The Untold History of the United States

by Oliver Stone

  111 Hasegawa, Racing the Enemy, 177.

  112 Fletcher Knebel and Charles W. Bailey, “The Fight over the Atom Bomb,” Look, August 13, 1963, 20. For Groves’s denial to Truman that he said this, see Alperovitz, The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb, 780, note 39.

  113 Alperovitz, The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb, 415.

  114 Dorris Clayton James, The Years of MacArthur: 1941–1945, vol. 2 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975), 774.

  115 Richard Goldstein, “Paul W. Tibbets Jr., Pilot of Enola Gay, Dies at 92,” New York Times, November 2, 2007.

  116 Kuznick, “Defending the Indefensible.”

  117 Merle Miller and Abe Spitzer, We Dropped the A-Bomb (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1946), 42–45.

  118 Ibid., 45.

  119 Hasegawa, Racing the Enemy, 179–180.

  120 Robert Jay Lifton, Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima (New York: Random House, 1967), 441–442.

  121 Miller and Spitzer, We Dropped the A-Bomb, 47. For a fuller discussion of the crewmembers and their reactions to the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, see Kuznick, “Defending the Indefensible.”

  122 Truman, Memoirs by Harry S. Truman: 1945, 465.

  123 Lifton and Mitchell, Hiroshima in America, 169–170.

  124 David Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb: The Soviet Union and Atomic Energy 1939–1956 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1994), 127.

  125 Georgii Konstantinovich Zhukov, The Memoirs of Marshal Zhukov (New York: Delacorte Press, 1971), 674–675; Vladislav M. Zubok, A Failed Empire: The Soviet Union in the Cold War from Stalin to Gorbachev (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 27, 354, notes 120 and 121.

  126 Ralph B. Levering, Vladimir O. Pechatnov, Verena Botzenhart-Viehe, and C. Earl Edmondson, Debating the Origins of the Cold War: American and Russian Perspectives (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001), 105; Zubok, 354 (notes 120 and 121).

  127 Hasegawa, Racing the Enemy, 197.

  128 Miller and Spitzer, We Dropped the A-Bomb, 57–59.

  129 Lifton and Mitchell, Hiroshima in America, 162.

  130 Sherwin, A World Destroyed, 237.

  131 Hasegawa, Racing the Enemy, 237.

  132 Stimson, diary, August 10, 1945.

  133 Dower, Cultures of War, 239.

  134 Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, “The Atomic Bombs and the Soviet Invasion: What Drove Japan’s Decision to Surrender?,” The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, www.japanfocus.org/-Tsuyoshi-Hasegawa/2501.

  135 Ibid.

  136 Memorandum for Chief, Strategic Policy Section, S&P Group, Operations Division, War Department General Staff, from Ennis, Subject: Use of Atomic Bomb on Japan, April 30, 1946, “ABC 471.6 Atom (17 August 1945), Sec. 7,” Entry 421, RG 165, National Archives.

  137 William D. Leahy, I Was There: The Personal Story of the Chief of Staff to Presidents Roosevelt and Truman Based on His Notes and Diaries Made at the Time (New York: Whittlesey House, 1950), 441.

  138 Alperovitz, The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb, 326.

  139 Douglas MacArthur, memorandum to Herbert Hoover, December 2, 1960, Herbert Hoover Presidential Library, Post-Presidential Papers, Individual File Series, Box 129 G, Douglas MacArthur 1953–1964, folder [3212 (3)]. MacArthur’s insistence on this point never wavered over the years. After a long talk with MacArthur in May 1946, Hoover had written in his diary, “I told MacArthur of my memorandum of mid-May 1945 to Truman, that peace could be had with Japan by which our major objectives would be accomplished. MacArthur said that was correct and that we would have avoided all the losses, the Atomic bomb, and the entry of Russia into Manchuria.” Alperovitz, The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb, 350–351.

  140 H. H. Arnold, Global Mission (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1949), 598.

  141 “Giles Would Rule Japan a Century,” New York Times, September 21, 1945; Alperovitz, The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb, 336.

  142 Alperovitz, The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb, 343.

  143 Ibid., 329.

  144 Sidney Shalett, “Nimitz Receives All-Out Welcome from Washington,” New York Times, October 6, 1945.

  145 Alperovitz, The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb, 331. Testifying before Congress in 1949, Halsey said, “I believe that bombing—especially atomic bombing—of civilians, is morally indefensible.” Alperovitz, The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb, 720, note 52.

  146 Ibid., 359.

  147 Lifton and Mitchell, Hiroshima in America, 11.

  148 “Japan Beaten Before Atom Bomb, Byrnes Says, Citing Peace Bids,” New York Times, August 30, 1945.

