The Chairman

by Kai Bird

  In the midst of these deliberations, McCloy heard from Allen Dulles in Switzerland of another Japanese peace feeler. According to the OSS representative, Japanese individuals connected to the Bank for International Settlements had approached Per Jacobsson, a bank official, and informed him that their government wanted to surrender. As Dulles reported it, Tokyo was hesitating only over the term “unconditional surrender”: “They wanted to keep their emperor and the constitution, fearing that otherwise a military surrender would only mean the collapse of all order and of all discipline. . . .” McCloy thought this so significant that he arranged to have Dulles flown to Potsdam immediately to report in person to Stimson. When Dulles arrived, on July 20, he received an “attentive hearing” from the secretary of war.62 McCloy thought there was “something behind it, but just how substantial I do not know.”63 Taken together with the Magic intercepts, Dulles’s information was one more indication that the Japanese were close to collapse. Now it was only a question of whether they would surrender soon enough to avoid an atomic bombing. As McCloy confided to his diary, “Maybe the Secretary’s big bomb may not be dropped—the Japs had better hurry if they are to avoid it.”64

  On the morning of July 24, Stimson told Truman that an atomic bomb would be available to drop on a Japanese city soon after August 1. A second bomb would be ready by August 6. This meant that both bombs would hit Japan before the Soviets were scheduled to enter the war in mid-August. The war might well be over before Russian troops could invade Manchuria. This suited Truman. When Stimson then tried once again to raise the issue of clarifying the surrender terms regarding status of the emperor, the president again demurred. The most he would say was that perhaps some kind of verbal assurance could be transmitted to the Japanese if “they were hanging fire on that one point. . . .”65 Two days later, the Potsdam Proclamation was issued without either an atomic warning or any assurance concerning the future of the Japanese royal dynasty.

  Stimson was frustrated, worn out, increasingly depressed by the distrust he saw all around him. Byrnes had made a point of excluding him from all the critical roundtable meetings between Truman, Churchill, and Stalin. Almost from the beginning of the conference, Stimson complained in his diary that Byrnes was “hugging matters in this Conference pretty close to his bosom.” Byrnes turned him down even when Stimson asked if McCloy could be squeezed into the main deliberations in his place. McCloy himself confided in a letter to Ellen that “we have not been in the middle of the ring.”66 Averell Harriman too was excluded, much to his annoyance. As Harriman recalled later, “Stimson also had plenty of free time. So we sat in the sun together outside his villa talking about when and how the Japanese might be brought to surrender, and how to deal with the Russians after the war.”67

  Stimson may have wished to issue the Japanese a warning, but he never voiced any doubts about whether the bomb should actually be used against the Japanese. General Eisenhower happened to be dining with Stimson when a long cable arrived conveying the details of the Trinity test. The secretary of war said they were going to drop this stupendous weapon on the Japanese. Eisenhower sat in silence, thinking it wasn’t his place to disagree. But as he listened to Stimson talk of the destructive power of this new weapon, he became more and more depressed. So, when Stimson suddenly asked for his opinion of the bomb, Eisenhower said he was against its use. As Ike recalled the conversation, he argued, “First, the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing. Second, I hated to see our country be the first to use such a weapon. Well . . . the old gentleman got furious.”68

  McCloy agreed with Eisenhower, but with his boss more or less excluded from the higher councils of the conference, he found little opportunity to exert any influence in these matters. One evening, he was among the guests invited to dine with Truman, but this was largely a social affair, where everyone was entertained by the piano playing of a sergeant from Philadelphia named Eugene List.69 In the one brief conversation he had with the president, McCloy spoke of Germany rather than the bomb and Japan. He told Truman that he felt the Soviets’ intention to strip her occupation zone of all industry might well lead to a permanent division of Germany into East and West zones.70

