The Chairman

by Kai Bird

  Since the president had given his approval to the contingency plans, the Joint Chiefs now began to rise to their feet, thinking that the meeting was over. But Truman suddenly said, “No one is leaving this meeting without committing himself. McCloy, you haven’t said anything. What is your view?” The assistant secretary of war turned to look at Stimson, who quickly said, “Say what you feel about it.”

  McCloy began: “Well, I do think you’ve got an alternative and I think it is an alternative that ought to be explored and that, really, we ought to have our heads examined if we don’t explore some other method by which we can terminate this war than just by another conventional attack and landing.”28 He repeated to Truman the proposal for a political overture to the emperor that he had outlined to Stimson the evening before. As he described it, McCloy made it clear that he thought the war had progressed to such a state that there was now a “question of whether we needed to get Russia in to help us defeat Japan.”29 This argument carried significant weight, since many of those in the room, like McCloy himself, were beginning to worry about the prospect of having Soviet troops occupy Manchuria or portions of Japan itself in the postwar era. If the war with Japan could be ended without Soviet assistance, why give them the chance to establish a foothold in this region? Truman responded warmly to this argument, telling McCloy, “That’s exactly what I’ve been wanting to explore. . . . You go down to Jimmy Byrnes and talk to him about it.”30

  McCloy then suggested that perhaps the Japanese ought to be told “that we had the bomb and that we would drop the bomb” on them if such surrender terms were not promptly accepted.31 Though everyone in the room was cleared for knowledge of the Manhattan Project, no one had felt it appropriate to mention the subject. There was a feeling that somehow McCloy had broken a taboo. He recalled later that he sensed the “chills that ran up and down the spines” of his colleagues.32 He ventured, “I think that our moral position would be better if we gave them specific warning of the bomb.” At this, a number of the assembled military officers protested that the bomb had yet to be tested and might not even explode when dropped from an airplane. In response, McCloy backed down a bit from his suggestion of a warning: “If you don’t mention the bomb, at least mention in general terms what its capacity is, something in the nature that with one blow we would wipe out a city. They’ll know what we’re talking about.”33

  After more discussion, Truman instructed McCloy to “give further thought to this message but don’t mention the bomb at this stage.”34 Truman was indicating that, while he thought some kind of political overture might be warranted, he was still inclined to keep the bomb a secret until it could be dropped.35 McCloy’s dialogue with the president influenced Stimson, who in the weeks afterward began to focus heavily on the need to change the terms of surrender. Stimson could see from the tone of the discussion that, barring a sudden surrender by Tokyo, the bomb would be used. This was an assumption that no one in the meeting seriously questioned, though it was not directly discussed. But McCloy had altered the agenda by pointing out that the war, one way or another, would certainly be long over before November 1, the earliest scheduled invasion of Japan.

  By speaking the unspoken, McCloy had dramatically shifted the terms of the debate. Now it was no longer a question of invasion. What had been a dormant but implicit option now became explicit. The soon-to-be-tested bomb would end the war, with or without a warning. And the war might even end before the bomb was ready.

  The following morning, on June 19, the Committee of Three met, with McCloy acting as a recorder. The acting secretary of state, Joseph Grew, argued that it really wasn’t even necessary to backtrack from a demand for unconditional surrender. “We must occupy Tokyo,” Grew said; no compromise peace could be tolerated. All that needed to be done was to explain “what we meant by unconditional surrender in such a way which might induce them to desist from further hostilities.” He suggested that Washington notify the Japanese that eventually “they could determine for themselves the nature of the particular political structure they wanted for the future so long as it did not incorporate any of the militaristic elements.”36