  149 “Oxnam, Dulles Ask Halt in Bomb Use,” New York Times, August 10, 1945.

  150 Gerald Wendt and Donald Porter Geddes, ed. The Atomic Age Opens (New York: Pocket Books, 1945), 207.

  151 Sadao Asada, “The Mushroom Cloud and National Psyches,” in Living with the Bomb, ed. Laura Hein and Mark Selden (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1997), 182.

  152 Leahy, I Was There, 384–385.

  153 Stimson, “The Decision,” 107.

  154 Asada, “The Mushroom Cloud and National Psyches,” 179.

  155 Wayne Phillips, “Truman Disputes Eisenhower on ’48,” New York Times, February 3, 1958.

  156 John Toland, The Rising Sun: The Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire, 1936–1945 (New York: Random House, 1970), 766 note.

  157 Bird and Sherwin, American Prometheus, 332.

  158 Freeman J. Dyson, Weapons and Hope (New York: Harper & Row, 1985), 121.

  159 Dwight McDonald, Memoirs of a Revolutionist: Essays in Political Criticism (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Cudahy, 1957), 97.

  160 Margaret Truman, Harry S. Truman (New York: William Morrow, 1973), 555.

  CHAPTER 5: THE COLD WAR: WHO STARTED IT?

  1 Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., “Some Lessons from the Cold War,” Diplomatic History 16 (January 1992), 47–53.

  2 Paul Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age (New York: Pantheon, 1985), 7, 15.

  3 Gerald Wendt and Donald Porter Geddes, ed. The Atomic Age Opens (New York: Pocket Books, 1945), 159.

  4 “Everyman,” New York Times, August 18, 1945.

  5 “Last Judgment,” Washington Post, August 8, 1945.

  6 “Text of Kennedy’s Address Offering ‘Strategy of Peace’ for Easing the Cold War,” New York Times, June 11, 1963.

  7 Gregg Herken, The Winning Weapon: The Atomic Bomb in the Cold War (New York: Vintage Books, 1982), 48.

  8 Henry L. Stimson and McGeorge Bundy, On Active Service in Peace and War (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1948), 643–644.

  9 Felix Belair, Jr., “Plea to Give Soviet Atom Secret Stirs Debate in Cabinet,” New York Times, September 22, 1945.

  10 “The Reminiscences of Henry Agard Wallace,” Columbia University Oral History, p. 4379.

  11 Arthur Compton to Henry A. Wallace, September 27, 1945, Arthur Compton Papers, Washington University in St. Louis Archives; Arthur Holly Compton, The Cosmos of Arthur Holly Compton, ed. Marjorie Johnston (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1967), 440.

  12 Henry A. Wallace, The Price of Vision: The Diary of Henry A. Wallace, 1942–1946, ed. John Morton Blum (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1973), 489–490.

  13 “Harry S. Truman, Press Conference, Oct. 8, 1945,” www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=12319#axzz1aJSeeAQ2.

  14 Samuel A. Tower, “Truman for Civil Control over Atomic Energy in U.S.,” New York Times, February 1, 1946.

  15 “Secretary of Commerce Warns of Danger of Fascism Under Army,” Washington Post, March 13, 1946.

  16 Memorandum by the Commanding General, Manhattan Engineer District (Groves), January 2, 1946, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1946, vol. 1 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1972), 1197–1198.

  17 Wallace, The Price of Vision, 496–497.

  18 Ibid., 502–503, 517.

  19 Melvyn P. Leffler, A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War (Stanford, CA: S
tanford University Press, 1992), 6.

  20 Fraser J. Harbutt, The Iron Curtain: Churchill, America, and the Origins of the Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 152.

  21 Melvyn P. Leffler, For the Soul of Mankind: The United States, the Soviet Union and the Cold War (New York: Hill and Wang, 2007), 55–56.

  22 John Lewis Gaddis, The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1941–1947 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1972), 119.

  23 Arnold Joseph Toynbee, Survey of International Affairs, vol. 2: The Middle East in the War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1954), 1.

  24 Geoffrey Wawro, Quicksand: America’s Pursuit of Power in the Middle East (New York: Penguin, 2010), 5; Michael T. Klare, Blood and Oil: The Dangers and Consequences of America’s Growing Dependency on Imported Petroleum (New York: Owl Books, 2004), 33; Edward W. Chester, United States Oil Policy and Diplomacy: A Twentieth Century Overview (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1983), 234.

  25 Klare, Blood and Oil, 32.

  26 James A. Bill, The Eagle and the Lion: The Tragedy of American-Iranian Relations (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988), 18.

  27 Ibid., 19.

  28 “Text of Churchill Plea for Alliance,” Los Angeles Times, March 6, 1946.

  29 “Soviet Chief Calls Churchill Liar, Warmonger,” Chicago Tribune, March 14, 1946.

