Fear Itself (66 page)

The gulf proved impassable.
⁷⁸
Anarchy’s desolation beckoned, to be contained, perhaps, only by the half peace of deterrence. It was this prospect that five of the leading American scholars of international relations considered just as Baruch and Gromyko were sketching their incommensurable positions. Arguing that neither international agreements nor inspections could, in fact, prevent atomic warfare, this group of experts contended that only the fear of retaliation would keep the peace, albeit a peace of mistrust and suspicion. That course, they maintained, would require the United States to build bigger and better bombs so that even an enemy with the bomb would not be tempted to use it.
⁷⁹

This perspective almost existentially informed U.S. policy. With international regulation discussions at an impasse, the United States warned the UN Atomic Energy Commission in late August 1946 that “the remaining alternative is development of superior bombs and superior ways of delivering them to the target as counter-offensive weapons” that could “deter a nation from starting an aggressive war by making it apparent that victory is impossible.”
⁸⁰
On June 5, 1947, a closed meeting of the UN Atomic Energy Commission, held in Lake Success, New York, heard Frederick Osborn, the U.S. representative, declare that an “atomic race has started.”
⁸¹
Within months, the United States closed the mid-Pacific atoll of Eniwetok, in the Marshall Island, to ships, planes, and visitors, especially journalists.
⁸²
It placed the area “under full security restrictions” and moved “the native inhabitants of the coral islands” some 150 miles southwest in order to secure the area as a proving grounds to test new types of atomic bombs.
⁸³

A sense of gloom and danger continued to accelerate. “We are traveling to a land we cannot see,” Robert Oppenheimer observed in 1948. He understood that “our atomic monopoly is like a cake of ice melting in the sun.”
⁸⁴
Noting with remarkable understatement that “the development of atomic energy” is not marked by “the otherworldliness normally characteristic of new developments in science,” the physicist most responsible for harnessing the Manhattan Project advised Americans to prepare for “weapons even more terrifying, and perhaps vastly more terrifying,” which, in all likelihood, would be built “in truly terrifying numbers.” Any basis for cooperation between the United States and the Soviet Union, he concluded, had been “eradicated by a revelation of their deep conflicts of interest, the deep and apparently mutual repugnance of their ways of life, and the apparent conviction on the part of the Soviet Union of the inevitability of conflict—and not in ideas alone, but in force.” With “the nature of atomic armament” coupled with “the political climate of the postwar world . . . there is the gravest danger,” he warned, that “the fabric of civilized life . . . will not hold.”
⁸⁵

IV.

A
MERICA
’
S NATIONAL SECURITY
state was incubated under the shadow of the bomb. The rupture this weapon inflicted on the human condition generated a sense of alarm and foreboding that accelerated as relations with the Soviet Union grew more fraught. The era’s landmark decisions in Congress—including the adoption of the Atomic Energy Act of 1946, the National Security Act of 1947, the Defense Reorganization Act of 1949, and the Internal Security Act of 1950—all were motivated by this new source of fear itself.

A paradox became apparent. Every key building block of the national security state that was developed during the Truman years required and secured congressional approval. By shaping the national security state’s agencies, Congress placed foreign and military policy within arrangements and processes consistent with its own purposes. The structures and procedures Congress brought into being allowed its members to build their own preferences into the substance of policy.
⁸⁶
And yet, as Congress grappled with national security, it circumscribed its own long-term role. By delegating immense capacity to the executive branch, Congress effectively stepped aside, just as it had during World War II when it had restrained its own powers of investigation and provided the country’s professional military leaders and President Roosevelt with all the means they requested.
⁸⁷

With mounting concern about Soviet ambitions and behavior, with Communism losing standing as a good, or at least well-intentioned, cause, and with global affairs increasingly understood as a fierce ideological battlefield, Congress was faced with choices that carried a huge responsibility. It had to decide when and how to assign authority, which security frameworks to adopt, and when to test the devotion and trustworthiness of American citizens.

