The Chairman

by Kai Bird

  Now he packed up and, before returning to Washington, flew off on a quick inspection tour of Germany, Austria, and Italy. The State Department had concluded that Italy was in serious danger of being lost to “subversive elements,” and that more food aid and other emergency relief would be needed to stem the growing popularity of the Italian left. McCloy reported that U.S. Army officers in the field found civilian conditions in such disarray that they felt “that to remove all American troops from Italy would encourage violent outbreaks.”95

  He was in Rome on the morning of August 6 when he was awakened with the news that Hiroshima had been hit with an atomic bomb. An American general asked him, “Is this all it’s cracked up to be?” McCloy replied, “Yes. It’s bigger than anything you’ve ever thought about.” Truman, aboard the USS Augusta, exclaimed, “This is the greatest day in history.”96

  In Tokyo, the Japanese Cabinet, not certain what had happened in Hiroshima, dispatched a physicist to the city with instructions to determine if the bomb was indeed an atomic weapon. Hiroshima had been devastated; at least a hundred thousand people were killed almost instantly.II Two days later, when Truman had not countermanded his original attack order, a second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, killing another seventy thousand people.97 The Japanese Cabinet was still paralyzed, but the emperor intervened on August 10 and sued for peace. With the Swiss acting as intermediaries, Washington was informed that Hirohito himself had commanded his government to accept the Potsdam surrender terms “with the understanding that the said declaration does not comprise any demand which prejudices the prerogatives of His Majesty as a Sovereign Ruler.”98

  Hirohito’s message pointedly reminded Washington that several weeks earlier Tokyo had asked the then neutral Soviets to render their “good offices in restoring peace vis a vis the enemy powers.” The only barrier to a surrender at that time had been an assurance that the institution of the monarchy would not be abolished. Now, even after two atomic bombs, the same assurance was being demanded. Upon receiving the Japanese message, Truman met with Stimson, Byrnes, Forrestal, and several other of his closest advisers. On August 8, 1945, the Soviet Union had entered the war against Japan, and Byrnes saw no reason to compromise. “I cannot understand,” he said, “why we should go further than we were willing to go at Potsdam when we had no atomic bomb, and Russia was not in the war.” He warned Truman that accepting anything less than unconditional surrender might precipitate a “crucifixion of the President.” This time Stimson did not defer to the secretary of state. He made a forceful argument that the “question of the Emperor was a minor matter compared with delaying a victory in the war which was now in our hands.”99 Delaying the inevitable victory would give the Soviets time to advance their forces into Manchuria, a factor that carried great weight with Truman.100 Forrestal then proposed a compromise, which Truman sanctioned: they would accept the offer to surrender with language that referred both to the emperor’s authority and the terms of the Potsdam Proclamation. Byrnes wrote the message and released it for broadcast the following morning.

  Throughout the next twenty-four hours, McCloy worked with Byrnes and Stimson in drafting details of how the surrender would be formally effected. He was constantly on the phone to Byrnes and in meetings with Stimson.101 At the end of the day, a message was sent to the Japanese informing them that, unless General MacArthur was notified of a cessation of hostilities, the Allied forces would continue full-scale military operations. Stimson had wished to suspend all strategic bombing, but in a Cabinet meeting it was decided only to halt any further atomic bombing. (Another bomb would have been ready by August 17 or 18.102) Giving evidence that only then was he beginning to realize the enormity of the event, Truman confessed that the thought of “wiping out another 100,000 people was too horrible.” As Henry Wallace recorded in his diary, the president “didn’t like the idea of killing, as he said, ‘all those kids.’ “103

