Roundup: Talking About History
Annette Gordon-Reed: Thomas Jefferson is still relevant today
Barbara Mahany: Gettysburg Address: Four score and one 7-year-old's tears ago
Editorial in Investor's Business Daily: Reagan's Legacy ... Our 25-Year Boom
Thomas J. Sugrue: The Hundred Days War ... Histories of the New Deal
Adam Kirsch: Did the Armenian genocide have its own Primo Levi?
John Q. Barrett: How NOT to win an appointment to the Supreme Court
Christopher Hitchens: Telling the Truth About the Armenian Genocide
Gwynne Dyer: NATO at 60 faces growing pains that could threaten its survival
Michael Slackman: For Egypt, Promise of 1979 Peace Still Unfulfilled
Michael Crowley: Will Obama renege on his campaign promise to recognize the Armenian genocide?
Sean L. Malloy: Four Days in May ... Henry L. Stimson and the Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb
David Clark: Ten Years On, Kosovo Still Contentious
Source: Guardian (UK) (4-16-09)
[David Clark served as Europe adviser at the Foreign Office, 1997-2001.]
Ten years after Nato jets went into action against Serbia, the Kosovo war remains as controversial as ever. Welcomed by many at the time as evidence of a humanitarian world order in the making, its legacy has been overtaken, subsumed and ultimately distorted by the debate about the war on terror. What Vaclav Havel called "the first war for values" is now more often described as a dangerous precedent. Even Clare Short, a forceful advocate of intervention in the Balkans, attributed Tony Blair's foreign policy errors to the "taste for grandstanding" he acquired in Kosovo.
There are several reasons for this, the most important undoubtedly the effect of the Iraq war in sowing doubt about the legitimacy and efficacy of western military power. In departing from the principle of non-intervention and lacking a UN mandate, Kosovo is often regarded as the original sin that made Iraq possible. Even Russia's invasion and recognition of Abkhazia and South Ossetia have been characterised as blowback from Kosovo's declaration of independence a few months before.
Comparisons of this kind confuse more than they clarify. The war in Kosovo was a response to a humanitarian emergency, not a geopolitical power play. Even so, this point is still contested. Self-styled anti-imperialists, all too often apologists for the imperialism of any regime that opposes the west, have constructed an alternative history in which Slobodan Milosevic's crimes are minimised or excused and a rapacious west portrayed as the instigator of violence. In this history, his efforts to reach a negotiated solution were sabotaged at the Rambouillet peace conference by Europe and the US; and the deaths and refugee movements inside Kosovo were caused by Nato bombing.
These critics talk as if the destruction of Bosnia was a figment of the imagination. The reality is that by the time of Rambouillet, western leaders had wised up to Milosevic's game of rope-a-dope in which he negotiated peace in bad faith while continuing to unleash ethnic terror on the ground. They had already endured eight years of it. In Kosovo, Serbian forces had killed 1,500 and driven 270,000 from their homes before Nato acted. The violence accelerated immediately before and after the start of the bombing campaign, but opponents deliberately invert cause and effect...
Annette Gordon-Reed: Thomas Jefferson is still relevant today
Source: CNN (4-14-09)
[Annette Gordon-Reed won the 2008 National Book Award for "The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family." A law professor at New York Law School and a history professor at Rutgers University, she will speak at the dedication of a new visitors center Wednesday at Monticello.]
Does the legacy of Thomas Jefferson speak to Americans today? Or perhaps we should ask about Jefferson's legacies, for there are many. His fingerprints are everywhere.
Politics, government, race, slavery -- our third president's life and words touch on so many aspects of the nation's journey from rebellious colony to world superpower that it is impossible to understand the country's history without dealing with him in some fashion.
Even today, Jefferson's name is regularly invoked in the news -- the latest example being writers harking back to the forceful action he took against the Barbary pirates 200 years ago.
His soaring language in the Declaration of Independence -- "all men are created equal" and pronouncement of the right to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" -- galvanized many during his lifetime. Those words have resonated across the years with diverse groups of Americans seeking to gain full citizenship in the United States. Working-class whites, blacks, women, immigrants, gays -- all have turned to the Declaration as a form of promise, a credo for the nation to live up to.
It is particularly interesting to ponder Jefferson's legacies at this moment in American history. The election of the country's first African-American president has brought an intense focus on America's past, specifically the history of relations between the races. Again, it is not possible to consider that history in any serious way without thinking of Jefferson.