  30 “Mr. Churchill’s Warning,” New York Times, June 7, 1946.

  31 “Testament,” Washington Post, March 6, 1946.

  32 “Mr. Churchill’s Plea,” Chicago Tribune, March 7, 1946.

  33 “Senators Shy from Churchill Alliance Plan,” Chicago Tribune, March 6, 1946; “Senators Cold to Churchill’s Talk of Alliance,” Los Angeles Times, March 6, 1946.

  34 “Churchill Plea Is ‘Shocking’ to 3 Senators,” Washington Post, March 7, 1946.

  35 John D. Eddy, “Churchill’s Speech,” Washington Post, March 8, 1946.

  36 Francis M. Stephenson, “Churchill’s ‘Attack on Peace’ Denounced by James Roosevelt,” New York Herald Tribune, March 15, 1946.

  37 Marquis Childs, Witness to Power (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1975), 45.

  38 “Ickes, Truman Feud Flames Hotter in Two New Letters,” Chicago Tribune, February 14, 1946; “Ickes Flays Truman as He Quits,” Los Angeles Times, February 14, 1946; Thomas J. Hamilton, “Ickes Resigns Post, Berating Truman in Acid Farewell,” New York Times, February 14, 1946.

  39 Bill Henry, “Ickes Blowup Rocks Capital like Atom Bomb,” Los Angeles Times, February 14, 1946.

  40 Henry Wallace, April 12, 1946, RG 40 (Department of Commerce); Entry 1, General Records of the Department of Commerce, Office of the Secretary, General Correspondence; Box 1074, File “104251/6” (2 of 7), National Archives, Washington, D.C.

  41 “Dr. Butler Urges Iran Oil Sharing,” Los Angeles Times, March 25, 1946.

  42 “Russia and Iran,” Washington Post, March 7, 1946.

  43 Robert C. Albright, “Pepper Urges Big 3 to Meet on ‘Confidence,’ ” Washington Post, March 21, 1946.

  44 E. Brook Lee, “Relations with Russia,” Washington Post, March 20, 1946.

  45 “Nation: Good Old Days,” Time, January 28, 1980, 13.

  46 Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light, 30.

  47 David E. Lilienthal, The Atomic Energy Years, 1945–1950, vol. 2: The Journals of David E. Lilienthal, ed. Helen M. Lilienthal (New York: Harper & Row, 1964), 10, 27.

  48 Ibid., 30; Herken, The Winning Weapon, 160–162.

  49 Lilienthal, The Atomic Energy Years, 1945–1950, vol. 2, 59; Robert C. Grogin, Natural Enemies: The United States and the Soviet Union in the Cold War (New York: Lexington Books, 2001), 95.

  50 Drew Middleton, “Baruch Atom Plan Spurned by Pravda,” New York Times, June 25, 1946.

  51 Lloyd J. Graybar, “The 1946 Atomic Bomb Tests: Atomic Diplomacy or Bureaucratic Infighting?,” Journal of American History 72 (1986), 900.

  52 “Red Sees Atom Test as Effort to Better Bomb,” Chicago Tribune, July 4, 1946.

  53 Lewis Mumford, “Gentlemen: You Are Mad!” Saturday Review of Literature, March 2, 1946, 5.

  54 Wallace, The Price of Vision, 589–601.

  55 James A. Hagerty, “Wallace Warns on ‘Tough’ Policy Toward Russia,” New York Times, September 12, 1946.

  56 Henry A. Wallace, “The Way to Peace,” September 12, 1946, in Wallace, The Price of Vision, 661–668.

  57 James Reston, “Wallace Speech Is Seen Embarrassing to Byrnes,” New York Times, September 13, 1946.

  58 “Hillbilly Policy, British Reaction,” Los Angeles Times, September 15, 1946.

  59 Eleanor Roosevelt, “My Day,” September 17, 1946, www.gwu.edu/~erpapers/myday/displaydoc.cfm?_y=1946&_f=md000445.

  60 Wallace, The Price of Vision, 593.

  61 Robert J. Donovan, Conflict and Crisis: The Presidency of Harry S Truman (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), 227.

  62 Wallace, The Price of Vision, 630.

  63 Richard J. Walton, Henry Wallace, Harry Truman, and the Cold War (New York: Viking, 1976), 114.

  64 Clifford-Elsey Report, Septembner 24, 1946, Conway Files, Truman Papers, Truman Library.

  65 Leffler, A Preponderance of Power, 130–138; Offner, Another Such Victory, 178–182.

  66 Clifford-Elsey Report.

  67 Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas, The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986), 376.

