by Howard Zinn
If we take the stand that our object is merely to see that the next war is
bigger and better, we wil ultimately lose the respect of the public… . We wil
become the unpaid servants of the munitions makers and mere technicians
rather than the self-sacrificing public-spirited citizens which we feel ourselves
to be.51
19
Nobel Prize-winning physical chemist James Franck, working with the University of Chicago Metal urgical Laboratory on problems of building the bomb, headed a committee on social
and political implications of the new weapon. In June 1945 the Franck Committee wrote a
report advising against a surprise atomic bombing of Japan: "If we consider international
agreement on total prevention of nuclear warfare as the paramount objective … this kind of
introduction of atomic weapons to the world may easily destroy al our chances of success."
Dropping the bomb "wil mean a flying start toward an unlimited armaments race," the
report said.52
The committee went to Washington to deliver the report personal y to Henry Stimson, but
were told, falsely, that he was out of the city. Neither Stimson nor the scientific panel
advising him was in a mood to accept the argument of the Franck Report.
Scientist Leo Szilard, who had been responsible for the letter from Albert Einstein to
Franklin Roosevelt suggesting a project to develop an atomic bomb, also fought a hard but
futile battle against the bomb being dropped on a Japanese city. The same month that the
bomb was successful y tested in New Mexico, July 1945, Szilard circulated a petition among
the scientists, protesting in advance against the dropping of the bomb, arguing that "a
nation which sets the precedent of using these newly liberated forces of nature for purposes
of destruction may have to bear the responsibility of opening the door to an era of
devastation on an unimaginable scale."53 Determined to do what he could to stop the
momentum toward using the bomb, Szilard asked his friend Einstein to give him a letter of
introduction to President Roosevelt. But just as the meeting was being arranged, an
announcement came over the radio that Roosevelt was dead.
Would Einstein's great prestige have swayed the decision? It is doubtful. Einstein, known to
be sympathetic to socialism and pacifism, was excluded from the Manhattan Project and did
not know about the momentous decisions being made to drop the bombs on Hiroshima and
Nagasaki.
One adviser to Harry Truman took a strong position against the atomic bombing of Japan:
Undersecretary of the Navy Ralph Bard. As a member of Stimson's Interim Committee, at
first he agreed with the decision to use the bomb on a Japanese city, but then changed his
mind. He wrote a memorandum to the committee talking about the reputation of the United
States "as a great humanitarian nation" and suggesting the Japanese be warned and that
some assurance about the treatment of the emperor might induce the Japanese to
surrender. It had no effect.54
A few military men of high rank also opposed the decision. General Dwight Eisenhower,
fresh from leading the Al ied armies to victory in Europe, met with Stimson just after the
successful test of the bomb in Los Alamos. He told Stimson he opposed use of the bomb
because the Japanese were ready to surrender. Eisenhower later recal ed, "I hated to see
our country be the first to use such a weapon."55 General Hap Arnold, head of the army air
force, believed Japan could be brought to surrender without the bomb. The fact that
important military leaders saw no need for the bomb lends weight to the idea that the
reasons for bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki were political.
In the operations of U.S. foreign policy after World War II, there were a few bold people
who rejected Machiavel ian subservience and refused to accept the going orthodoxies.
Senator Wil iam Fulbright of Arkansas was at the crucial meeting of advisers when President
Kennedy was deciding whether to proceed with plans to invade Cuba. Arthur Schlesinger,
who was there, wrote later that "Fulbright, speaking in an emphatic and incredulous way,
denounced the whole idea."56
20
During the Vietnam War, advisers from MIT and Harvard were among the fiercest advocates of ruthless bombing, but a few rebel ed. One of the earliest was James Thomson, a Far East
expert in the State Department who resigned his post and wrote an eloquent article in the
Atlantic Monthly criticizing the U.S. presence in Vietnam.57
While Henry Kissinger was playing Machiavel i to Nixon's prince, at least three of his aides
objected to his support for an invasion of Cambodia in 1970. Wil iam Watts, asked to
coordinate the White House announcement on the invasion of Cambodia, declined and wrote
a letter of resignation. He was confronted by Kissinger aide General Al Haig, who told him,
"You have an order from your Commander in Chief." He, therefore, could not resign, Haig
said. Watts replied, "Oh yes, I can—and I have!" Roger Morris and Anthony Lake, asked to
write the speech for President Nixon justifying the invasion, refused and instead wrote a
joint letter of resignation.58
The most dramatic action of dissent during the war in Vietnam came from Daniel El sberg, a
Ph.D. in economics from Harvard who had served in the marines and held important posts
in the Department of Defense, the Department of State, and the embassy in Saigon. He had
been a special assistant to Henry Kissinger and then worked for the Rand Corporation, a
private "think tank" of brainy people who contracted to do top-secret research for the U.S.
government. When the Rand Corporation was asked to assemble a history of the Vietnam
War, based on secret documents, El sberg was appointed as one of the leaders of the
project. But he had already begun to feel pangs of conscience about the brutality of the war
being waged by his government. He had been out in the field with the military and what he
saw persuaded him that the United States did not belong in Vietnam. Then, reading the
documents and helping to put together the history, he saw how many lies had been told to
the public and was reinforced in his feelings.
