The Untold History of the United States

by Oliver Stone

  James Roosevelt had been introduced by Harold Ickes, Roosevelt’s former long-standing secretary of the interior, who, as a stalwart New Deal progressive, had consistently been a thorn in Truman’s side. Truman had finally rid himself of Ickes the previous month, after earlier denigrating him in front of reporters as “shitass Ix.”37 Ickes’s resignation came over his opposition to Truman’s nominating California oil millionaire Edwin Pauley, to whose nefarious activities Truman owed his office, as assistant secretary of the navy. But Ickes stood in the way, accusing Pauley of lying when he testified that he had not lobbied against the government’s suit to assert federal title to the oil along the nation’s coasts. Ickes alleged that Pauley had offered “the rawest proposition ever made to me”: oilmen would contribute $300,000 to the Democratic Party in 1944 if the government dropped the tidelands suit that Ickes had brought. Ickes reported that at a special cabinet meeting the previous week, Truman had implored him to “Be as gentle as you can with Ed Pauley” and that party chairman Robert Hannegan had “been moving heaven and earth” to get Pauley confirmed. Ickes chose integrity over gentleness. He lashed out, “I don’t care to stay in an Administration where I am expected to commit perjury for the sake of the Party.” He released his acerbic exchange of letters with Truman over the resignation. He warned that unless the administration changed its unsavory ways, it would bring about a scandal reminiscent of Teapot Dome. The Department of the Interior, he reminded Truman, “must always be on guard against any association of money with politics.” Ickes also told reporters that no oilman should be allowed to hold a government office that dealt with oil policy.38 The Los Angeles Times headlined its front-page article “Ickes Blowup Rocks Capital like Atom Bomb,” describing what reporter Bill Henry called “the biggest press conference in the history of Washington.”39

  In introducing James Roosevelt, Ickes offered some sage advice to his former boss on dealing with the Soviets: “The people . . . want President Truman to stand up aggressively for the foreign policies of President Roosevelt. They do not feel comfortable with the sniping at Russia, which is being indulged in. They know that without Russia we would still be fighting the war. They cannot envisage a peaceful future without an understanding with Russia.”

  The following month, on the first anniversary of Roosevelt’s death, Wallace spoke in New York’s City Hall, repudiating Churchill and proposing a different vision of competition between the two nations:

  The only kind of competition we want with the Soviets is to demonstrate that we can raise our standard of living faster during the next 20 years than Russia. We shall compete with Russia in serving the spiritual and physical needs of the common man. . . . The only way to defeat Communism in the world is to do a better and smoother job of maximum production and optimum distribution. . . . Let’s make it a clean race, a determined race but above all a peaceful race in the service of humanity. . . . Russia can’t ride roughshod over eastern Europe and get away with it any more than we can do the same in Latin America or England in India and Africa. . . . The source of all our mistakes is fear. . . . Russia fears Anglo-Saxon encirclement. We fear Communist penetration. If these fears continue, the day will come when our sons and grandsons will pay for these fears with rivers of blood. . . . Out of fear great nations have been acting like cornered beasts, thinking only of survival. . . . A month ago Mr. Churchill came out for the Anglo Saxon century. Four years ago I repudiated the American century. Today I repudiate the Anglo Saxon century with even greater vigor. The common people of the world will not tolerate a recrudescence of imperialism even under enlightened Anglo-Saxon, atomic bomb auspices. The destiny of the English speaking people is to serve the world, not dominate it.40

  Following Churchill’s speech, U.S.-Soviet relations deteriorated rapidly. At the United Nations, the United States pressed for a confrontation over Iran, despite the Soviet Union’s agreement to withdraw its troops. When Soviet troops stayed beyond the March 2 deadline for their removal, Truman threatened war. He wrote, “If the Russians were to control Iran’s oil, either directly or indirectly, the raw material balance of the world would undergo serious damage and it would be a serious loss for the economy of the western world.” Forrestal afterward noted that “whoever sits on the valve of Middle East oil may control the destiny of Europe.” Truman decided to send a clear message that the United States—not the Soviet Union—would sit on that valve.41

