1977, 5.

  42 “Senator Urges Terms to Japs Be Explained,” Washington Post, July 3, 1945.

  43 “Fatal Phrase,” Washington Post, June 11, 1945.

  44 Alperovitz, The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb, 20.

  45 Hasegawa, Racing the Enemy, 72–73.

  46 Combined Chiefs of Staff, 643/3, “Estimate of the Enemy Situation (as of 6 July)” July 8, 1945, RG 218, Central Decimal Files, 1943–1945, CCS 381 (6/4/45), sec. 2, pt. 5.

  47 Allan Nevins, “How We Felt About the War,” in While You Were Gone: A Report on Wartime Life in the United States, ed. Jack Goodman (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1946), 13.

  48 Lisle Abbott Rose, Dubious Victory: The United States and the End of World War II (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1973), 58.

  49 John W. Dower, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (New York: Pantheon, 1986), 54, 78, 79, 85; “World Battlefronts, THE ENEMY: Perhaps He Is Human,” Time, July 5, 1943, 29.

  50 Dower, War Without Mercy, 51–52.

  51 Truman, Dear Bess, 39.

  52 Peter Kuznick, “We Can Learn a Lot from Truman the Bigot,” Los Angeles Times, July 18, 2003; Miller, 183.

  53 Edgar Jones, “One War’s Enough,” Atlantic Monthly, February 1946, 49.

  54 Greg Robinson, By Order of the President: FDR and the Internment of Japanese Americans (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 89–90; John Morton Blum, V Was for Victory: Politics and American Culture During World War II (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1976), 158.

  55 Lillian Baker, The Concentration Camp Conspiracies, A Second Pearl Harbor (Lawndale, CA: AFHA Publications, 1981), 156.

  56 Harry N. Scheiber, Earl Warren and the Warren Court: The Legacy in American and Foreign Law (New York: Lexington Books, 2007), 41; Roger Daniels, Sandra C. Taylor, Harry H. L. Kitano, and Leonard J. Arrington, Japanese Americans, from Relocation to Redress (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1991), 242; “Bay City Warned Raid Peril Real,” Los Angeles Times, December 10, 1941; Lawrence E. Davies, “Carrier Is Hunted off San Francisco,” New York Times, December 10, 1941.

  57 Kennedy, Freedom from Fear, 749–751.

  58 Robert Asahina, Just Americans: How Japanese Americans Won a War at Home and Abroad (New York: Gotham, 2006), 20.

  59 “Epilogue to a Sorry Drama,” Life, April 28, 1967, 6; Kennedy, Freedom from Fear, 753.

  60 John Howard, Concentration Camps on the Home Front: Japanese Americans in the House of Jim Crow (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 120; Dower, War Without Mercy, 82.

  61 Kennedy, Freedom from Fear, 751.

  62 Eddie Yamaoka, “Sport Tidbits,” Heart Mountain Sentinel, July 7, 1945.

  63 Susan Lynn Smith, “Women Health Workers and the Color Line in the Japanese American ‘Relocation Centers’ of World War II,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 73 (Winter 1999), 585–586.

  64 Linda Gordon and Gary Y. Okihiro, Impounded: Dorothea Lange and the Censored Images of Japanese American Internment (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008), 19–20.

  65 Asahina, Just Americans, 43, 161–193.

  66 “A Jap’s a Jap,” Washington Post, April 15, 1943.

  67 Blum, Victory, 163, 166; Charles McClain, The Mass Internment of Japanese Americans and the Quest for Legal Redress (New York: Taylor & Francis, 1994), 189.

  68 Hirabayashi v. United States, 320 U. S. 81, 1943, http://supreme.justia.com/us/320/81/case.html.

  69 J. Burton, M. Farrell, F. Lord, and R. Lord, “Closing the Relocation Centers,” www.nps.gov/history/history/online_books/anthropology74/ce3o.htm.