With the help of a former Rand employee he had met in Vietnam, Anthony Russo, El sberg
secretly photocopied the entire 7,000-page history—the "Pentagon Papers" as they came to
be cal ed—and distributed them to certain members of Congress as wel as to the New York
Times. When the Times, in a journalistic sensation, began printing this "top-secret"
document, El sberg was arrested and put on trial. The counts against him could have
brought a prison sentence of 130 years. But while the jury deliberated the judge learned,
through the Watergate scandal, that Nixon's "plumbers" had tried to break into El sberg's psychiatrist's office to find damaging material and he declared the case tainted and cal ed
off the trial.
El sberg's was only one of a series of resignations from government that took place during
and after the Vietnam War. A number of operatives of the CIA quit their jobs in the late
sixties and early seventies and began to write and speak about the secret activities of the
agency—for example, Victor Marchetti, Philip Agee, John Stockwel , Frank Snepp, and Ralph
McGehee.
For the United States, as for other countries, Machiavel ian
ism dominates foreign policy, but
the courage of a smal number of dissenters suggests the possibility that some day the
larger public wil no longer accept that kind of "realism." Machiavel i himself might have smiled imperiously at this suggestion, and said, "You're wasting your time. Nothing wil
change. It's human nature."
That claim is worth exploring.
1 Ralph Roeder, The Man of the Renaissance (Viking, 1933), 120-130, gives us a dramatic
description of Savonarola's arrest and execution.
21
2 Niccoló Machiavel i, The Prince and The Discourses, Introduction by Max Lerner, (Modern
Library Col ege Edition, 1950), Chapt. 6, p. 22. Al citations are from this edition unless
otherwise specified.
3 Ibid., Chapt. 15, p. 56.
4 In the period after World War II, the term realism became known among theorists of
international relations as meaning a recognition that "national interest" and "power"
predominated in the foreign policy of nations. Political scientist Hans Morgenthau made this
the center of his theory, explained in his book Politics among Nations (Knopf, 1948), which became the most influential textbook of the postwar period. The "realist paradigm" is
discussed at length and criticized in John Vasquez, The Power of Power Politics (Rutgers,
1983).
5 Editorial, Wal Street Journal, Apr. 6, 1989. That same week, the Supreme Judicial Court in Massachusetts rejected such "realism" when it overturned the arrest of a protester against nuclear weapons for "trespassing," saying that the traditional police practice of using
"disorderly conduct" or "loitering" charges as a catch-al for arresting undesirable persons violated rights of free speech and assembly.
6 Scholars, as is their habit, have always argued about Machiavel i and what he "real y
meant," although the language of The Prince is quite simple and direct. Political philosopher Leo Strauss, in his Thoughts on Machiavel i (Free Press, 1958), believes that we cannot read Machiavel i directly, that we must look for hidden meanings. This approach is strongly
criticized by Robert McShea in "Leo Strauss on Machiavel i," Western Political Quarterly, (Dec. 1963), who says, "The theory of concealed teaching and the rules for reading as used
by Strauss in the explication of Machiavel i's text seem less a means for finding what that
thinker purports to say than for reading preconceived notions into his writing."
7 The British political philosopher Isaiah Berlin has written about Machiavel i in the New York Review of Books, March 17, 1988, that he believed "one needed a ruling class of brave, resourceful, intel igent, gifted men who knew how to seize opportunities and use them, and
citizens who were adequately protected, patriotic, proud of their state, epitomes of manly,
pagan virtues. That is how Rome rose to power and conquered the world… . Decadent states
were conquered by vigorous invaders who retained those virtues." Berlin takes a kindly view
of Machiavel i, saying that Machiavel i recognizes the Christian virtues, which are different,
but "leaves you to choose." This seems naive to me. A writer who argues so powerful y for those "pagan virtues" hardly leaves it to us to choose. Of course, we can stil choose, but he has loaded the argument so as to push our choice his way. J. H. Hexter, a Yale historian,
noted Machiavel i's chief concern as lo state (roughly, "the state"), as "an instrument of exploitation, the mechanism the prince uses to get what he wants." J. H. Hexter, "The Loom of Language and the Fabric of Imperatives: The Case of // Principe and Utopia, " The American Historical Review (July 1964).
8 Parade Magazine, Apr. 13, 1986.
9 Robert W. Tucker, "The Purposes of American Power," Foreign Affairs (Winter 1980).
10 New York Times, Mar. 10, 1983.
11 For a history of U.S. involvement in Central America, see Walter LaFeber, Inevitable
Revolutions (Norton, 1983). For a more specific look at the policy of the Reagan
administration in El Salvador, read Raymond Bonner, Weakness and Deceit (Times Books,
1984).
12 Robert W. Tucker, "The Purposes of American Power," Foreign Affairs (Winter 1980).
22
13 Machiavel i, The Prince, Chapt. 7, p. 27.
14 The Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intel igence
Activities, Interim Report, Senate, Nov. 20, 1975, n.