  With time on his hands, McCloy made several tours of Berlin’s ruins. He wrote Ellen, “You would be appalled by it and you would think you were dreaming.” A few days later, he wrote, “Berlin is a depressing place, a most depressing place. I saw a group of people . . . and children tearing up a carcass of a horse that had fallen dead in the streets from God knows what disease—it was horrible. The people look pale and dead looking, tho they say a night club is running in the city. There are Russian soldiers everywhere.”71 One day, he and an American general drove into Berlin and found their way to Hitler’s bombed-out bunker in the middle of the city. They argued their way past a Russian sentry and, armed with flashlights, walked through the Führer’s study and living quarters. McCloy’s companion retrieved several chairs from the wreckage of Eva Braun’s ornate bedroom and presented one of them to the assistant secretary of war. That night, he confessed to his diary, “I feel as if I were very much of a looter.”72

  While Stimson tried unsuccessfully to persuade Truman and Byrnes to issue the Japanese a warning on the bomb, McCloy spent most of his working hours at Potsdam in meetings with the Russians on the question of reparation payments. Given the Russian negotiating style, these were grueling affairs. Some sessions lasted until two in the morning. Bored by the endless haggling, McCloy in one such meeting got out his pen and began a letter to Ellen: “The Russians say Italy, to whom we are now paying over $50 million for relief purposes, should pay $6.5 million as reparations which only means that we pay for Russian reparations. The Russians say . . . if the U.S. saw fit to promise them relief that is our affair. They did not ask us to do it.”73

  Despite such problems, McCloy felt the Soviets were “difficult and stubborn, but not impossible.” The Americans on his delegations, he thought, might even be missing “a good chance at an agreement by fencing too much.”74 The central problem lay in the fate of Germany. Six months earlier, at Yalta, Roosevelt had agreed to use the general figure of $20 billion as a rough estimate of what the Germans should pay in reparations, half of which was reserved for the Soviets. Now Byrnes declared this figure “impractical” and refused to discuss any specific amount at all. Because McCloy was skeptical that Germany would be capable of paying any reparations, he concurred with Byrnes’s position, saying that it would be a “great mistake . . . if the amount of reparations . . . [were] absolutely fixed now.”75 In a paper on the subject, McCloy and Stimson advised Truman, “The Russian policy on booty in eastern Germany is rather Oriental. It is bound to force us to preserve the economy in western Germany in close cooperation with the British.”76 In the end, Molotov agreed to an American proposal that each power satisfy its reparation claims from its occupation zone. This solution, of course, indirectly encouraged the Soviets to solidify their hold over East Germany. The Soviets might have been persuaded to demand less in reparations from Germany, Austria, and Italy if they had been assured of extensive lend-lease credits from the United States. But in May they had been abruptly told these loans would cease. This gave the Soviets all the more reason to take an uncompromising stand on control of Eastern Europe. Now, particularly in the wake of the successful Trinity test, Byrnes and Truman were trying to roll back some of the very specific understandings reached at Yalta concerning Eastern Europe. This was bad enough from the Soviet perspective. But worse in their eyes was the fact that they were being asked to loosen their grip on such border states prior to any U.S.-Soviet agreement on the fate of Germany. With sole possession of the atomic bomb, the Americans may no longer have feared Germany, but for the Soviets it was a different matter.77

  McCloy had no illusions about the nature of Soviet rule. “The Russians,” he wrote in his diary, “are actually posing as ‘democrats’ in spite of practicing totalitarianism i
n its most complete form (and getting away with it even in our own press).”78 But as he demonstrated during the negotiations at San Francisco, he was willing to deal with them realistically and, unlike Byrnes, acknowledged their de facto sphere of influence in Eastern Europe. It was unfortunate that the Russians had “moved in like locusts on the Germans,” and stripped whole factories of their equipment. “Yet in many respects,” he wrote Ellen, “they cooperate fully with us in working out problems.”79 He thought Byrnes’s negotiating style only made a difficult situation worse. “When there was controversy/’ Harriman recalled, “he [Byrnes] would pour oil on the waters.”80 McCloy was disturbed by the “atmosphere of rather deep suspicion” that pervaded the Potsdam conference: he acknowledged Byrnes to be “astute and experienced,” but on the whole he thought the president’s closest advisers were neither “particularly intellectually-minded” nor “enlightened.”81 In all the discussions he had heard at Potsdam, McCloy confided to his diary, “there was no clear evidence of an outstanding mind.” This judgment stood for the president as well. He thought Truman was “less composed” and spoke with “less of an air of thought and experience about him” than either Stalin or the new British prime minister, Clement Attlee. “He always gives me the impression of too quick judgment.”82