  Former Columbia President Nicholas Murray Butler, the 1931 Nobel Peace Prize winner and president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, made it clear that the issue involved was oil, not democracy. “Iran is wholly a question of oil,” he explained. “Large commitments have been proposed and made to Great Britain. A way ought to be found for Russia to have a share of the oil without carrying on a political military disturbance.” Some found that suggestion quite plausible. In an editorial on the crisis, the Washington Post suggested that “Russia may have legitimate claims to make on Iran. On the oil situation, for instance, we have repeatedly argued that a joint plan for the exploitation of the oil resources of the Middle East is definitely in order.”42

  Claude Pepper got a closer look at the unfolding crisis in his tour of the Middle East, which included an interview with Stalin. After returning to the United States, Pepper addressed the Senate, exonerating the Soviet Union and condemning British imperial overreach: “It comes with ill grace from a certain world power whose people are stationed in every nation from Egypt to Singapore to make a world conflagration out of the movement of a few troops a few miles into some neighboring territory to resist an oil monopoly which they enjoy.” “If American foreign policy is made the scapegoat for such imperialism, it is more stupid than I thought is possible for it to be.” The Washington Post reported that after Pepper finished, several senators and House members walked over to shake his hand.43

  The public was not enthusiastic about confronting the Soviet Union over Iranian oil. The Washington Post carried a particularly illuminating letter identifying the stakes in Iran and disavowing military action:

  I do not believe that the fate of the oil deposits of Iran justifies war with Russia. If this oil were located in North or South America, the . . . United States would both protect these oil deposits for our use in any future war and guarantee that no other strong power could seize these oil fields. If the Iranian oil occupied a geographic position near any of the British dominions, as it does next to the Soviet states, I believe Great Britain would secure or protect this oil. . . . The support of Iranian freedom has never before been suggested as justifying an overseas war for Americans. Iranian freedom as we understand freedom has never existed, so those who suggest war in support of such freedom are without a real cause. . . . I am firmly convinced that the vast majority of Americans do not want to fight Russia for any cause that has yet developed. I also believe that a majority of Americans hope and think that left alone with her own borders reasonably secure that Russia will work to help support the peace of the world and to develop her own great natural resources for generations to come.44

  Pressured by the United States and Great Britain, Soviet forces withdrew from Iran. Truman later told Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson that he had summoned Soviet Ambassador Andrei Gromyko to the White House and informed him that if Soviet troops weren’t out in forty-eight hours, “We’re going to drop it on you.” They were out, he claimed, in twenty-four hours.45 Although the real story behind Soviet withdrawal is much more complicated, Truman drew the lesson that when confronted with superior force, the Soviets would back down. The United States decided to press its advantage. In May, it halted reparations shipments from western Germany that the Soviets desperately needed. In July, it decided to keep troops in South Korea and the following month to maintain a naval presence in the eastern Mediterranean.

  While Truman was making atomic threats, the public quaked at the prospect of atomic war. In early 1946, Ladies’ Home Journal instructed readers, “Over and above all else y
ou do, the thought you should wake up to, go to sleep with and carry with you all day” is prevention of nuclear war.46 Henry Wallace agreed and pushed Truman to pursue international control of atomic weapons more aggressively. In January 1946, Truman appointed Acheson, who had voiced similar concerns, to head a committee to tackle the problem. Acheson named Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) Administrator David Lilienthal to chair a board of scientific advisors. Acheson confided to Lilienthal that Truman and Byrnes had neither “the facts nor an understanding of what was involved in the atomic energy issue, the most serious cloud hanging over the world.” Commitments had been made, and, with Byrnes then in London, new ones were being made “without a knowledge of what the hell it is all about—literally!” Acheson bemoaned the fact that “the War Department, and really one man in the War Department, General Groves, has, by the power of veto on the ground of ‘military security,’ really been determining and almost running foreign policy.”