  70 Michi Nishiura Weglyn, Years of Infamy: The Untold Story of America’s Concentration Camps (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1996), 268, 281–282.

  71 Dower, War Without Mercy, 39.

  72 Greg Mitchell, “On the Death of ‘Hiroshima Bomb’ Pilot Paul Tibbets,” Editor and Publisher, November 1, 2007, http://editorandpublisher.com/Article/UPDATE-On-the-Death-of-Hiroshima-Bomb-Pilot-Paul-Tibbets. For a fuller discussion of Tibbets, see Peter J. Kuznick, “Defending the Indefensible: A Meditation on the Life of Hiroshima Pilot Paul Tibbets, Jr.,” The Asia Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, January 22, 2008, http://japanfocus.org/-Peter_J_-Kuznick/2642.

  73 Yuki Tanaka and Marilyn B. Young, Bombing Civilians: A Twentieth-Century History (New York: New Press, 2009), 5, 84–85, 117.

  74 Lifton and Mitchell, Hiroshima in America, 133; Sherry, The Rise of American Air Power, 295.

  75 Robert S. McNamara, “We Need International Rules for War,” The Gazette (Montreal, Quebec), August 9, 2003.

  76 Bird and Sherwin, American Prometheus, 291.

  77 Alperovitz, The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb, 352.

  78 Ronald Schaffer, Wings of Judgment: American Bombing in World War II (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 154.

  79 Sherwin, A World Destroyed, 298.

  80 Alperovitz, The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb, 147.

  81 Sherwin, A World Destroyed, 62.

  82 Bird and Sherwin, American Prometheus, 284.

  83 Truman, Memoirs by Harry S. Truman: 1945, 104.

&nb
sp; 84 For the full report, see the appendix to Alice Kimball Smith, A Peril and A Hope: The Scientists’ Movement in America: 1945–47 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), 560–572.

  85 Lanouette with Silard, Genius in the Shadows, 273.

  86 Ibid., 527–528, note 42. Seventy-two percent favored a demonstration before use and 11 percent favored a demonstration and no use.

  87 Bird and Sherwin, American Prometheus, 300.

  88 Sherwin, A World Destroyed, 235; Harry S. Truman, Off the Record: The Private Papers of Harry S. Truman, ed. Robert H. Ferrell (New York: Harper & Row, 1980), 53.

  89 Hasegawa, Racing the Enemy, 133–134.

  90 Allen Dulles, The Secret Surrender (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), 255–256.

  91 “Russo-Japanese Relations (13–20 July 1945),” Publication of Pacific Strategic Intelligence Section, Commander-in-Chief United States Fleet and Chief of Naval Operations, 21 July 1945, SRH-085, Record Group 457, Modern Military Branch, National Archives.

  92 Alperovitz, The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb, 27.

  93 Truman, Off the Record, 53.

  94 Truman, Dear Bess, 519.

  95 Henry L. Stimson, diary, May 15, 1945, Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University.

  96 Bird and Sherwin, American Prometheus, 304.

  97 Ibid., 309.

  98 Alperovitz, The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb, 250–251.

  99 Stimson, diary, July 21, 1945.

  100 Ibid.

  101 Stimson, diary, July 22, 1945.

  102 Alperovitz, The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb, 259.

  103 Truman, Off the Record, 55.

  104 Stimson, diary, May 31, 1945.

  105 “Ike on Ike,” Newsweek, November 11, 1963, 107.

  106 Barton J. Bernstein, “Ike and Hiroshima: Did He Oppose It?,” Journal of Strategic Studies 10 (September 1987), 377–389.

  107 Alperovitz, The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb, 271.

  108 Robert L. Messer, The End of an Alliance: James F. Byrnes, Roosevelt, Truman and the Origins of the Cold War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), 105.

  109 Truman, Off the Record, 54.

  110 Andrei Gromyko, Memoirs (New York: Doubleday, 1989), 110.