The great and often remarked-upon paradox is that the man who wrote about the equality of all mankind, and who wrote insightfully and forcefully about the evils of slavery, was also a lifelong slave owner in a racially based slave system. He was not alone in this, of course. Some of the most prominent founders -- including four of the first five presidents -- owned slaves, too. All these men, at various points in their lives, claimed to abhor the institution that provided their sustenance.
Jefferson tends to be held to a higher standard on this question largely because he, not George Washington, James Madison or James Monroe, wrote the Declaration of Independence. And, as hard as it may be for some to believe now, he early on developed a reputation as a dangerous radical.
There was his attitude toward religion. Jefferson did not believe in the divinity of Jesus Christ and, to the consternation of many, insisted upon the separation of church and state. There is no doubt that he would enthusiastically endorse President Obama's statement on his recent trip to Turkey that "one of the great strengths of the United States" is that it does not consider itself "a Christian nation or a Jewish nation or a Muslim nation. We consider ourselves a nation of citizens who are bound by ideals and a set of values."
And, of course, there was his politics. Jefferson was, in the eyes of many, a "leveler" bent on destroying all social distinctions; a move that his detractors felt would eventually lead to the breakdown of racial barriers.
Indeed, during the period leading up to the American Civil War, later generations of white Southerners emphatically repudiated Jefferson's Declaration and, in some cases, the man himself. They knew that whether he truly believed those words or not, the ideas embodied in the Declaration mattered greatly....
Grover G. Norquist: Did Reagan Win the Cold War?
Source: Foreign Policy (4-13-09)
[Grover G. Norquist is the president of Americans for Tax Reform.]
Ronald Reagan ran for president in 1976 and 1980 challenging the establishment's views on domestic economic policy and foreign policy vis-�-vis the Soviet Empire.
Reagan first defeated and then largely absorbed the Republican establishment on both domestic and foreign policy. Howard Baker, once a contender for the 1980 Republican nomination did vote for the Reagan income tax rate reductions, while calling them a "riverboat gamble." George Bush called supply side economics "voodoo economics" but then in 1988 signed a pledge to protect the lower rates. Bob Dole voted for the lower tax rates while bitterly criticizing supply side economics only to endorse marginal tax rate reduction when he ran for president in 1996.
On foreign policy Reagan's "peace through strength" has become the party's mantra and "d�tente" is now viewed as another of Richard Nixon's character flaws. Reaganism, the party's history explains, defeated and dismantled the Soviet Empire after fifty years of bipartisan dangerous failure.
The center-right finds Reagan's successes easy to explain. Low taxes and less regulation create jobs and growth. A strong military, recognition of the evil and threat of Communism and support for anti-communist rebels in Afghanistan, Angola and the resistance in Poland aided by the failure of socialism as an economic system led to the collapse of the Soviet Empire. What is not to understand and applaud?
The establishment left has had a more difficult time explaining how Reagan succeeded in his two stated goals-turning the economy around from Carter's stagflation -- both high unemployment and inflation-and destroying the Soviet Union -- with such wrongheaded policies.
The establishment left has also had to back away from its favorite caricature of Reagan the "amiable dunce" who was "sleepwalking through history" and who had read fewer books than Illinois Democrat Senator Paul Simon had written. The final stake was thrust into the heart of this narrative with the publication of Martin and Annelise Anderson and Kiron K. Skinner's book in 2004, A Life in Letters that published hundreds of radio editorials written in his own hand, self-edited and clearly showing a first rate and well read mind. Reagan the product of clever speechwriters, the actor reading the ideas and words of others was gone.
The bitter enders of the revisionist Left wisely skipped over the economic history of the 1980s and 1990s (deciding to avoid embarrassing conversations about GDP, employment, inflation, growth rates) and on foreign policy credited Michael Gorbachev with agreeably ending the cold war and dismantling the Soviet Union on purpose. Reagan was just standing there when the nice Soviet Leader fixed the world.
James Mann's new book The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan is a cross between the Andersons' revelation of Reagan's unexpected and hitherto hidden, wisdom and the theory that Gorbachev reformed the Soviet Union out of existence absent external pressures-certainly not due to any right-wing, military build up, red baiting pressures from the cowboy Reagan.
Reagan's wisdom, per Mann, is found in recognizing Gorbachev's historic role and not getting in the way. A rather backhanded insult to the man's life work.
