Truman (133 page)

When on Tuesday, January 31, 1950, Acheson, Johnson, and Lilienthal with several of their aides convened for the final session of the Z Committee in Room 216 of the Old State Department Building, it was Acheson who took charge. He had concluded that work should proceed on the hydrogen bomb and presented the draft of a statement to be made by the President.

Johnson agreed, but Lilienthal did not like rushing things through in an “atmosphere of excitement.” A decision to go ahead with the bomb now would probably make a new approach to the atomic arms race impossible. He thought the country’s almost sole reliance on this kind of weapon was extremely unwise and that going ahead with it would give the American people a “false and dangerous assurance…that when we get this new gadget ‘the balance will be ours’ as against the Russians.” He questioned what the project would do to defense budgets and foreign policy.

Acheson, who greatly admired Lilienthal and who would later describe Lilienthal’s objections as “eloquently and forcefully” expressed, said he could not overcome two “stubborn facts”: that delaying work on the bomb would not delay Soviet work on their bomb; and that the American people would simply not tolerate a policy of delay.

“We must protect the President,” Johnson said. And though he still had grave reservations, Lilienthal, too, agreed to sign the statement.

Accompanied by Admiral Sidney W. Souers, the executive secretary of the National Security Council, the three men walked to the White House. Their meeting had lasted two and a half hours. The meeting with the President took seven minutes.

Truman had already made up his mind, perhaps as much as ten days earlier, or at least that was the impression of his immediate staff, though he had said nothing specific. Acheson knew this. Apparently they all did. The President, wrote Lilienthal, was “clearly set on what he was going to do before we set foot inside the door.”

As Truman looked over the statement, Acheson said Lilienthal had some additional views to express.

Truman, turning to Lilienthal, said he had always believed the United States should never use “these weapons,” that peace was “our whole purpose.” Lilienthal said that while he did not overrate the value of his own judgment, he felt he must express his grave reservations about the proposed course. Try as he might, he could not see it as the wisest move. However carefully worded, however issued, the statement would only magnify the essentially mistaken policy of relying on atomic weapons as the country’s chief defense.

There was too much talk in Congress “and everywhere,” Truman broke in. People were “so excited.” He didn’t see that he had any alternative.

“Can the Russians do it?” he asked the group. It was his only question. They all nodded.

“We don’t have much time,” interjected Admiral Souers.

“In that case,” said Truman, “we have no choice. We’ll go ahead.”

As he signed the statement, Truman said he recalled another meeting of the National Security Council concerning Greece, when “everybody predicted the end of the world if we went ahead, but we did go ahead and the world didn’t come to an end.” It would be “the same case here,” he said.

While the President went home to Blair House for lunch, Charlie Ross again handed out a mimeographed sheet.

Lilienthal described the mood at the AEC afterward as that of a funeral party. For him it was a night of heartache. “I hope I was wrong, and that somehow I’ll be proved wrong,” he wrote. “We have to leave many things to God….” Albert Einstein, in a rare appearance on television, talked of the radioactive poisoning of the atmosphere and warned, “General annihilation beckons.”

To what extent Truman had struggled with the decision, or dwelled on it afterward, is not known. He left nothing in writing. Nor can Acheson’s influence on him be readily gauged, though doubtless it was considerable. Acheson, as Truman said, was one of the most persuasive men he had ever known.

It would have been preferable surely—wiser, more prudent—to have given the entire question longer, closer examination, and under less stress, even assuming Truman would have decided no differently. The country could have been better prepared. There would have been time for a clear, explanatory presidential address to the nation, instead of a mimeographed announcement. So disquieting, so momentous, and so costly a step deserved better.

In any event, as anticipated, public and editorial approval of the decision was overwhelming—the President had made “the right and inevitable” decision. Then, in only a matter of days, the level of apprehension was raised still higher by news from London that Klaus Fuchs, a former atomic scientist at Los Alamos, had confessed to being a Russian spy, and by the sudden claim of Senator Joseph McCarthy that he had in his possession a list of more than two hundred known Communists employed at the State Department.

With the onrush of so much sensational, seemingly inexplicable bad news—China lost, the Russian bomb, Alger Hiss, the treason of Klaus Fuchs—breaking with such clamor, all in less than six months, the country was in a state of terrible uncertainty.

“How much are we going to have to take?” asked Senator Homer Capehart of Indiana.

Life
devoted much of one issue to show how vastly Russian military strength exceeded that of the United States—an army of 2,600,000 men, compared to an American force of 640,000, 30 Russian armored divisions to one American. The United States produced 1,200 new planes a year, the Russians 7,000. Only the American Navy stood first, but the Soviets already had a more powerful fleet than Germany had had at the start of the last war and three times the number of American submarines. While America spent 6 percent of its national income on military strength, the Russians were spending 25 percent. And so on. “War Can Come; Will We Be Ready?” asked the
Life
headline.

It was, of course, a question of paramount importance within the administration. For months behind the scenes Acheson had been arguing that Truman’s $13 billion limit on defense spending was no longer realistic. Now with his decision to proceed with the hydrogen bomb Truman authorized a complete review of military policy. At both the State Department and the Pentagon, work began on a sweeping new report, and with the pressure on, relations between the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Defense grew steadily more contentious. At a meeting in March, Louis Johnson exploded with such temper—banging down his chair, shouting objections, hammering his fist on the table—that Acheson could only conclude that Johnson, like Forrestal, had cracked under the strain.

