Fear Itself (63 page)

This form of democratic politics was largely procedural. By establishing and policing rules, Washington convened a game dominated by organized interests. Tens upon tens of organizations formed to pressure Washington to adopt policies to their advantage. Even before a later expansion of such groups, the Department of Commerce identified some four thousand civic, trade, and professional entities that engaged in lobbying in 1949.
¹²⁸
Noting how that list “gives some idea of the tremendous number of groups operating in the American scene,” the political scientist David Truman stressed, in 1951, how their astonishing range of types “from the Abrasive Grain Association and the American Bible Society to the Society for the Preservation and Encouragement of Barber Shop Quartet Singing in America (23,000 members) and the Zionist Organization of America” reflected an uncommonly open political system.
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The most striking feature of Truman’s classic analysis of American politics at the end of the New Deal is how it underlines the absence of a public interest. The postwar arrangement of policies and procedures lacked “an interest of the nation as a whole.” Many groups, he argued, claimed to represent the public interest, but such assertions “did not describe any actual or possible political situation” within the arrangements that were crafted by the procedural face of the national state. Thus, he concluded that observers of American politics “do not need to account for a totally inclusive interest, because one does not exist.”
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Understandably, many observers, including David Truman, celebrated this combination of group diversity, multiple interests, and competitive politics as the polar opposite of the era’s totalitarian regimes. There were no fixed outcomes, no guiding substantive principles, no ideological imperatives. Conducted within this process, this procedural state transported a market model to the political realm. More than a set of facts, but “an ideology about how a democratic polity ought to work,” such interest-group liberalism represented a triumph for democracy.
¹³¹

But just as planned administrative economic management or corporatist forms of political negotiation do not come without cost, neither did this pluralist model of procedural politics. Unchecked by the pursuit of a public interest, its formal neutrality opened the state to the distortions of private power. The new public philosophy of group competition abdicated any democratic, as distinct from dictatorial, notions of a civic interest. Placed under great stress, public authority to achieve common goals thus lacked means to articulate why private interests should not dominate decision making about public policy.

The resulting contest veered between an open and fair competition and a game with skewed rules and a syntax of inequality. The more diffuse an interest—that is, the more civic and public—the less it could be served by this organization of political influence. With planning replaced by bargaining, government, too, often came to be “captured by too-narrow a range of interests.”
¹³²
Especially notable was a pro-business bias. This outcome was a consequence of decision in Congress to set aside important controls over economic life and to constrain the capacity of organized labor to act as the only available countervailing national force. Of the 1,247 lobbying organizations in Washington that were identified by a House Select Committee in 1950, fully 825 were business associations. In all, the political scientist E. E. Schattschneider concluded, “the flaw in the pluralist heaven is that the heavenly chorus sings with a strong upper class accent.”
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There was an additional cost, not a small one. The combination of a hands-off fiscal consensus for the Democratic Party and sharp constraints on the expansion of union labor protected the South’s rotten-borough political system and its structure of racial domination. Without planning instruments and without unions as a fully national force, the procedural state offered a lifeline to the system of segregation. With labor—the one force best poised to mount an assault on Jim Crow—demobilized by Taft-Hartley, southern resistance stiffened. In turn, the era’s still-nascent movement for civil rights proceeded in the main without active labor allies. As a result, the frontal attack on black civic and political exclusion advanced without focusing on social class, economic equality, or labor rights as essential features of racial justice.
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11
“Wildest Hopes”

T
HE FIRST ATOMIC BOMB
exploded on American soil. At 11:00
P.M.
on July 15, 1945, already morning in Potsdam as Churchill, Stalin, and Truman gathered for their victors’ summit, a convoy of Manhattan Project scientists, administrators, and one journalist, William Laurence, a fifty-seven-year-old Lithuanian-born science reporter for the
New York Times,
set out for a secret destination 212 miles south of Los Alamos to observe the start of the atomic age. Stationed on a hill in the desert at the edge of New Mexico’s remote and inaccessible Alamogordo Air Base, twenty miles from test site Zero,
¹
they were cautioned not to look until the flash had ended and a mushroom cloud had risen. Manhattan Project leaders, among them Vannevar Bush, James Conant, Enrico Fermi, and Leslie Groves, waited in the control room for Robert Oppenheimer, who had named the test Trinity, to issue the command. Some had participated in a betting pool about the size of the explosion.
²
The order was given at 5:30
A.M.
on the sixteenth. A bomb, referred to as “the Gadget,” with a plutonium core in the form of two small hemispheres, was to drop from the one-hundred-foot-high steel tower on which it stood poised.