Mann divides his book into four parts that can be enjoyed or at least visited separately: first, a comparison of Nixon and Reagan's views of communism and the Soviet Union; second, the little focused upon role of Suzanne Massie as an informal conduit between Reagan and the Soviet Leadership in the mid-1980s; third, the story of the June 1987 "tear down this wall" speech, and fourth, the "easing of the Cold War Tensions during Reagan's final two years in office."
It is all interesting reading and appears accurate and well sourced. But it is a little like reading a history of Napolean's life after the retreat from Moscow. It skips over some of the good bits.
The Soviet Union didn't fall. It was pushed. Gorbachev didn't end the Cold War any more than Mussolini ended the Second World War. He was a casualty and one fatally wounded in retreat...
Richard Cohen: Delving Into Bush's Legacy
Source: New York Daily News (4-14-09)
[Richard Cohen writes for the New York Daily News.]
Former President George Bush and some of his White House aides are gathering in Dallas to plan the future George W. Bush Policy Institute. There, I guess, they will ponder grand themes and marble foyers, but I propose they begin by simply renaming the place. I suggest the "George W. Bush Institute of Management Failure" and dedicate it to studying how this presidency went so wrong - a task as big as Texas.
Bush's tenure was truly remarkable. He left office with the lowest poll ratings in 60 years, two wars had begun and not ended and the deepest recession since the Great Depression. If it's true that we learn from our mistakes, Bush's eight years represent a bonanza of lessons.
What commends the Bush presidency to further study was its sheer managerial ineptitude. This is irony aplenty for a man not known for irony. Bush's one area of expertise, after all, supposedly was in management. Not only had he been a businessman, but he had graduated from Harvard Business School. Bush was the Decider. He was a delegator. He was precise and punctual - early to the office, early out of the office and a clean desk at all times. Wow!
Conventional wisdom holds that the bungling of the Iraq war was a consequence of ideology run amuck. Maybe. But it was also an example of awful management. Whether you supported the war or opposed it, you have to concede that it should have ended years ago and, along with the invasion of Grenada, be a fit dissertation subject for a desperate Ph.D. candidate and not, as it remains, a festering debacle.
Had Bush and his team performed better, the war might have ended a lot sooner. It finally took the surge to get things under control - and that may yet turn out to be too optimistic a statement. Still, the surge would not have been necessary had the war been handled competently from the beginning.
The war in Afghanistan waged against the Taliban, which had provided Osama Bin Laden with sanctuary, was similarly mishandled. Once again, too few troops were sent to do too big a job. Good managers know how to make choices. Bush not only chose wrong when he gave Iraq precedence over Afghanistan, but he chose not to choose at all when he thought both wars could be fought on the cheap - no draft, no tax hike, no sacrifice from the general public...
Barbara Mahany: Gettysburg Address: Four score and one 7-year-old's tears ago
Source: Chicago Tribune (4-13-09)
[HNN Editor: In this article reporter Barbara Mahany recalls a recent trip she and her family took, at her young son's insistence, to Gettysburg, where he delivered the famous address as his parents and older brother looked on.]
... We looked in, each of us, zeroed our eyes on his face, trying to read the root of the slowed-down reading.
Only then, as the next few words sputtered, did I see what I thought looked like a tear. And then another and another.
He was crying and reading, the boy who would not let the tears stop the cadence, the moment, not until the end when we all crushed him, a tangle of arms, cheeks, tears.
"Sweetheart, what is it?" I asked, not sure if the hard words had netted his courage, swallowed his sense of the moment.
"It's the soldiers," he managed to choke out in a short few syllables, before burying his face in my sleeve.
We all stood in this knot for a minute or two. I knew that I, for one, was etching the moment into my mind, into my picture of this boy who was not often considered the one with his pulse in sync with the poetry and pain of a world marred by bloodshed and tombstones.
Sometimes on a cold afternoon, at the crest of history, you discover the script that you've dotted and crossed in your head, the script of your own child, is not what you thought it was.
And you stand there, wiping back tears, his and your own. And all of a sudden you understand a whole new chapter has been written.
Tristram Hunt: What have the Germans ever done for us..?
Source: Times (UK) (4-13-09)
[Tristram Hunt's biography of Engels, The Frock-coated Communist, is published by Penguin on May 1.]
What could be more British than Handel's Messiah, Holbein's portraits of Henry VIII or a traditional Christmas Day? With museums, concert halls and opera houses commemorating the 250th anniversary of Georg Friedrich Handel's death on April 14, 1759, this seems the right moment to remember the signal contribution of German culture to British identity. An appreciation all too often obliterated today by our obsession with the Nazis.