  In Moscow on August 8, Ambassador Harriman and his top aide, Minister-Counselor George Kennan, went to see Stalin in his Kremlin office. Ostensibly, their mission was to talk about Soviet progress against Japanese forces in the Far East. But the real agenda was to gauge how the Soviet ruler was reacting to news of the American atomic attack. After discussing briefly how far Soviet forces had advanced into Manchuria, Harriman pointedly raised the issue of the atomic bomb and asked what effect Stalin thought it would have on the Japanese. The Soviet ruler said he thought the bomb might give the Japanese a “pretext” to surrender. Harriman then observed that “it was a good thing we had invented this and not the Germans.” Stalin volunteered that he had been told by his own scientists that it was indeed a “very difficult problem to work out.” Soviet scientists, he said, had tried but failed to produce such a weapon. Harriman said that “if the Allies could keep it and apply it for peaceful purposes it would be a great thing.” To this vague hint of some kind of atomic cooperation in the future, Stalin agreed, and observed that this would mean the end of war and aggressors. “But,” he warned, “the secret would have to be well kept.”104

  Any chance, however, that the United States might invite the Soviet Union to share in the control of the atomic bomb was rapidly fading. On this issue Stimson again had further thoughts. Returning from Potsdam, where he had opposed any sharing of nuclear secrets, he began to torment himself with doubts. Utterly exhausted, he left on August 12 for the Adirondacks, for what he hoped would be several weeks of rest. McCloy called him there on the afternoon of August 14 to tell him that the Japanese had finally accepted the terms drafted four days earlier. The war was at an end. The next day, McCloy flew up to join him at his Saint Hubert’s mountain retreat. There the two men had time to reflect on what had happened. They had “long and painful thoughts about the atomic triumph.” McCloy was now routinely referring to it as the “primordial weapon.” As Stimson recalled later, they asked themselves, “Granting all that could be said about the wickedness of Russia, was it not perhaps true that the atom itself, not the Russians, was the central problem? . . . And was it practical to hope that the atomic ‘secret’—so fragile and short-lived—could be used to win concessions from the Russian leaders as to their cherished, if frightful, police state?”105

  After a few days of such talk, McCloy flew back down to the Pentagon to work on a memo designed to encourage the president to share control over the atom with the Soviet Union and Great Britain. But Jimmy Byrnes remained, according to Stimson, “radically opposed to any approach to Stalin whatever.” The secretary of state was looking ahead to the London foreign ministers’ meeting scheduled for early September; he told McCloy, “The Russians were only sensitive to power and all the world, including the Russians, were cognizant of the power of this bomb, and with it in his hip pocket he felt he was in a far better position to come back with tangible accomplishments even if he did not threaten anyone expressly with it.”106

  McCloy tried to suggest that an American monopoly over atomic technology could not exist for long—there were no real atomic secrets. But Byrnes insisted that it was a matter of production capabilities and that it would be a “long time before they [the Soviets] were at the stage where we were now.” Seeing that Byrnes’s mind was pretty much made up, McCloy “did not feel it wise to argue the point further. . . .”107 Though not encouraged, he returned to the Adirondacks and spent the last week of the summer finishing his memo on atomic policy. Ellen had taken the kids to Saint Hubert’s earlier in the month, so the family was able to share at least part of their vacation together. McCloy was eager to teach his young son a little fishing. Unfortunately, one day, when the family was fishing from the banks of a nearby stream, Ellen slipped and badly bruised her thigh on the sharp rocks, forcing her to remain in bed for the rest of the vacation. Still, it was a peaceful interlude. Ellen, according to Stimson, was a “great joy” to Mabel Stimson, and the “Colonel” himself always felt invigorated by the presence of the McCloy children. This would be, however, the last such gathering of Stimson’s adopte
d family. The secretary had decided to tender his resignation soon, and McCloy himself began to ponder what he should do now that the war was over.108

  On September 11, 1945, Stimson sent the memo drafted by McCloy on the bomb over to the White House. In a cover note, he explained that, although he was still convinced of the ultimate importance of changing the Russian attitude on individual liberties, “I have come to the conclusion that it would not be possible to use our possession of the atomic bomb as a direct lever to produce the change.” Such internal democratic reforms would come only “slowly and gradually”; in the meantime, “we should not delay our approach to Russia in the matter of the atomic bomb. . . .”109 The memo itself was even more blunt: “To put the matter concisely, I consider the problem of our satisfactory relations with Russia as not merely connected with but as virtually dominated by the problem of the atomic bomb. . . . For if we fail to approach them now and merely continue to negotiate with them, having this weapon rather ostentatiously on our hip, their suspicions and their distrust of our purposes and motives will increase.” It was a matter of “saving civilization not for five years or for twenty years, but forever.”110