It was congressional lawmaking, in short, that sorted not just the extent but also the manner in which powers held by the central government would be augmented. In so doing, members of the House and Senate had to consider the risks posed for representative government by the growth of concentrated and often concealed executive power as the country confronted the world’s only other superpower. They had to determine whether and when programs created to advance U.S. safety and promote its commitment to democracy might contradict the country’s liberal principles, humanitarian norms, and familiar procedures of government, and when such policies might endanger the country rather than promote its security.
⁸⁸
As capacious security instruments were developed, it was by no means clear whether “the concentration of power, and the authoritarian control of it, [which] are inescapable in a military establishment,” would characterize the national security state; that is, as Charles Merriam put the question in 1946, whether it would be possible to develop “security without militarism.”
⁸⁹

Hugely motivated by fears of Communism, congressional decisions were guided by a more bipartisan approach to foreign affairs than had existed before Pearl Harbor, particularly those related to the control of atomic energy and the organization of the armed services. The U.S. delegation to the San Francisco conference that brought the UN into being included Tom Connally of Texas, who chaired the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, and the ranking Republican member, Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan, who increasingly abjured his prewar isolationism. The fierce divisions and close votes that had marked lawmaking about neutrality and conscription in the late 1930s and the start of the 1940s did not reappear. Some of the most far-reaching laws passed with little or no recorded opposition. The Atomic Energy Act of 1946, which gathered great power in the hands of the Atomic Energy Commission, was approved without a roll call in the Senate, and by a large majority in the House, followed by a voice vote that endorsed the conference report. Similarly, the National Security Act of 1947, which redesigned the organizational architecture of the federal government in fundamental ways, was adopted in each chamber by voice vote. Joseph Wilson, a Texan, expressed a widely shared sentiment when he told the House, “It has been said here that this is a piece of ‘must’ legislation for both the Democrats and the Republicans. I say you can leave out ‘Democrats’ and ‘Republicans’ and say that this is a piece of ‘must’ legislation for America and its future.”
⁹⁰
Similarly, the Defense Reorganization Act of 1949, which fine-tuned the Pentagon, was confirmed by voice vote in the Senate, and approved in the House by a 356–7 margin after the ranking Republican on the House Armed Services Committee, Dewey Short, of Missouri, praised Georgia’s Carl Vinson, the committee’s Democratic chair, for his “capacity, energy, and sagacity” in moving the law to completion.
⁹¹
Fear for the country’s survival as a robust democracy often placed national security above national politics.

Notwithstanding, controversy remained. There was much debate, often sharp and rancorous, inside congressional committee rooms and sometimes on the floor about policies and purposes, concepts and practices. When the regulation of atomic energy was considered, there was a well-defined division between the members of Congress who wanted the military to be in charge and those who insisted on civilian control. When the armed forces were reorganized, some preferred a unified military command under the auspices of a single senior general; others favored a more complex structure of leadership. When military manpower was discussed, there emerged severe differences dividing members who supported universal military training from those who wanted a draft that would only conscript persons who were needed for a current conflict.

We have already seen how the congressional power of the southern wing of the Democratic Party loomed large during the postwar years when crucial judgments were made about capitalism and labor. Regarding might and security, the southern position tended to be persistently expansive, just as it had been before World War II. Of all the blocs in Congress that backed the Truman administration’s international policies, southern Democrats were the most steadfast; the great majority of state delegations that offered the highest level of support for its prodigious initiatives were southern.
⁹²
As a whole, representatives from this region were the most consistently prepared to project U.S. military power and campaign for democracy overseas. Especially striking was how members of the House and Senate from the South who resisted the more vigorous parts of the domestic New Deal and a key role for organized labor forcefully backed the national security state. Maryland senator Millard Tydings, for example, gave Presidents Roosevelt and Truman fits as a congressional adversary on economic and social policy. He helped lead the frontal assault on organized labor that produced the Taft-Hartley Act. But he strongly backed policies and institutions that asserted global power. Americans, he counseled in November 1947, must unite, and be “willing to curtail our own enjoyment of wealth and possessions,” and not “turn back from this sacrificial action” because “the risk is too great.”
⁹³
In this quest, he was happy to join with organized labor and liberal Democrats who were prepared to back his sense of an American crusade, including a new group, Americans for Democratic Action, whose founders included Walter Reuther, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Arthur Schlesinger Jr.