Few embody that Germanic shaping of Britishness more than Handel. He arrived on the tailcoats of his royal patron, the Elector of Hanover, Georg Ludwig von Braunschweig-Luneburg, better known as George I. And his compositions reflected an increasingly confident sense of national destiny as Britain - a Protestant nation in a predominantly Catholic Europe, committed to parliamentary governance, liberty and the rule of law - was projected by royal propagandists as a Promised Land, a new Israel. Brought across the sea by another Protestant wind, the Hanoverian dynasty was part of that story of redemption and deliverance from Jacobite darkness.
So Handel's music compared events in British history with the narratives of the Old Testament. The oratorio Israel in Egypt and Zadok the Priest, Handel's 1727 Coronation anthem for George II, which has been played at every subsequent crowning, are the most adulatory. �It was because he celebrated Britain in this glowing fashion,� the historian Linda Colley says, �that Handel became such a national institution.�
In Dissenting chapels, choral societies, cathedral concerts and in Westminster Abbey itself, Handel became the composer of Britishness.
The next royal infusion of Teutonic blood - Queen Victoria's marriage to Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha - resulted in a further layering of German culture. Reviled by the English aristocracy as worthy and dour, Prince Albert did more than just introduce fir trees into British Christmas ritual. His management of the 1851 Great Exhibition, presidency of the Royal Society of Arts and establishment of the South Kensington Museums signalled a new class settlement. Albert brought a little bit of German admiration for the b�rgerlich ethic into Britain: after decades of haughty disdain, the technically-minded, commercially- savvy provincial bourgeoisie became part of our national story. And Albert endowed some of Britain's finest cultural institutions.
Even more so than Hanoverian England, the 19th century was the age of enthusiasm for all things German. Inspired by the writings of Herder and the poetry of Schiller, Coleridge and the Lake Poets disavowed the Enlightenment and dwelt on the uniqueness and particularity of national culture, language and landscape. Meanwhile, Marian Evans (better known as George Eliot) translated Ludwig Feuerbach and his fellow philosopher David Strauss into English, lacing their philosophy through her novels.
But the polemicist and historian Thomas Carlyle, from his beautifully appointed drawing room at Cheyne Row, Chelsea (with its twin portrait of Martin Luther's parents on the wall), most effectively diffused German Romanticism into British culture. In the writings of Richter and Goethe, he found a spiritualism and naturalism to counter �the inner emptiness, the untruthfulness of the age�. Unfortunately one of Carlyle's greatest admirers was Adolf Hitler, who had Carlyle's biography of Frederick the Great read to him during his final hours in the bunker...
Editorial in Investor's Business Daily: Reagan's Legacy ... Our 25-Year Boom
Source: Investor's Business Daily (4-9-09)
Let's go back to 1982, in many ways the bleakest year since the Depression. The economy had emerged severely damaged by the stagflation of the 1970s. Americans' confidence, both in government and in the economy, had reached a low ebb in 1980. Many felt our best years lay behind us.
On the nations' campuses and even in some of its boardrooms, people were talking about capitalism as a failed system.
Some advocated a "third way" between socialism and capitalism, as in Europe, which would include heavy doses of government intervention in markets to bring them back to life. Still others took up the call in E.F. Schumacher's best-seller, "Small Is Beautiful," to downsize expectations. Live frugally, they said. Inhabit small houses. Drive small cars. Don't use oil. Rein in your ambitions.
One man didn't agree with this: President Ronald Reagan, elected in 1980 amid a wave of voter disgust at his predecessor's failures.
It was Reagan who brought America's capitalist economy roaring back to life, ending energy price controls, slashing income tax rates by 25% and dramatically reducing tax rates on capital gains.
Americans had been told for years � as they're now being told again � to expect diminished standards of living. Then they watched as the Reagan years set in place one of the most durable and remarkable booms in incomes and wealth in history.
Yet the media and academia rarely credited Reagan for his accomplishments � especially on the economy, where "Reaganomics" became a term of opprobrium among the intelligentsia.
But it's a fact. As the nonpartisan National Bureau of Economic Research once declared, we lived in the "longest sustained period of prosperity in the 20th century" from 1982 to 1999 � one big boom, the NBER said, set off by Reagan...