  By July 24, Stimson was completely exasperated with Byrnes and Truman. He bluntly complained to the president that he had been excluded from too many of the Potsdam deliberations, to which Truman brusquely replied that he could leave at any time. Stung, Stimson finally decided to return to Washington. He left McCloy behind to find out what he could on the remainder of the Big Three deliberations.83

  That same afternoon, McCloy learned from Marshall that after the end of the plenary session Truman had walked over to Stalin and “casually mentioned . . . that we had a new weapon of unusually destructive force.” “Uncle Joe,” as McCloy called him, expressed no surprise or particular interest, and remarked only that he hoped the United States would make “good use of it against the Japanese.” But the Soviet ruler had not failed to catch the implied threat. That evening, he told Marshal Georgi K. Zhukov, the Soviet Army commander, “They simply want to raise the price. We’ve got to work on Kurchatov [the Soviets’ chief of atomic research] and hurry things up.”84

  McCloy and Stimson had repeatedly emphasized the importance of apprising Stalin about the existence of the bomb, if only as a first step toward placing atomic technology under international control. Stimson, however, still thought the bomb might, if only in the short term, give the United States some diplomatic leverage over the Soviets. The more the secretary listened to Harriman’s descriptions of Stalin’s secret police, the more he became inclined to demand of the Soviets some degree of internal liberalization in return for a share in the control of atomic technology. Only a month earlier, he had speculated in his diary on the “quid pro quos” that might be expected for sharing nuclear secrets.85 McCloy, however, thought it highly unlikely that any atomic horse-trading could impose Western-style democracy on the Soviet Union. “Personally,” he wrote in his diary, “I think they have their political religion and we have ours.” This same pragmatic instinct led him to conclude that, as difficult as the Soviets might be, some kind of modus vivendi would eventually have to be reached with them in order to control this “revolutionary” source of destructive power.86 So McCloy was pleased that Truman had informed Stalin, however vaguely, of the new weapon.

  The very next day, on July 25, Truman used a National Geographic map of Japan to pinpoint the four potential targets on which the first bomb would be dropped: the industrial cities of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Kokura, and Niigata. He then gave his approval for the bombing; henceforward, unless the president countermanded this order, the bomb would be dropped as soon as it was ready. Twenty-four hours later, the watered-down version of McCloy’s surrender proclamation was issued to the press and broadcast over the radio. Simultaneously, U.S. signal intelligence intercepted another message from the Japanese foreign minister to his ambassador in Moscow. Tokyo still would not accept unconditional surrender, but Togo wished his ambassador to “communicate to the other party [the U.S.] through appropriate channels that we have no objection to a peace based on the Atlantic Charter.” This amounted to a significant signal, since the Charter constituted a liberal statement of British and American war aims. Togo pleaded that it was “necessary to have them understand that we are trying to end hostilities by asking for very reasonable terms in order to secure and maintain our nation’s existence and honor.” By this Togo unmistakably meant the preservation of the emperorship. “Should United States and Great Britain remain insistent on formality,” Togo concluded, “there is no solution to this situation other than for us to hold out until complete collapse because of this point alone.” This intercept was quickly deciphered and passed along to Truman, Byrnes, and no doubt McCloy, at Potsdam.87

  A few days later, McCloy received another military-intelligence report, which concluded that the enemy “would be receptive to a peace that would allow Japan to continue its ‘self-existence.’ ” From his intelligence briefings, McCloy was well aware that by the spring of 1945 most Army G-2 specialists believed the Pacific war would soon be over. Few of these intelligence specialists thought Soviet entry into the war would be necessary.88

  Forrestal too was convinced that the Japanese were ready to surrender, and on July 28 he arrived in Potsdam with more copies of Japanese cable intercepts which he hoped would demonstrate this fact.89 Like McCloy, he too felt that “we may need the Emperor to stabilize things in Japan” and effect a quick surrender of Japanese troops in Manchuria.90 Nevertheless, Truman and Byrnes let the clock run on the atomic bomb.