  The resulting Acheson-Lilienthal report, which the hardheaded Acheson described as “a brilliant and profound document,” was largely the work of Oppenheimer.47 Under the plan, an international Atomic Development Authority would oversee the mining, refining, and utilization of all the world’s atomic raw materials, denaturing all fissionable material and making it available for peaceful uses. National activity in these “dangerous” areas would be outlawed. The plan intentionally minimized the need for on-site inspections to increase the chances that the Soviet Union would accept it.

  Hopes for an international agreement were dashed when Truman and Byrnes appointed Byrnes’s fellow South Carolinian, seventy-five-year-old financier Bernard Baruch, to present the plan to the United Nations. Paying off another old political debt, Truman empowered him to revise it as he saw fit. Baruch had bankrolled Truman when he trailed in his 1940 Senate reelection bid and desperately needed funds. All involved, including Acheson, Lilienthal, and Oppenheimer, were furious, knowing that Baruch, an outspoken anti-Communist who viewed the bomb as the United States’ “winning weapon,” would reformulate the plan so that the Soviets would reject it out of hand. Lilienthal wrote in his journal, “When I read this news last night, I was quite sick. . . . We need a man who is young, vigorous, not vain, and who the Russians would feel isn’t out simply to put them in a hole, not really caring about international cooperation. Baruch has none of these qualifications.” Baruch’s choice of fellow businessmen as advisors further infuriated those who had labored so hard to come up with a plan that would work. He decided not to include scientists because, he later explained, “I concluded that I would drop the scientists because as I told them, I knew all I wanted to know. It went boom and it killed millions of people.” Vannevar Bush, who had served on the Acheson-Lilienthal Committee, dismissed Baruch’s advisors as “Wall Streeters.” He let Baruch know that he considered him and the rest of the crew completely unqualified for the job. Baruch announced that he would turn to Groves and the industrialists for advice on technical matters. Facing widespread criticism, Baruch finally relented and asked Oppenheimer to come on board as chief scientific advisor. “Don’t let those associates of mine worry you,” he told the physicist. “Hancock is pretty ‘Right,’ but [winking] I’ll watch him. Searls is smart as a whip, but he sees Reds under every bed.” He said they would have to begin “preparing the American people for a refusal by Russia.” Oppenheimer declined the invitation.48

  Baruch proceeded to amend the original proposal, larding it with inspections and other provisions that the Soviets would be certain to reject. Not only did Acheson and Lilienthal try to convince him to remove those provisions, Truman and Byrnes did too. Baruch remained adamant, threatening to resign if his plan was not adopted, and Truman, in a colossal failure of presidential leadership, backed down. On the eve of Baruch’s submitting the plan to the United Nations on June 14, Byrnes admitted to Acheson that appointing Baruch was “the worst mistake I have ever made.” Even Truman later privately admitted that appointing Baruch was “the worst blunder I ever made.”49

  Soviet leaders waited ten days before lashing out at the U.S. proposal. Pravda charged that the Baruch plan was “a product of atomic diplomacy, [and] reflects the obvious tendency toward world domination.” The plan made it clear that the United States intends “to consolidate [its] monopoly” on the production of “atomic weapons.” Pravda pointed out that the U.S. government had contracted production of bombs “to private monopolistic firms such as E. I. du Pont de Nemours, whose entire pre-war outlook was connected by a thousand threads to the German I. G. Farbenindustrie.”50 The Soviets submitted a counterplan of their own, which would ban production, stockpiling, and use of atomic weapons. Existing stockpiles would be destroyed within three months.

  Financier Bernard Baruch (pictured here in 1920), whom Truman appointed to present the U.S. plan for international atomic control to the United Nations. Baruch rejected input from scientists and amended the original proposal, larding it with inspections and other provisions that the Russians would be certain to reject.