Norman Solomon: Getting a Death Grip on Memory
Source: Media Beat (4-9-09)
[Norman Solomon�s latest books are �War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death� and �Made Love, Got War: Close Encounters with America�s Warfare State.� For information, go to: www.normansolomon.com]
A headline in the New York Times announced a few days ago: �Brain Researchers Open Door to Editing Memory.� This news ran above the fold on the front page.
�Suppose scientists could erase certain memories by tinkering with a single substance in the brain,� the article began. Readers quickly learned that it�s starting to happen: �Researchers in Brooklyn have recently accomplished comparable feats, with a single dose of an experimental drug delivered to areas of the brain critical for holding specific types of memory...�
Big deal.
American media outlets have been pulling off such feats for a long time.
The scientists trying to learn how to wipe out �specific types of memory� are lagging way behind.
Don�t need to remember the vast quantities of napalm, Agent Orange and cluster bombs that the U.S. military dropped on Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia in the 1960s and 1970s? Or the continuing realities of burn victims, dioxin poisoning and unexploded warheads?
Don�t want to consider the many thousands of civilians killed by Salvadoran death squads, Guatemalan troops and Nicaraguan contra guerillas during the 1980s, courtesy of U.S. taxpayers?
Don�t care to recall the Pentagon�s estimate that the Gulf War in early 1991 killed 100,000 Iraqi people during a six-week period?
Forget about it! That�s what selective memory is for.
Prefer not to recollect how the U.S. government trained and armed President Reagan�s beloved �freedom fighters� in Afghanistan -- including the likes of Osama bin Laden and other fundamentalist mujahedeen -- for their insurgency against the Soviet occupiers in the 1980s? Rather not remember how those �freedom fighters� became �terrorists�?
Hate that particular gray? Then wash it away!
Enough bleach in the spin cycles will do the trick. There�s more than one way to be �editing memory.�
�So far, the research has been done only on animals,� the Times reported in its April 6 story. �But scientists say this memory system is likely to work almost identically in people.�
The Times account managed to balance enthusiasm for the advances of scientific research with some potential downsides: �Millions of people might be tempted to erase a severely painful memory, for instance -- but what if, in the process, they lost other, personally important memories that were somehow related?�
Dominant media have blotted out countless painful memories -- national or personal -- if only by treating them as irrelevant or incidental to news and concerns that really count. All in a day�s work: part of the mix of organized forgetting.
�The greatest triumphs of propaganda have been accomplished, not by doing something, but by refraining from doing,� Aldous Huxley observed. �Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth.� And, of equal relevance to the brave new world of U.S. mass media in 2009: �The propagandist�s purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.�
With constant media prompts, the widely replicated screens end up screening us, from ourselves and from each other.
Now we know the names of the Pentagon�s drones -- Predators and Reapers -- but not the names of the people they�re killing.
Easy enough to approve of bombing people when they�ve been rendered unreal. Forgetting becomes a simple matter.
Is some memory not worth remembering? Of course, we could always let the market decide.
Larry W. Hurtado: Why Was Jesus Crucified?
Source: Slate (4-9-09)
[Larry W. Hurtado is head of the School of Divinity, University of Edinburgh. His recent books are The Earliest Christian Artifacts: Manuscripts and Christian Origins, How on Earth Did Jesus Become a God? and Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity.]
A central statement in traditional Christian creeds is that Jesus was crucified "under Pontius Pilate." But the majority of Christians have only the vaguest sense what the phrase represents, and most non-Christians probably can't imagine why it's such an integral part of Christian faith. "Crucified under Pontius Pilate" provides the Jesus story with its most obvious link to larger human history. Pilate was a historical figure, the Roman procurator of Judea; he was referred to in other sources of the time and even mentioned in an inscription found at the site of ancient Caesarea in Israel. Linking Jesus' death with Pilate represents the insistence that Jesus was a real person, not merely a figure of myth or legend. More than this, the phrase also communicates concisely some pretty important specifics of that historical event.
For one thing, the statement asserts that Jesus didn't simply die; he was killed. This was a young man's death in pain and public humiliation, not a peaceful end to a long life. Also, this wasn't a mob action. Jesus is said to have been executed, not lynched, and by the duly appointed governmental authority of Roman Judea. There was a hearing of some sort, and the official responsible for civil order and Roman peace and justice condemned Jesus. This means that Pilate found something so serious as to warrant the death penalty.