  Both Stimson and McCloy agreed with these sentiments, and during the next week they drafted a memo for the president outlining the arguments for giving the Japanese such assurances. By this time, most of the president’s advisers—including McCloy, Stimson, Forrestal, Leahy, and the Joint Chiefs—more or less accepted the proposition that a modest change in the surrender terms might soon end the war. On June 26, at another meeting of the Committee of Three, Stimson, Forrestal, and Grew, with McCloy present, also agreed that any such clarification of the surrender terms should be issued well before an invasion and with “ample time to permit a national reaction to set in.” They agreed that “Japan is susceptible to reason” and that there was every reason to avoid an outright invasion. A “carefully timed warning” should include the following elements: a characterization of the “varied and overwhelming force” the United States was about to bring to bear on Japan; the “completeness of the destruction” this force would entail; an assurance that the Allies did not intend to “extirpate the Japanese as a race or to destroy them as a nation”; and a statement that occupation troops would withdraw from Japan as soon as there was established “a peacefully inclined government, of a character representative of the masses of the Japanese people.” Stimson and McCloy suggested that, if they were to add a statement to the effect that the Allies would not “exclude a constitutional monarchy under her present dynasty, it would substantially add to the chances of acceptance.” There was general agreement even on this controversial last point, and before the meeting broke up the secretaries asked McCloy, two State Department officers, and a representative of the Navy Department to draft the actual language for such a statement.37

  As usual, McCloy became the leading “oarsman” in drafting this critical language. As instructed by Truman, he did not mention the atomic bomb; instead, a vague threat was made to inflict “utter devastation of the Japanese homeland.” But in a separate note to Stimson he was careful to say that he thought a reference to the atomic bomb could be “readily introduced.”38 As he drafted it, Paragraph 12 of the surrender terms specified that the occupying forces of the Allies would withdraw after the establishment of a peacefully inclined government. And, most important, it specified that this government “may include a constitutional monarchy under the present dynasty. . . .”39 McCloy acknowledged to Stimson that this was the “most controversial” point and might “cause repercussions at home. . . .” But without it, he said, “those who seem to know most about Japan feel there would be very little likelihood of acceptance.”40

  Over the weekend, McCloy flew up to Hastings-on-Hudson to visit Ellen and the children. He had taken copies of the draft proclamation and phoned Washington to dictate some minor changes in the wording. Back in Washington on July 2, he went over the final draft, and then Stimson personally handed it to the president later that day. Truman brusquely gave it his tentative approval. McCloy thought it fair, clear, and firm; without really compromising on the principle of unconditional surrender, the language in Paragraph 12 gave the Japanese just enough assurances to persuade them to end the war.41 Though the proclamation did not yet include a direct warning on the atomic bomb, McCloy hoped Truman might be persuaded to insert this once the scientists successfully demonstrated they actually had a weapon ready for delivery.

  In the meantime, Navy Undersecretary Ralph A. Bard, who had been sitting in on the deliberations of the Interim Committee, had made his own appeal for a bomb warning, directly to the president. The Chicago financier had become convinced, like McCloy, that the “Japanese war was really won.” On June 27, he had written a formal dissent from the Interim Committee’s recommendation not to issue a warning. His top-secret memo argued the merits of giving Japan a “preliminary warning” two or three days prior to dropping the bomb. Four days later, Bard took his case to the White House in person. “Fo
r God’s sake,” he told the president, “don’t organize an army to go into Japan. Kill a million people? It’s ridiculous.”42 Truman dismissed these arguments with the comment that the idea of a bomb warning had already been considered.

  Under the influence of Jimmy Byrnes, the president was now moving in quite the opposite direction. Early in his presidency, there was no man on whom Truman relied more than the former South Carolina senator and Supreme Court justice. Truman sometimes felt this “politician’s politician” should have occupied the Oval Office in his place. In 1944, before he had been tapped by the Democratic Party bosses to replace Henry Wallace as Roosevelt’s running mate, Truman had agreed to nominate Byrnes for the job. When Roosevelt died, one of Truman’s first acts was to call Byrnes to his side and promise to make him secretary of state, a move not received very graciously by Washington’s foreign-policy community. Though he knew nothing of foreign affairs, Byrnes always had a strong opinion. “Mr. Byrnes,” said Dean Acheson, “is not sensitive or lacking in confidence.”43 Within weeks of Roosevelt’s death, the smooth South Carolinian was quietly known about Washington as the “assistant president.” All the evidence suggests that, during the spring and early summer of 1945, Byrnes had influenced Truman to think of the atomic bomb as a diplomatic weapon, something that “might well put us in a position to dictate our own terms at the end of the war.”44 As the president’s personal representative on the Interim Committee, he had taken every opportunity to shoot down suggestions of demonstrating the terrible force of the bomb, or sharing the “secret” of its existence with the Soviets.45 And now Byrnes was about to take steps to ensure that McCloy’s political overture to the Japanese, embodied in Paragraph 12 of the surrender proclamation, was eliminated.