Republicans, by contrast, were less united.
⁹⁴
Within the Republican Party, two distinct lines of criticism regarding President Truman’s policies developed. The first, though hostile to the Soviet Union, wanted to sharply limit any continuing U.S. involvement in European affairs, restrict the country’s defense perimeter to the Western Hemisphere, and confront Soviet power only when core U.S. interests were threatened directly. Supporters of this position also were concerned, as California’s Donald Jackson told the House, that a powerful and centralized national security state could pose “a serious challenge to our national traditions” by creating “evils of concentration . . . more dangerous in its implications than anything now existent in the executive branch of government.”
⁹⁵
Harold Knutson of Minnesota, the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee in the Eightieth Congress, which served during the critical moment for the formation of the national security state in 1947–1948, fought for tax reductions and against overseas spending on the grounds that “people are becoming fed up with all these foreign entanglements.”
⁹⁶
When plans were being made for a national intelligence agency, the country’s leading Republican newspaper, the
Chicago Daily Tribune,
campaigned against it under the headline. N
EW
D
EAL
P
LANS TO
S
PY ON
W
ORLD AND
H
OME
F
OLKS
; S
UPER
G
ESTAPO
A
GENCY IS
U
NDER
C
ONSIDERATION.
⁹⁷
Of this Republican group, Georgia Democrat Carl Vinson wryly argued, “They don’t like Russia, they don’t like Communism, but they don’t want to do anything to stop it.”
⁹⁸

By contrast, other Republicans (including the first-term California House member Richard Nixon, who had campaigned for a no-appeasement “realistic foreign policy” and was disappointed that President Truman’s announcement of aid to Greece and Turkey was silent about China,
⁹⁹
thought that the Truman administration was “weak on Communism,” especially in Asia, and that its efforts to contain the Soviet Union were too hesitant. Their preference was a greatly more assertive American military stance, even to the point of initiating a showdown with the USSR before that country could level the playing field by coming to possess atomic weapons.
¹⁰⁰

The Senate’s most important Republican, Robert Taft of Ohio, the majority leader in the Eightieth Congress, was forced to balance both schools of thought. In a speech to the Rhode Island Republican Club in January 1948, he argued that high military spending and mobilization for national security threatened to overcome the very “America we are trying to preserve.”
¹⁰¹
But concurrently, he criticized the Democrats for practicing a policy of “appeasing Russia” and sacrificing “the freedom of many nations and millions of people.”
¹⁰²

Most nonsouthern Democrats joined their southern colleagues to back President Truman’s global policies, which they believed were successfully combining assertiveness with prudence. On those occasions when Congress did not vote to build a national security state with overwhelmingly bipartisan votes, the House and Senate largely split along party lines. From 1945 through 1952, southern and nonsouthern Democrats voted in the main with a similar commitment to back the Truman administration.
¹⁰³

Yet high Democratic agreement across regional lines should not obscure tensions about these issues within the party. Nonsouthern Democrats also found themselves often unable to speak with one voice. With nostalgia for the anti-Fascist alliance, a sense of sympathy with left-wing European movements, and hope for cooperation with the Soviet Union, more than a few Democrats thought that the Cold War had developed less as the result of Soviet behavior than of persistent American misjudgment and overextended ambition.
¹⁰⁴
While others saw ominous signs in Soviet speech and behavior, this vocal minority, led before his defection in 1948 by former vice president and former commerce secretary Henry Wallace, focused on the fact that the Soviet Union had taken positions that were not unreasonable about reparations from Germany, the reconstruction of Italy and Japan, and other strategic issues.
¹⁰⁵
When President Truman declared his doctrine of active engagement in Greece and Turkey, many liberal Democrats in Congress and outside it were either reserved or opposed at the outset.
¹⁰⁶
Rather than follow a policy of active containment, they preferred negotiations and concessions to restore the spirit of Yalta.
¹⁰⁷