When Acheson reported to Truman what had happened, Truman was appalled. Probably it was then he knew that Johnson would have to go—when the time was right.

Fear gripped Washington and the country. “The air was so charged with fear,” remembered Herb Block, “that it took only a small spark to ignite it.” And the spark was McCarthy. When Block, in one of his cartoons in the
Post,
labeled an overflowing barrel of tar “McCarthyism,” another new word entered the language along with the H-bomb.

Until that January, Joseph R. McCarthy, Wisconsin’s forty-one-year-old junior senator, had been casting about for an issue that might lift him from obscurity. All but friendless in the Senate, recently voted the worst member of the Senate in a poll of Washington correspondents, McCarthy appeared to be a hopeless failure. Over dinner one evening at the Colony Restaurant, a Catholic priest, Father Edmund A. Walsh of Georgetown University, suggested he might sound the alarm over Communist infiltration of the government, and McCarthy, who had already made some loud, if unnotable, charges about Communist subversion, seems to have realized at once that he had found what he needed. A month later, in a Lincoln’s Birthday speech in West Virginia, he waved a piece of paper, saying he had “here in my hand” the names of 205 “known Communists” in the State Department. The speech went largely unnoticed, but at Salt Lake City and Reno soon afterward he made essentially the same claim, except the number was cut to fifty-seven, and they were referred to now as “card-carrying” Communists. He made headlines across the country. Back at the Senate he carried on for five hours, claiming to have penetrated “Truman’s iron curtain of secrecy” and come up with eighty-one names.

The charges were wild and unsupported. McCarthy had no names, he produced no new evidence. He was a political brawler, morose, reckless, hard-drinking, a demagogue such as had not been seen in the Senate since the days of Huey Long, only he had none of Long’s charm or brilliance. The press called him desperate, a loudmouth and a character assassin. His Communist hunt was “a wretched burlesque of the serious and necessary business of loyalty check-ups.” But he was no more bothered by such criticism than by his own inconsistencies, and whatever he said the press printed, his most sensational allegations often getting the biggest headlines. To more and more of the country it seemed that even if he might be wrong in some of his particulars, probably he was onto something, and high time.

Harry Truman, McCarthy charged, was the “prisoner of a bunch of twisted intellectuals” who only told him what they wanted him to know. Attacking Acheson, he said, “When this pompous diplomat in striped pants, with the phony British accent, proclaimed to the American people that Christ on the Mount endorsed Communism, high treason, and betrayal of a sacred trust, the blasphemy was so great that it awakened the dormant indignation of the American people.” As McCarthy kept up the assault, Acheson received so much threatening mail that guards had to be posted at his house around the clock.

While numbers of his fellow Republicans silently deplored McCarthy’s methods, others—Bridges, Brewster, Capehart, Mundt, Wherry—began lending support. “I will not turn my back on Joe McCarthy,” said Brewster. Encouragement came too from Senator Taft, who had been the first to introduce the “soft on Communism” issue in the 1946 elections and who now admitted publicly that he was egging McCarthy on, to press the attack, to “keep talking and if one case didn’t work out, to bring up another.” All the anger and resentment felt by Republicans like Taft over Truman’s surprise upset in 1948 had found an outlet.

Senate Democrats, meanwhile, called for a complete investigation of McCarthy’s charges. A special subcommittee of the Foreign Relations Committee began hearings under the chairmanship of Millard Tydings of Maryland, one of the most respected, influential Democrats in the Senate. The assumption was that in the bright light of public exposure, McCarthy and his tactics could not long survive.

But the attention only magnified him. The hearings in the Senate’s marble-columned Caucus Room gave him center stage and the full attention of the press day after day. “You are not fooling me,” he said. “This committee [is] not seeking to get the names of bad security risks, but…to find out the names of my informants so they can be kicked out of the State Department tomorrow.” By the end of March, in the six weeks since his initial outburst at Wheeling, McCarthy had not named a single Communist.

He announced he had the name of the “top Russian espionage agent” in the United States, indeed the “onetime” boss of Alger Hiss and his espionage ring. The man, said McCarthy, was Owen J. Lattimore, formerly of the State Department and currently director of the Johns Hopkins School of International Relations. As time would show, Lattimore was neither a Communist nor ever an influential figure at the State Department. He had worked for the department all of four months in 1946, as an adviser on a reparations mission in Japan. The accusation was a fraud. “If you crack this case,” McCarthy told the committee, “it will be the biggest espionage case in the history of this country.” He was willing, he said, to stand or fall on that.

In mid-February 1950, at about the time McCarthy’s reckless charges were first making headlines, Truman agreed to an exclusive interview with Arthur Krock of
The New York Times,
during which he impressed Krock as a man of exceptional inner calm and strength.

Harry S. Truman, said Krock, might seem to many a controversial figure. But to those who had the chance to talk with him intimately, his faith in the future had a “luminous” quality.

David Lilienthal, who came to the Oval Office on February 14 for a final farewell meeting with the President, described it later as “one of the happiest sessions I’ve ever had with him.”

“About these scientists,” Truman said, “we need men with great intellects, need their ideas. But we need to balance them with other kinds of people, too.”

Lilienthal, perhaps as much as anyone, knew the weight of the burdens Truman carried. Yet Truman looked “tip-top…his eye clear.” Studying him, listening to him talk, Lilienthal was amazed. As he later wrote, “My admiration and wonder at his relaxed way of looking at things, and his obvious good health…reached a new high.”