Today you hear much talk of absolutes…people say that two systems as different as ours and that of the Russians cannot exist in the same world…that one is good and one is evil, and good and evil cannot exist in the world…. Good and evil have existed in this world since Adam and Eve went out of the Garden of Eden.
The proper search is for limited ends which soon enough educate us in the complexities of the tasks which face us. That is what all of us must learn to do in the United States; to limit objectives, to get ourselves away from the search for the absolute, to find out what is within our powers…. We must respect our opponents. We must understand that for a long, long period of time they will continue to believe as they do, and that for a long, long period of time we will both inhabit this spinning ball in the great void of the universe.
As would become apparent to everyone soon enough, Acheson was not only the most important member of Truman’s Cabinet, but the most important appointment Truman ever made. And unlike Byrnes and Marshall, he would serve as Secretary throughout a full term, despite vilification such as few in American public life had ever known. He would be seen as an immense political liability, called a fool and a traitor. Nor were his critics and adversaries to be found only among the ranks of the Republicans. One especially determined to challenge his authority at every chance, to see Acheson taken down several pegs, if not entirely, was Louis Johnson, who clearly disliked him and whose cutting remarks soon reached the White House. Greatly displeased, Truman warned Johnson to stop it. “Acheson is a gentleman,” Truman told James Webb, the former Director of the Budget, who was now Acheson’s under secretary. “He won’t descend to a row. Johnson is a rough customer, gets his way by rowing. When he takes out after you, give it right back to him.”
Others who knew Acheson thought that in a showdown Johnson wouldn’t have a chance. Oliver Franks, the British ambassador and a close friend, described Acheson as “a romantic” and “a blade of steel.”
He had a serious—a very serious—problem to decide before long, Truman told Lilienthal on November 7, Acheson having by then talked to him about the superbomb.
He hoped to have a full report from the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) committee soon, Lilienthal replied.
Yes, said Truman. He wanted the facts, of course.
The report, with its unanimous conclusion by the advisory committee that the superbomb should not be developed, plus a concurring recommendation by the AEC, was delivered two days later, on November 9. The AEC had decided against the bomb by 3 to 2, with Lilienthal the deciding vote. The following day, Truman named Acheson, Johnson, and Lilienthal to act as a special committee of the National Security Council—the Z Committee, as it was called—to advise him whether to proceed with the Super and whether “publicity” should be given the matter. A week later all Washington knew a superbomb was under consideration.
A Washington Post reporter, Alfred Friendly, had picked up the first hint of the story from remarks made on a local television broadcast in New York by Democratic Senator Edwin Johnson of Colorado, a member of the Joint Congressional Committee on Atomic Energy, who made his disclosure while airing his fears about the ability of scientists to keep secrets. So suddenly the “H-bomb,” a new word, was a public issue.
Physicists Edward Teller and Ernest Lawrence were lobbying hard for proceeding with it. Karl T. Compton, who served on the Interim Committee in 1945 and had only just retired as head of MIT, wrote to Truman saying that in the absence of an international agreement on the control of atomic energy, the United States had no choice but to go ahead with the Super.
At the State Department, stirred by moral outrage, George Kennan labored intensively on a close analysis of the problem and in a long memorandum to Acheson, a plea “as earnest and eloquent” as he knew how to make it, he not only declared against the project but urged that the United States set an example. The last hope for humanity was international control of all weapons of indiscriminate mass destruction. The United States should announce it was “prepared to go very far, to show considerable confidence in others, and to accept certain risk for ourselves,” in order to achieve international agreement. To go forward with this still more fearsome next step would be to commit the country and the world to an indefinite escalation of destructiveness and cost.
So the voices against the Super were essentially three, Lilienthal, Kennan, and Oppenheimer, who apart from his own moral objections did not think such a bomb was technically feasible.
But Kennan, like Lilienthal, was about to retire, and the new head of the Policy Planning Staff at the State Department, Paul Nitze, agreed with the Joint Chiefs. To Nitze, Soviet possession of the atomic bomb meant not only that the United States must proceed with work on the H-bomb but build up its conventional forces as well.
Acheson, who, after Hiroshima, favored an atomic partnership with the Soviet Union, had by now come full circle. In effect, he told Kennan to take his Quaker ideas and go.
I told Kennan if that was his view he ought to resign from the Foreign Service and go out and preach his Quaker gospel but not push it within the Department. He had no right being in the Service if he was not willing to face the questions as an issue to be decided in the interests of the American people under a sense of responsibility.