Laurence reported:

There rose from the bowels of the earth, a light not of this world, the light of many suns in one. It was a sunrise such as the world had never seen, a great green super-sun climbing in a fraction of a second to a height of more than eight thousand feet, rising ever higher until it touched the clouds, lighting up earth and sky all around with a dazzling luminosity. Up it went, a great ball of fire a mile in diameter, changing colors as it kept shooting upward, from deep purple to orange, expanding, growing bigger, rising as it expanded, an elemental force freed from its bonds after being chained for billions of years. For a fleeting instant the color was unearthly green, such as one sees only in the corona of the sun during a total eclipse. It was as though the earth had opened up and the skies had split. One felt as though one were present at the moment of creation when God said: “Let there be light.”
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Another eyewitness, Brig. Gen. T. F. Farrell, the chief of field operations for the Manhattan Project, described the event in more prosaic prose:

Dr. Conant reached over and shook hands with General Groves. Dr. Bush, who was on the other side of the General, did likewise. Dr. Kistiakowsky
⁴
threw his arms around Dr. Oppenheimer and embraced him with shouts of glee. Others were equally enthusiastic. All pent-up emotions were released in those few minutes and seemed to sense immediately that the explosion had far exceeded the most optimistic expectations and wildest hopes of the scientists.
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Only animals, including a herd of antelope, disappeared that morning. That all was to change, of course, three weeks later, once three B-29s took off from Tinian Island in the Marianas, some fifteen hundred miles east of Japan, on August 6, 1945.
⁶
Laurence was permitted access to that air base, the home of what amounted to an air force, under the direction of Leslie Groves, exclusively for atomic warfare.
⁷
He observed the departure—and, hours later, the return—of the
Enola Gay,
the bomber that dropped “Little Boy” on Hiroshima. “Could it be,” he wondered, “that this innocent-looking object, so beautifully designed, so safe to handle, could in much less time than it takes to wink an eye annihilate an entire city and its population?”
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“Results clear-cut successful in all respects” was how the Department of War informed President Truman by telegram that the weapon had obliterated Hiroshima. “Visible effects greater than any test.”
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Three days later, Laurence received authorization to fly with the second mission, this one carrying “Fat Man” in the
Great Artiste
to Nagasaki. A midnight briefing closed with a prayer by the base chaplain, Capt. William B. Downey of the Hope Evangelical Lutheran Church in Minneapolis. “Almighty God, Father of all mercies . . . give to us all courage and strength for the hours that are ahead; give to them rewards according to their efforts.” Twelve hours later, watching from a front-row seat in the cramped, transparent nose of an accompanying B-29, Laurence witnessed Nagasaki “in its last brief moments under the sun.” As the city “stood out clearly in broad daylight,” he observed the “black object that went downward.”
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I.

F
OURTEEN YEARS
after Japan had conquered Manchuria, Emperor Hirohito addressed his nation by radio on August 15. His country lay in ruins. Some three million Japanese had died. Nearly five million servicemen were wounded or ill. Almost half the urban areas of the country had been destroyed. Nine million were homeless. With the enemy’s use of “cruel bombs to kill and maim large numbers of the innocent,” and with the casualties at Hiroshima and Nagasaki “beyond measure,” a decision to continue the war further,” he announced, “could lead in the end not only to the extermination of our race, but also to the destruction of all human civilization.”
¹¹

With this announcement of capitulation, the United States witnessed an explosion of joy even before the arrival of the first U.S. occupation forces or Japan’s formal surrender on the deck of the battleship
Missouri
on September 2, which the president declared as V-J Day. More than two million New Yorkers filled the Times Square area in a spontaneous celebration on August 14, once the electric news bulletin board on the
New York Times
annex reported President Truman’s announcement that Japan had been defeated. “The greatest throng in New York’s history goes wild in Times Square,”
Life
reported. The scene was repeated in other parts of the city and, indeed, across the country as something of a national party began. Americans took to the streets to celebrate the end of wartime sorrow and the prospect of normal times.
¹²