15 In the trial of former National Security Council staff member Colonel Oliver North, who
had been in charge of the covert operation to deliver military supplies to the
counterrevolutionary group in Nicaragua (the "contras") after Congress had made such aid
il egal, it was disclosed that Vice President George Bush had made a visit to the president of
Honduras in the spring of 1985 to discuss giving additional military supplies to Honduras in
return for Honduras's continuing aid to the contras, who were based on their territory.
Boston Globe, Apr. 7, 1989.
16 Machiavel i, The Prince, Chapt. 18, p. 64.
17 Ibid., Chapt. 6, p. 22; Chapt. 25, p. 94.
18 Ibid., Chapt. 18, p. 64.
19 We are told this by Christian Gauss, a Princeton philosopher, in his introduction to the
Mentor edition of The Prince. Max Lerner, in his introduction to the Modern Library Col ege Edition, names Lenin and Stalin as having read Machiavel i. But we get no details or
sources.
20 Antonio Gramsci, The Modem Prince (International Publishers, 1959), 142.
21 Machiavel i, The Prince xxxvi .
22 This was Senator Hayakawa, of California, at the time of the renegotiation of the Panama
Canal treaty in the late 1970s.
23 James M. Burns, Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox (Harcourt Brace, 1956).
24 The incidents are described and the historian Thomas A. Bailey is quoted in Bruce M.
Russett, No Clear and Present Danger (Harper & Row, 1972), 79-82.
25 For a detailed account of the Gulf of Tonkin incidents, see Anthony Austin, The President's
War ( New York Times Books, 1971).
26 More did not fol ow his own advice. He accepted the job of adviser to Henry VIII, and
according to a recent biographer, he served Henry obediently, only dissenting on the issue
of Henry's divorce and remarriage. Richard Marius, Thomas More: A Biography (Knopf,
.984).
27 Thomas More, Utopia (Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1948), 18.
28 Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., A Thousand Days (Houghton Mifflin, 1965), 254-255.
29 The Schlesinger memo is analyzed critical y in Ronald Radosh, "Historian in the Service of
Power," The Nation, Aug. 6, 1977.
30 The Nation, Aug. 6, 1977. A Harvard col eague of Schlesinger, Richard Neustadt, wrote
Presidential Power: The Politics of Leadership (John Wiley, 1960). This book is a kind of
modern version of The Prince. Neustadt wrote in his preface, "My theme is personal power and its politics; what it is, how to get it, how to keep it, how to use it." He understands that whatever the personal scruples of the expert adviser, he wil not stray far from the policies
of The Prince. Speaking of the expert, "His expertise assures a contribution to the system and it natural y commits him to proceed within the system."
23
31 Victor Bernstein and Jesse Gordon, "The Press and the Bay of Pigs," Columbia University Forum (Pal 1967).
32 According to investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, who did years of research on
Kissinger's role in Washington, "By the early summer of 1969, Nixon and Kissinger had
reached agreement in secret on a Gotterdammerung solution to the Vietnam War. North
Vietnam would be threatened with a 'savage, decis
ive blow,' a phrase Kissinger now used
openly and repeatedly in meetings with the NSC staff that summer and fal —if it did not
begin serious negotiations in Paris… . Al in al , twenty-nine major targets in North Vietnam
were targeted for destruction in a series of attacks planned to last four days and to be
renewed, if necessary, until Hanoi capitulated." Seymour Hersh, The Price of Power (Summit Books, 1083), 118-120.
33 Marvin Kalb and Bernard Kalb, Kissinger (Little, Brown, 1974), 161-162.
34 New York Times, Dec. 30, 1972.
35 Machiavel i, The Prince, Chapt. 18, p. 65.
36 Words and music by Tom Lehrer, reproduced in his book Too Many Songs (Pantheon,
1981).
37 Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb (Simon & Schuster, 1986), 770, 776.
38 Robert Jungk, Brighter Than a Thousand Suns (Harcourt, Brace, 1956), 209.
39 Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb, 696.
40 U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, Japan's Struggle to End the War (U.S. Government
Printing Office, 1945).
41 Robert Butow, Japan's Decision to Surrender (Stanford University Press, 1954).
42 Barton J. Bernstein, "Hiroshima and Nagasaki Reconsidered: The Atomic Bombings of
Japan and the Origins of the Cold War, 1941-1945" (University Program Modular Studies,
General Learning Press, 1945).
43 Ibid.
44 Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb, 698.
45 Herbert Feis, Japan Subdued (Princeton University Press, 1962).
46 Gar Alperovitz, Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam (Simon & Schuster, 1965).
47 Quoted in Gar Alperovitz, "More on Atomic Diplomacy," Bul etin of Atomic Scientists (Dec.
1985). James Forrestal, secretary of the navy, wrote in his diary: "Byrnes said he was most
anxious to get the Japanese affair over with before the Russians got in."
48 Atomic radiation is not the only horrible way of kil ing people. Chemical weapons, of which
we had a brief and unforgettable glimpse in the use of mustard gas in World War I, were
being produced by at least twenty nations in 1989, including the United States. In 1983,
two years after he became president, Reagan ordered the Pentagon to end a fourteen-year
cessation of the production of these weapons (Nixon had cal ed a halt when he became