  Neither Stimson nor McCloy would ever really back away from this position during the rest of their public careers. But their September 11 memo was much too late. By that time, Byrnes had gone to London for the foreign ministers’ conference, and he would come away from those meetings complaining that the Soviets didn’t “scare.”111 The Cold War had already begun, and over the next few months the inevitable frustrations that arose in working with the Soviets would convince many American policy-makers that any degree of cooperation was not worth the trouble. McCloy too felt these frustrations, but there was a profound difference between his view and the attitude of Byrnes and other hardliners. The difference lay in the bomb. For McCloy—and Stimson—the existence of the bomb made all the difference. With the bomb, there could never be another war unless those waging it were prepared to destroy civilization. Atomic warfare was unthinkable. This view, however, was not universal. Less than two years later, Byrnes wrote a book in which he argued that, if the Soviets refused ultimately to withdraw their troops from East Germany, the United States should be prepared to adopt “measures of last resort” to force them to comply. “We should not start something,” he warned, “we are not prepared to finish.”112 McCloy and Stimson thought talk of pre-emptive atomic warfare both immoral and, pragmatically speaking, unnecessary. There would, in fact, never be a time in the tension-filled years of the early Cold War when McCloy believed the Soviets intended to wage a war of aggression in Western Europe.

  In retrospect, McCloy would always believe the decision to drop the bomb had been mishandled. He told this to his closest friends at the time, men such as Forrestal, and he maintained the position over the years.113 He was more than a little bit skeptical over an article Stimson published in February 1947 defending the decision. “I knew Stimson as well as any man alive,” he recalled years later, “and while after the war he wrote an article for Harper’s defending his decision, I know in his soul there were doubts. He lay awake at night before the decision thinking about the consequences of dropping it on a civilian target, a city of that size.”114

  McCloy saw Byrnes as the primary advocate of using the bomb; Byrnes had repeatedly rejected McCloy’s suggestions to give the Japanese an explicit warning, and Byrnes had deleted McCloy’s assurance to the emperor in the first draft of the Potsdam Proclamation. He also felt that Byrnes could only have had such influence because of the character of the man who now occupied the White House. Truman, he thought, was “a simple man, prone to make up his mind quickly and decisively, perhaps too quickly—a thorough American.” This was not a great president, “not distinguished at all . . . not Lincolnesque, but an instinctive, common, hearty-natured man.”115 And in the matter of atomic diplomacy, Truman’s instincts led to decisions that were, in McCloy’s view, neither measured nor sound.

  McCloy’s access to intelligence intercepts had convinced him that the atomic bombing of two Japanese cities had been unnecessary. He had been aware that the emperor had thrown his weight against the militarists, and for a surrender that was all but unconditional. Though some have argued in retrospect that Truman and Byrnes could not be certain the militarists would obey their emperor’s wishes to surrender, virtually all the president’s advisers except Byrnes felt otherwise.

  McCloy also believed the atomic bombing had crucial moral consequences. He and other officials had been well aware, particularly after the Trinity test, that the atomic bomb was not just another weapon. “We knew it was an incredible thing,” he recalled.116 “God give us the intelligence and character,” he wrote in his diary, “to use it for good purpose.”117 When it was used to end a war that was already over, he could not help fearing the moral consequences for his country. He was not alone: Admiral Leahy, General Eisenhower, and many others associated with the Manhattan Project repeatedly expressed doubts about the morality of atomic bombing.III As the years passed, McCloy came to emphasize the immorality of the Hiroshima decision: “I feel very strongly that if we had found a way to have a politically negotiated surrender, and had not dropped the bomb, we would today be in a stronger position morally. . . . We should have given the Japanese a warning at least of what we had. In the postwar world, it would have made an enormous difference.”118