“Bring Back Daddy” clubs sprang up in something of a mass movement. Before long, the “greatest postwar demobilization of the American armed forces got underway.”
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Soldiers started to come home at great speed. When Japan laid down its arms, 8,020,000 U.S. Army soldiers and 3,400,000 U.S. Navy sailors were in service. Within months, by the start of 1946, the total had fallen to 3,024,000; by year’s close, to just 1,582,000. U.S. combat forces in Europe numbered just twelve understrength combat divisions by mid-1947, down from the ninety-seven that had been in combat when Germany surrendered.
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Defense spending also dropped drastically, from $81 billion to $13 billion between 1945 and 1947.
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It did not go without notice that this decline seemed to confirm that the United States intended to leave Europe just as soon as it could, much as President Roosevelt had indicated at Yalta, and that the serious range of conventional American might had been reduced for the most part to a defense posture limited to the Western Hemisphere.
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Concurrently, Washington’s war agencies began to ease their grip and close down. As early as August 18, Isaiah Berlin was reporting to London from the British embassy in Washington both about the public’s “recklessly carefree mood” and how, “in clear response to the public mood, war agencies have been competing with one another in slashing of controls, and an impression is given that the gigantic and complex American war machine is being dismantled overnight.”
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The effects on American society were immediate. Censorship was lifted. Gasoline was no longer rationed. Nylon would be in stockings by Christmas. The Office of War Information stopped functioning in late August 1945, and its overseas programs were transferred to the State Department. Within a month, the doors shut at the Foreign Economic Administration, the bureaucracy that managed Lend-Lease; that program came to an unequivocal end, notwithstanding the negative impact of its abrupt termination on Great Britain.
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The Office of Strategic Services (OSS), which had conducted intelligence operations, was disbanded by an executive order issued on September 20.
¹⁹
Its research and analysis divisions were transferred to the Department of State, while its operational side was moved to the Department of War.
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At that moment, both the public and its leaders expected that a combination of international law, collective security, and the country’s atomic shield would permit the United States to draw back from most of its global commitments. Not terribly worried about the Soviet Union, an “exhausted, devastated nation,”
²¹
the administration turned its attention to the home front’s housing crisis and massive strike wave. It also superintended a speedy return to a civilian economy by overseeing the rapid termination of military contracts, the disposal of surplus goods, the removal of war-focused materials from American factories, and an end to price controls. For now, at least, President Truman left foreign affairs for the most part to his secretary of state, the former South Carolina senator James Byrnes.
²²

The
Cold War
—a term that would not be coined until 1947 by Bernard Baruch and popularized by Walter Lippmann
²³
—was not anticipated. During World War II, Lippmann had not been alone in thinking that the alliance of the non-Axis countries would persist because the core strategic interest of the United States lay in not allowing any power in Europe to act with force outside that continent.
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Likewise, President Roosevelt had believed the wartime coalition would continue, if for more prosaic reasons. “They have got a large enough ‘hunk of bread’ right in Russia to keep them busy for a great many years to come,” he told the Advertising War Council Conference on March 8, 1944, “without taking on any more headaches.”
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This was a widely shared view.
²⁶
The armed forces, the office of the president, and Congress projected a continuing partnership of the Allies when they conducted planning efforts during the war for a smooth and rapid postwar demobilization.
²⁷
They took heart not just from negotiations to establish the United Nations but also from the way American participation was beyond controversy. Drafted in San Francisco before the war ended, the United Nations Charter was signed on June 26, 1945, and ratified by a lopsided 89–2 margin in the U.S. Senate on July 28,
²⁸
twenty-six years after American participation in the League of Nations had been rejected by that body. Three months later, on October 24, the United Nations Charter came into effect just as the war crimes trial of Nazi leaders was convening in Nuremberg under the collective auspices of the wartime alliance.

President Truman had every reason to expect the UN would advance Franklin Roosevelt’s postwar vision.
²⁹
When they returned from Alamogordo to Washington, Vannevar Bush and James Conant agreed that the best course forward would be to impart all available information about the bomb in order “to avoid a secret armament race.” For that reason, they argued, efforts to build the capacity of the United Nations “must be the prime objective of every sane man.”
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Despite emerging tensions, the Soviet Union was not yet an enemy.
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Even Mississippi’s James Eastland, a fierce anti-Communist, told his Senate colleagues during the UN ratification debate in July 1945 that “we must cooperate with Russia.”
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When the first session of the UN General Assembly met in January 1946 at Church House in London, a collaborative relationship between the United States, whose delegation was led by former secretary of state Edward Stettinius, and the Soviet Union, whose delegation was led by Andrei Vyshinsky, the former Soviet purge trial prosecutor, still did not appear far-fetched, even though Iran charged the USSR with interference in its internal affairs, and the Soviet Union charged Britain with interference in Greece, both omens of disputes to come. Consistent with the euphoria and relief that had accompanied the end of the war, a tone of cooperation prevailed. It quickly seemed to take practical form. Within a fortnight, the United Nations’ first resolution, unanimously adopted by the fifty-one member nations on January 24, initiated a process to secure a global treaty that would eliminate atomic weapons and guide the peaceful application of atomic science. Stalin soon expressed confidence that the UN was developing as a “serious instrument” for preserving world peace.
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