“How can you persuade a paranoid adversary to ‘disarm by example’?” Acheson asked rhetorically in conversation with another associate.
The top-secret debate went on for three months, from November 1949 to the end of January 1950, and much of it in Acheson’s immense fifth-floor office at the State Department—a room that reminded him, he said, of the cabin-class dining salon on one of the old North German Lloyd ocean liners. But the three-man Z Committee of Acheson, Johnson, and Lilienthal met only twice, due primarily, as Acheson said, “to the acerbity of Louis Johnson’s nature.” Johnson and Lilienthal argued bitterly.
The first of these sessions was on December 22, the second and last on January 31.
Between times Truman kept to a full presidential schedule. He appointed Oscar Chapman as Secretary of Interior, after the resignation of Julius Krug. He received the new Shah of Iran on a first state visit; posed for photographs with five crippled children for the March of Dimes campaign; issued an executive order authorizing the Federal Housing Administration loans of $20 million for low-rent housing in twenty-seven states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico; issued an executive order to the FHA to deny financial assistance to new housing projects with racial or religious restrictions; exchanged Christmas greetings with the Pope; and learned from the Secret Service that in 1949 alone there had been a total of 1,925 threats, Written or oral, against him or his family. (“The day will come,” said one, “when I will have your heart out and give it to the ants as food.”)
Four days into the new year, in a recently redecorated House Chamber, he delivered his fifth State of the Union message. If American productive power continued to increase at the same rate as it had in the previous half century, he told the Congress, then national production fifty years hence would be four times as great, the average family income three times what it was in 1950, or $12,450 a year, which struck many as unimaginable. “Today, by the grace of God, we stand in a free and prosperous nation with greater possibilities for the future than any people have ever had before in the history of the world….”
At a press conference on January 7, 1950, he presented his annual budget—a big green book the size and weight of a New York telephone directory—and answered questions about it. The total figure was $42.4 billion, which included an increase of $1 billion for domestic programs. But most, some $30 billion, was to pay for wars past and for the present national defense, listed to cost $13.5 billion. It was a budget that did not balance. The estimated deficit was $5 billion, which would mean a national debt by 1952 of $268.3 billion.
In a message to Congress he asked for a “moderate” tax increase to bring in an additional $1 billion.
For an hour at the Sho
reham Hotel one night, he stood at the door of a private dining room shaking hands with virtually every Democrat in Congress. He addressed the A.F. of L. dinner and a civil rights conference; he held five more press conferences.
He also faced the fact that Clark Clifford and David Lilienthal, two of his best, were leaving in February, to return to private life. The loss of Clifford would be a real blow. But Clifford was worn out and deeply in debt, his living expenses over the past four years having run far ahead of his White House salary. He would stay on in Washington to practice law. Lilienthal, too, was exhausted and knew the time had come to move on. Truman, as he said, felt as though “the bottom had fallen out.”
More serious, and worrisome, however, was the assault on Dean Acheson. In December, angry over the loss of China and the supposed infiltration of Communists everywhere, the Republicans in both houses of Congress called on Truman to fire Acheson. Then, in New York, on January 21, at the end of a long second trial, Alger Hiss was found guilty of perjury—he had lied about passing secret documents—and that night Republican Congressman Richard Nixon, who as the only lawyer on the House Un-American Activities Committee had played a leading part in the case against Hiss, went on the radio to accuse the administration of a “deliberate” effort to conceal the Hiss “conspiracy.” On Wednesday, January 25, the day Hiss was sentenced to five years in prison, Acheson was asked at a press conference at the State Department if he had any comments.
The question was not unexpected. At his confirmation hearings the year before, Acheson had acknowledged that Hiss was a friend and remained a friend, adding that his own friendship was not easily given nor easily withdrawn. Hiss’s brother, Donald, a partner in Acheson’s law firm, had served as Acheson’s assistant when Acheson was Assistant Secretary of State. Now to the throng of reporters he said, “I should like to make it clear to you that whatever the outcome of any appeal which Mr. Hiss or his lawyers may take in this case, I do not intend to turn my back on Alger Hiss.”
It was no impulsive response. Acheson had thought long about what to say, and as many in the room sensed at once, it was a decisive moment in the history of the Truman administration. He continued, his voice full of emotion:
I think anyone who has known Alger Hiss or has served with him at any time has upon his conscience the very serious task of deciding what his attitude is and what his conduct should be. That must be done by each person in the light of his own standards and his own principles. For me there is little doubt about those standards and principles. I think they were stated for us a very long time ago…on the Mount of Olives and if you are interested in seeing them you will find them in the 25th Chapter of the Gospel according to St. Matthew beginning with verse 34.