  In the end, however, McCloy had to resign himself to the fact that on one of the most critical issues of the war—how it was to end—his advice was ignored. So it was with some irony then that on September 7, 1945, he received a phone call from the White House. Truman was holding up a ceremony in which he was to be presented with the formal surrender documents, recently signed by MacArthur and Japanese representatives aboard the USS Missouri. At the last minute, the president remembered that McCloy was the man who had chiefly drafted the documents, and he wanted him to be part of the ceremonies. So McCloy rushed over to the White House, where Marshall, the Joint Chiefs, Stimson, Forrestal, Acheson, and several other officials were impatiently waiting. After the usual press photos were taken, McCloy and Stimson returned to the Pentagon, where they talked about the atomic bomb. Before leaving the War Department, both men wished to see a change of direction in the administration’s atomic policies. But the time left to either of them in government service was now very short.

  A few days later, just before Secretary of War Stimson left for his High-hold retreat for the last time, he presented McCloy and Lovett with Distinguished Service Medals, one of the country’s highest-ranking civilian awards. (Lovett too had decided to resign, after five years of supervising America’s air war.) As McCloy stood to receive the medal, his eye was drawn to the portrait of Elihu Root, Teddy Roosevelt’s secretary of war, hanging behind Stimson’s desk. Root had been one of Stimson’s mentors, and now McCloy could not help thinking that Stimson was passing on to him a tradition. Later that night, he wrote in his diary, “I felt a direct current running from Root through Stimson to me. They were the giants.”119

  With Stimson gone, McCloy was eager to leave as well, if only because he felt it was time to get back to Wall Street and earn some decent money. But before doing so, he had agreed to take a five-week trip around the world, with an eye to giving the department an overview of America’s new responsibilities. In Europe, he traveled with Averell Harriman, who was in a most pessimistic mood about the prospects for Soviet-American collaboration in the postwar world. In London, he told McCloy that he thought the “Russians are truly troubled” by the way in which the “people on the border states are reacting to them and the way the other powers are lining up against them.”120 He feared the situation would feed their natural paranoia and lead to a blowup. McCloy’s instincts were always more optimistic than Harriman’s. In his view, the Soviet Union was an economically backward state, exhausted by its herculean war effort. The Soviets could be difficult and troublesome, but the American military officers dealing with them in occupied
Europe assured McCloy that cooperation was still possible. He agreed—assuming that the United States continued its military presence in Europe and resisted the temptation to fall back into its prewar isolationist ways.

  The pressures to demobilize, however, were enormous. At one point in his European tour, he encountered a crowd of raucous GIs who shouted at him, demanding to know when they could return home. He handled the situation with humor, jocularly feigning deafness. But demobilization was not an issue that could be put off very long. And in the meantime, coming to some kind of working agreement with the Soviets was of “prime importance.”121 In large part, that meant establishing a practical relationship with the Soviets in Germany and Eastern Europe, based on the Yalta accords. To McCloy, the problem was to find a way to recognize the Soviet sphere of influence in Eastern Europe, particularly on security issues, without shutting the door to democratic freedoms and American business and media interests.

  This point was brought home to him in a dramatic fashion when he and Harriman arrived in Soviet-occupied Budapest. The Hungarian Smallholders Party, a noncommunist party, had just won a majority in free elections supervised by the Soviets, and throngs of jubilant Hungarians were celebrating in the streets. As McCloy and Harriman made their way to the U.S. Embassy, they found the road blocked by a crowd of Hungarians waving the American flag. “Here was the hope of the world,” McCloy later recalled, “the American flag.” The incident reminded him how necessary it was to maintain an American presence in Europe. “We give the population hope against the Russian fear,” he cabled back to Washington. “Opposition to Russian pressures gains encouragement by our mere presence.”122 For the same reason, he recommended that the United States keep its troops in Austria, where Soviet troops also resided, and put any loans to Eastern Europe on hold until the Soviets demonstrated that their security presence would not block the introduction of democratic governments.