  The U.S. decision to proceed with its July 1 atomic bomb test in the Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands sent the Soviets another chilling message about U.S. intentions. The General Assembly of the Universalist Church denounced the tests as being “offensive to the very purpose of the Christian spirit.”51 Ickes described the Bikini tests as “diplomacy by intimidation” and noted that if it were the Soviets carrying them out, “Americans would find cause for deep concern about the future peace of the world.” Raymond Gram Swing told his ABC Radio listeners that many Americans, including atomic scientists and members of Congress, had protested the decision. “On the one hand we’re striving to rid the world of a weapon which may set back civilization for centuries. . . . On the other hand we’re training ourselves in the use of this very weapon. So we strive to save civilization, and we learn how to wreck it, all on the same weekend.” The Soviets, predictably, responded in similar fashion. Pravda’s Boris Izakov wondered why the Americans would go to such lengths to improve their bombs if they were serious about disarmament.52

  There was indeed a madness to the unfolding nuclear arms race that no one expressed better than Lewis Mumford when he first learned that the test was to occur. In an article in Norman Cousins’s Saturday Review titled “Gentlemen, You Are Mad!” Mumford wrote:

  We in America are living among madmen. Madmen govern our affairs in the name of order and security. The chief madmen claim the titles of general, admiral, senator, scientist, administrator, Secretary of State, even President. And the fatal symptom of their madness is this: they have been carrying through a series of acts which will lead eventually to the destruction of mankind, under the solemn conviction that they are normal, responsible people, living sane lives, and working for reasonable ends.

  Soberly, day after day, the madmen continue to go through the undeviating motions of madness: motions so stereotyped, so commonplace, that they seem the normal motions of normal men, not the mass compulsions of people bent on total death. Without a public mandate of any kind, the madmen have taken it upon themselves to lead us by gradual stages to that final act of madness which will corrupt the face of the earth and blot out the nations of men, possibly put an end to all life on the planet itself.53

  Explosion during the July 1946 Bikini atomic bomb tests, which Harold Ickes described as “diplomacy by intimidation” designed to impress the Soviet Union.

  Henry Wallace tried to stop the madness. In July 1946, he wrote a long memo to Truman, repudiating the “growing feeling . . . that another war is coming and the only way that we can head it off is to arm ourselves to the teeth . . . all of past history indicates that an armament race does not lead to peace but to war.” He saw the coming months as very possibly “the crucial period which will decide whether the civilized world will go down in destruction after the five or ten years needed for several nations to arm themselves with atomic bombs.” He urged Truman to consider how “American actions since V-J Day appear t
o other nations,” pointing to “$13 billion for the War and Navy Departments, the Bikini tests of the atomic bomb and continued production of bombs, the plan to arm Latin America with our weapons, production of B-29s and planned production of B-36s, and the effort to secure air bases spread over half the globe from which the other half of the globe can be bombed. . . . [This] make[s] it appear either (1) that we are preparing ourselves to win the war which we regard as inevitable or (2) that we are trying to build up a predominance of force to intimidate the rest of mankind. How would it look to us if Russia had the atomic bomb and we did not, if Russia had 10,000-mile bombers and air bases within a thousand miles of our coastlines and we did not?”

  Wallace called for sharply cutting defense spending, because maintaining peace by a “predominance of forces is no longer possible.” In 1938, the United States spent less than $1 billion on national defense. Now, he calculated, the War and Navy Departments, war liquidation, and interest on public debt and veterans’ benefits, representing the cost of past wars, consumed $28 billion, or 80 percent, of the current $36 billion budget. Wallace reiterated scientists’ warnings that “atomic warfare is cheap” and even having ten times as many bombs as one’s enemy gives no decisive advantage. “And most important, the very fact that several nations have atomic bombs will inevitably result in a neurotic, fear-ridden, itching-trigger psychology. . . . In a world armed with atomic weapons, some incident will lead to the use of those weapons.” He forcefully dismissed those advocating a “preventive war,” whose “scheme is not only immoral but stupid.” The only solution, he concluded, “consists of mutual trust and confidence among nations, atomic disarmament, and an effective system of enforcing that disarmament.”54