  On July 3,1945, Stimson and McCloy went over to the White House to see Byrnes sworn in as secretary of state. Later that afternoon, in a private meeting with Truman, Stimson solicited a reluctant invitation from the president to “be somewhere near” him at the upcoming Potsdam conference. He pointed out that this would mean he would have to go to Berlin and asked if he could take McCloy along. Truman said, “All right,” and a relieved Stimson rushed back to the Pentagon to prepare for the trip. When Truman did not invite Stimson and McCloy to accompany him on the cruiser USS Augusta, they made their own travel plans. Stimson decided to take another ship, while McCloy took a plane to Europe on July 8.46

  Truman left Washington on July 7. Sailing with him aboard the Augusta were a number of his Missouri poker-playing companions and Jimmy Byrnes. In between poker games, Byrnes persuaded Truman to review his decision to accept McCloy’s draft of the surrender proclamation. Byrnes had been impressed by former Secretary of State Cordell Hull’s view that Paragraph 12—regarding the permissibility of a constitutional monarchy—sounded “too much like appeasement.”47 With no one on board to argue otherwise, Truman cut the last sentence of Paragraph 12 by the time they arrived in Antwerp on July 15, eliminating any assurance to the peace factions in Tokyo that the emperor might be allowed to retain his throne.

  This decision was never altered, even when new evidence of the emperor’s intentions became available that week from intelligence intercepts. Before Stimson, McCloy, and other officials left for Potsdam, they had been shown an intercept strongly indicating that the emperor himself had requested his war Cabinet to seek a peace settlement. It seemed Hirohito wished to dispatch a special Japanese ambassador to Moscow under orders to request the Soviets, then still neutral, to act as intermediaries with the Americans and British. As Truman, Stimson, and McCloy were traveling toward Potsdam, Washington intercepted a July 13 cable from Japanese Foreign Minister Shigenori Togo to his ambassador in Moscow that made Tokyo’s intentions clear: “Unconditional surrender is the only obstacle to peace. . . .” In another cable, Togo instructed his ambassador in Moscow to obtain an interview with Molotov before the Soviet foreign minister left for the Big Three conference at Potsdam. Molotov should be told, said Togo, that “it is His Majesty’s heart’s desire to see the swift termination of the war. . . .”48

  McCloy’s plane arrived in Berlin shortly before Truman’s. Greeting him on the tarmac was Averell Harriman, who had also managed to get himself invited to the conference. Andrei Gromyko, the Soviet ambassador to Washington, was there as well, and all three waited for Truman’s plane to land before driving into Potsdam. After settling in at one of the large lakefront villas formerly occupied by a colony of German filmmakers, McCloy had lunch with Harriman and, later in the afternoon, discussed the Japanese war with Stimson.49

  Unaware that Byrnes had persuaded Truman to cut out the language concerning the emperor in Paragraph 12, McCloy still considered the draft surrender proclamation incomplete. Just before leaving for the Big Three summit, he told Grew, “There are impending two matters of great significance: one, the possibility of Russian entry into the Pacific War and, two, the event with which Secretary Byrnes is fully familiar.” By this veiled reference to the atomic bomb, McCloy indicated to Grew that he assumed that, if the bomb was to be used against Japan, “the warning paper, of course, will have to be rewritten to take this into account.”50

  On their first full day in Potsdam, McCloy, Harvey Bundy (Stimson’s personal assistant), and the war secretary sat in the garden outside their villa and set to work drafting yet another memo to the president. Delivered to Byrnes on the evening of July 16, the memo stated that the right “psychological moment to commence our warnings to Japan” had arrived. Referring to the intelligence intercepts of Japanese diplomatic-cable traffic, they argued, “. . . the recent news of attempted approaches on the part of Japan to Russia, impels me to urge prompt delivery of our warning.” If this warning did not bring about a surrender, then “the full force of our newer weapons” should be marshaled against the Japanese.51