  On the same day as Forrestal arrived in Potsdam with his intercepts, Japan’s prime minister gave his country’s answer to the Allies’ demand for unconditional surrender: “The Potsdam Proclamation, in my opinion, is just a rehash of the Cairo Declaration, and the government therefore does not consider it of great importance. We must ‘mokusatsu’ it.”91 The Japanese decision to “ignore” the Proclamation was no surprise to any of the American officials involved in developing the surrender policy. They had been repeatedly told that the Japanese would not accept unconditional surrender without an assurance regarding the emperor. Truman and Byrnes did not expect Tokyo to accept the Potsdam Proclamation before the bomb could be dropped. A few days later, when Stalin formally communicated the Japanese peace overture to Truman, the president quickly agreed with Stalin’s observation that it represented nothing new.

  McCloy hung around until the conference finally broke up on August 1. By that time, the Big Three had come to agreement on a de facto division of Germany. Stalin had told Truman, “. . . the Soviet delegation . . . will regard the whole of Western Germany as falling within your sphere, and Eastern Germany, within ours.” Truman agreed but asked whether Stalin intended to have this division of Germany reflected in Europe as a whole. Did the Soviet ruler envision “a line running from the Baltic to the Adriatic”? Stalin did.92

  McCloy had no basic disagreement with the accords reached at Potsdam. He favored a division of Germany and the destruction of her warmaking capabilities. “This situation,” he wrote in his diary, “is better than the constant distrust and difficulty we would have with the Russians over their being in our zones.”93 He was also pleased that the Allies had affirmed their intention to conduct a trial of Nazi war criminals. At the Quebec conference in September 1944, Roosevelt had casually agreed with Churchill that the top Nazis should be summarily executed. When McCloy had reported this to Stimson, the secretary immediately set him to work on an alternative. McCloy gathered a group of War Department lawyers, headed by Lieutenant Colonel Murray C. Bernays, to iron out a proposal for an international war-crimes tribunal. Bernays, a Lithuanian Jew who had immigrated to America at the age of six, eventually proposed that the Nazis should be tried not only for their individual crimes but for participating in a criminal conspiracy as w
ell. McCloy liked the idea, and convinced Stimson that the concept of a criminal conspiracy was a valid contribution to international law. At Potsdam, the Allies agreed to negotiate the details of a war-crimes tribunal in a series of meetings in London.

  On the critical issue of Poland, the Western Allies agreed to recognize a provisional government of national unity based on the Soviet-backed Polish communists. New boundaries gave Poland a large slice of formally German territory. Everyone recognized that Poland would fall within a Soviet sphere of influence.

  The Potsdam Declaration would haunt the American political landscape for years to come. Conservatives would argue that the agreements amounted to a giveaway. But this argument assumes that the West had anything to “give away.” Read carefully, the Declaration merely reflected the military positions of the respective powers on the ground, and postponed a reckoning of otherwise difficult political imponderables. A Council of Foreign Ministers was established, scheduled to meet in London in September. Regarding Germany, each of the four occupying powers was granted authority in its respective zone, but a four-power Control Council was headquartered in Berlin and empowered to coordinate the Allied occupation. On paper, occupied Germany was to “be treated as a single economic unit.” In principle, the Americans had given away nothing that they controlled on the ground, and they had left open the opportunity for joint American-Soviet accommodation on the future of Germany.

  McCloy had predicted when the conference opened that, despite the “exasperations and frustrations of dealing with the Russians,” an agreement would be reached.94 On the whole, he believed the Potsdam Declaration of August 2, 1945, was the best one could expect.