  68 Offner, Another Such Victory, 180–181.

  69 Lloyd C. Gardner, Three Kings: The Rise of an American Empire (New York: New Press, 2009), 48.

  70 “Plan to Split U.S. Charged,” Baltimore Sun, May 29, 1946.

  71 Robert L. Beisner, Dean Acheson: A Life in the Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 53, 57.

  72 Gardner, Architects of Illusion, 204.

  73 Dean Acheson, Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department (New York: Signet, 1969), 293.

  74 “Text of President Truman’s Speech on New Foreign Policy,” New York Times, March 13, 1947.

  75 Lawrence S. Wittner, Cold War America: From Hiroshima to Watergate (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1978), 34.

  76 “Henry Wallace Answers President Truman [advertisement],” New York Times, March 18, 1947; “Truman Betraying U.S. Wallace Says,” New York Times, March 14, 1947; Culver and Hyde, American Dreamer, 436–437.

  77 “Pravda Opens Bitter Attack on U.S. Loans,” Washington Post, March 16, 1947.

  78 Gardner, Architects of Illusion, 221; Anne O’Hare McCormick, “Open Moves in the Political War for Europe,” New York Times, June 2, 1947.

  79 Herring, From Colony to Superpower, 616.

  80 Lawrence S. Wittner, American Intervention in Greece, 1943–49 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 262–263.

  81 Lorraine M. Lees, Keeping Tito Afloat: The United States, Yugoslavia and the Cold War (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993), 54; John Lewis Gaddis, Russia, The Soviet Union, and the United States: An Interpretive History (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978), 192.

  82 Lloyd C. Gardner, Spheres of Influence: The Great Powers Partition Europe, From Munich to Yalta (Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993), 265.

  83 Offner, Another Such Victory, 209–211.

  84 Walter LaFeber, The American Age: United States Foreign Policy at Home and Abroad Since 1750 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989), 479–480.

  85 Offner, Another Such Victory, 213.

  86 Gaddis, The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 322–323.

  87 Vladislav Zubok and Constantine Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War: From Stalin to Khrushchev (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 276–277; Melvyn P. Leffler, “Inside Enemy Archives: The Cold War Reopened,” Foreign Affairs 75 (July–August 1996).

  88 Gary Wills, Bomb Power: The Modern Presidency and the National Security State (New York: Penguin, 2010), 63.

  89 Walter Lippmann, The Cold War: A Study in U.S. Foreign Policy (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1947
), 15–16, 19, 44.

  90 Ellen Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 287; Wills, Bomb Power, 74.

  91 Offner, Another Such Victory, 202.

  92 Ibid., 192.

  93 Mark Perry, Four Stars (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1989), 88; Townsend Hoopes and Douglas Brinkley, Driven Patriot: The Life and Times of James Forrestal (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992), 310–312; “NSC 10/2,” June 18, 1948, in William M Leary, ed., The Central Intelligence Agency: History and Documents (Birmingham, AL: University of Alabama Press), 133.

  94 Colonel R. Allen Griffin, recorded interview by James R. Fuchs, staff interviewer, February 15, 1974, Harry S. Truman Library, Oral History Program; Wills, Bomb Power, 78, 88–89; Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA (New York: Doubleday, 2007), 28–29.

  95 Norman J. W. Goda, “Nazi Collaborators in the United States: What the FBI Knew,” in U.S. Intelligence and the Nazis, ed. Richard Breitman, Norman J. W. Goda, Timothy Naftali, and Robert Wolfe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 249–253.

  96 Weiner, Legacy of Ashes, 43–45.

  97 Wills, Bomb Power, 87.

  98 Christopher Simpson, Blowback: America’s Recruitment of Nazis and Its Effects on the Cold War (New York: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1988), 65.

  99 Walter A. McDougall, The Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1997), 88.

  100 Leffler, A Preponderance of Power, 238–239.

  101 Avi Shlaim, “The Balfour Declaration and Its Consequences,” in Yet More Adventures with Britannia: Personalities, Politics and Culture in Britain, ed. W. Roger Lewis (London: I. B. Tauris, 2005), 251.

  102 Herring, From Colony to Superpower, 569.

  103 Wawro, Quicksand, 37–38.

  104 Wallace, The Price of Vision, 607.

  105 Steven M. Gillon, The American Paradox: A History of the United States Since 1945 (Boston: Wadsworth, 2012), 25.

  106 Daniel Yergin, The Prize, 408.

  107 William Stivers, “The Incomplete Blockade: Soviet Zone Supply of West Berlin, 1948–1949,” Diplomatic History 21(Fall 1997), 569–570; Carolyn Eisenberg, “The Myth of the Berlin Blockade and the Early Cold War,” in Ellen Schrecker, ed. Cold War Triumphalism: The Misuse of History After the Fall of Communism (New York: New Press, 2004), 174–200.