  That same afternoon, Stimson received an “eyes-only” cable from George Harrison, the War Department’s watchdog for the Manhattan Project, in Washington, who reported on the test of the first atomic bomb carried out that morning at Alamogordo, New Mexico. Harrison said the “results seem satisfactory and already exceed expectations.”52 Stimson was visibly jubilant. “The Secretary cut a gay caper,” McCloy wrote in his diary, “and rushed off to tell the President and Jimmy Byrnes about it.” He caught the president coming back from a tour of the ruins of Berlin that evening and showed him the cable. The news, however cursory, immediately buoyed the president, who was scheduled to meet Marshal Stalin for the first time the next day. Later, when more detailed reports came in on the success of the Trinity test, McCloy observed that Truman and Churchill went off to their next round of negotiations with Stalin “like little boys with a big red apple secreted on their person.” McCloy himself was sobered by the news. He wrote in his diary that night, “I hope it does not augur the commencement of the destruction of modern civilization. In this atmosphere of destruction and the callousness of men and their leaders, the whole thing seems ominous.”53

  For the remainder of the conference, the fact that the atomic bomb was at last an operational weapon was always uppermost in the minds of American officials. Early the next morning, Stimson made a point of showing the cable to Byrnes and made yet another plea for both an explicit warning on the bomb and an assurance to the Japanese that unconditional surrender did not mean an end to the emperorship. This time Byrnes unequivocally rejected both ideas, saying he spoke for the president.54 Byrnes and Truman were isolated in their position; they were rejecting a plan to end the war that had been endorsed by virtually all their advisers. Just hours before the news from Alamogordo arrived, the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff meeting in Potsdam with their British counterparts had agreed that the “unconditional-surrender” formula should be changed or reinterpreted so as to assure the Japanese that the emperorship would be preserved. Perhaps because they were well aware of Byrnes’s opposition, the Combined Chiefs of Staff then formally recommended that Churchill personally raise the matter with Truman.55

  But
it was evidently too late to change the president’s mind. Truman himself was now counting on the bomb, perhaps to end the Pacific war and certainly to ameliorate some of his diplomatic problems with the Soviets. Shortly after meeting Stalin for lunch that day, the president noted in his private diary, “Believe Japs will fold up before Russia comes in. I am sure they will when Manhattan appears over their mainland.”56 He could feel so certain of this because on July 16, the same day he learned about the successful test of the bomb, he was informed of the Japanese emperor’s effort to have the Russians negotiate a surrender. He characterized the deciphered message as the “cable from [sic] Jap Emperor asking for peace.” McCloy said much the same thing in his own diary that day: “Hirohito himself was called upon to send a message to Kalinin and Stalin. Things are moving—what a long way we have come since that Sunday morning we heard the news of Pearl Harbor.” Clearly, both men suspected the war could end in a matter of days.57

  By the opening of the Potsdam conference, Truman had concluded that Soviet entry into the war was probably unnecessary.58 McCloy had always been rather indifferent to whether the Soviets entered the Pacific war or not. He never thought it was “much of a trading point. . . .” And now, if it could be argued that it was quite unnecessary—given “the nearness of Japanese collapse,”—it might even be undesirable, because the Soviets could then have a claim in administering an occupied Japan.59 If at one time the Americans had thought a mere Soviet declaration of war would have enough “shock value” to push the Japanese out of the war, they now felt the bomb could do the same thing. Moreover, according to Edwin Pauley, delegated by the president to handle the negotiations with the Russians on reparation issues, Truman also said he felt the bomb “would keep the Russians straight.”60 Later in the conference, when Stalin seemed particularly intransigent, Truman assured Stimson that he would not back down before the Soviet ruler. He could do so, the president inferred, by “relying greatly upon the information as to S-i [atomic bomb].”61