An aide stood at the door with a Bible ready for those reporters who wished to check the reference: “I was a prisoner and ye came unto me.”
Perhaps the voice of the late bishop of Connecticut, Acheson’s father, sounded in the citation, wrote the New York Herald-Tribune, one of the few papers to praise Acheson for what he had said.
This newspaper has felt it necessary at times to criticize and oppose Mr. Acheson in his policies…. But of this statement made on Wednesday in a difficult hour, we are glad to declare in our judgment it was as courageous as it was Christian.
It was also a political disaster. The news reached Capitol Hill almost instantly. Senator Joseph McCarthy interrupted the flow of business in the Senate to report “the most fantastic statement” just made by the Secretary of State. Did this mean, McCarthy asked, that the Secretary would “not turn his back on any other Communists in the State Department?”
His press Conference ended, Acheson went immediately to see Truman, who by then had seen the news ticker story. Acheson offered to resign. Truman, Acheson wrote to his daughter, was “wonderful about it…said that one who had gone to the funeral of a friendless old man just out of the penitentiary [Tom Pendergast] had no trouble knowing what I meant and proving it.
“So there we are,” Acheson added, “and as the Persian King had carved on his ring, ‘This, too, will pass.’ ”
But pass it did not. The damage done to himself and the President was worse than either knew. Richard Nixon called Acheson’s statement “disgusting.” Republican Senator Hugh Butler of Nebraska exploded in a tirade. “I look at that fellow, I watch his smart-aleck manner and his British clothes and that New Dealism in everything he says and does, and I want to shout, ‘Get out! Get out! You stand for everything that has been wrong in the United States for years!’”
The atmosphere in Washington, the atmosphere in which the decision on the hydrogen bomb was being weighed, had become charged with rancor and fear. At his press conference the next afternoon, Friday, January 27, Truman was asked first whether he too would refuse to turn his back on Alger Hiss—to which he replied, “No comment”—then, what his views were on the H-bomb, as though the two issues were directly connected. He would have nothing to say until he made a decision, Truman answered, thus acknowledging for the first time that the issue existed.
Comment and speculation on the bomb continued. Headlines called it the “Ultimate Bomb,” the “Hell Bomb.” Life ran an aerial photograph of Chicago showing how much of the city would be obliterated—50 square miles—by one such weapon. In the Washington Post, where for years he had been drawing the atomic bomb as a sinister presence looming over peace conferences or taking the measure of the world, cartoonist Herb Block now portrayed the atomic bomb holding the giant hand of an infinitely larger, more menacing creature labeled “Superbomb,” and asking a terrified Uncle Sam, “Want to meet my friend, too?”
Eleanor Roosevelt and Bernard Baruch announced their support for building the bomb. Harold Urey of the University of Chicago, a leader in atomic research who, in 1934, had won a Nobel Prize for his discovery of heavy hydrogen, declared in a speech in New York that the United States could not intentionally lose the armaments race without risking its liberties.
Rumors of bitter animosity within the administration, talk of who was for and who was against the H-bomb became a Washington obsession. On Capitol Hill, Democratic Senator Brien McMahon of Connecticut, chairman of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, was reportedly “almost in tears” over the prospect of the bomb not proceeding. War with the Russians was inevitable, the powerful senator assured Lilienthal. The thing to do was “blow them off the face of the earth, quick, before they do the same to us—we haven’t much time.” To Truman he wrote, “If we let Russia get the Super first, catastrophe becomes all but certain—whereas if we get it first, there exists a chance of saving ourselves.”
The Joint Chiefs wanted a “crash program.” General Bradley wrote that it was “folly to argue whether one weapon is more immoral than another. For, in a larger sense, it is war itself which is immoral, and the stigma of such immorality must rest upon the nation which initiates hostilities.” Despite an understanding that deliberations on the bomb would be kept within the Z Committee, Louis Johnson quickly sent Bradley’s memorandum to Truman.
Like a patient sitting in a doctor’s anteroom while the specialists discuss his case [wrote Time], the U.S. public…sat outside while the President, his military, scientific and diplomatic advisers debated whether to construct the…most powerful explosive weapon the world has yet dreamed of…. But since the principle of the hydrogen bomb was also known to the Russians, temporizing was risky and might be fatal. The simple fact, unpleasant though it might be, was that if the Russians are likely to build an H-bomb, the U.S. will have to build it, too.
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 excitem
ent.” 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.
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