But this was also a particular kind of death penalty. The Romans had an assortment of means by which to carry out a judicial execution; some, such as beheading, were quicker and less painful than crucifixion. Death by crucifixion was reserved for particular crimes and particular classes. Those with proper Roman citizenship were supposed to be immune from crucifixion, although they might be executed by other means. Crucifixion was commonly regarded as not only frighteningly painful but also the most shameful of deaths. Essentially, it was reserved for those who were perceived as raising their hands against Roman rule or those who in some other way seemed to challenge the social order�for example, slaves who attacked their masters, and insurrectionists, such as the many Jews crucified by Roman Gen. Vespasian in the Jewish rebellion of 66-72....
Thomas J. Sugrue: The Hundred Days War ... Histories of the New Deal
Source: Nation (4-8-09)
[Thomas J. Sugrue, the Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Professor of History and Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, is the author of The Origins of the Urban Crisis and, most recently, Sweet Land of Liberty: The Unfinished Struggle for Racial Equality in the North.]
During Barack Obama's first hundred days, history has provided pundits and politicians with a grab bag of analogies. Obama himself has invoked Abraham Lincoln and put him on a pedestal. I'm not speaking figuratively: a bust of the sixteenth president sits on the same plinth in the Oval Office where Obama's predecessor had displayed a sculpture of Winston Churchill. Obama has also cited Doris Kearns Goodwin's Team of Rivals, an analysis of Lincoln's complex relationships with leading members of his cabinet, as a model for his own style of presidential leadership. Journalists have compared the youth and idealism of Obama and his supporters to John F. Kennedy's Camelot, and fashionistas have twittered about the dashing Michelle being a latter-day Jackie (with sinewy biceps). Still others have suggested that Obama embodies Reagan's charisma while reclaiming Reaganesque paeans to national greatness for the Democrats. A few wags have tried to burst the bubble of hope by comparing Obama to Jimmy Carter, another Washington outsider and intellectual who promised sweeping change but whose mandate collapsed under the weight of recession, malaise and crisis in the Middle East.
Barack Lincoln. Barack H. Kennedy. Barack Carter. Barack Reagan. None have captured the imagination of editorialists, bloggers and journalists like Barack Delano Roosevelt. A recent New Yorker illustration portrayed the forty-fourth president chin up in the Rooseveltian fashion, exuberant and self-confident, a cigarette holder clenched in his teeth. In this version of history-as-analogy, Obama's fight against the "Great Recession" will restore a faith in government that has been wholly discredited by the disastrous policies of George W. Hoover. Obama's most fervent supporters hope that the president's stimulus package and ambitious budget will launch a "new New Deal" designed to restore confidence in the financial system, curb unemployment, revivify the housing market and rebuild America's decaying highways and schools. The Obama-Roosevelt analogy is compelling--until you remember that history does not repeat itself. It is not cyclical. And it seldom offers easy lessons for the present. Ultimately, the differences between FDR and BHO and their respective eras are as instructive as the similarities.
Each generation has drawn its own lessons from the New Deal. The first wave of New Deal histories were written by unabashed Democrats during the 1950s and early 1960s, when liberalism seemed invincible. The eminent historian and Washington courtier Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. popularized the heroic interpretation of Roosevelt with a triple-decker history in which the New Deal represents the full flowering of an American political tradition of strong executive power and visionary leadership rooted in the Age of Jackson. FDR created the modern American state, offering a pragmatic, humane alternative to the radical individualism and anti-statism that had long hindered the fulfillment of the American promise of equality and opportunity.
By the 1960s, however, the New Deal was under siege from various quarters. Left-leaning scholars, alienated by liberalism's hubris, skeptical of military-industrial Keynesianism, outraged at the Vietnam War and inspired by radical insurgencies at home and abroad, argued that the New Deal was fundamentally conservative. FDR's cardinal sin was that he saved capitalism from itself rather than taking the opportunity to nationalize the financial system and redistribute wealth. He transformed the state into the servant of big business, letting corporate executives and financiers draft legislation that allowed them to consolidate power, while he co-opted radical social movements with symbolic gestures.
Conservatives rejoined with their own demonology of the New Deal. In a view that trickled down from the National Association of Manufacturers and the National Review and was distilled into the bitter libertarianism of Barry Goldwater and his followers, the New Deal was the epitome of collectivism, a dangerous repudiation of the founders' ethos of governmental restraint, budgetary parsimony and states' rights. Innovations like federal jobs programs and Social Security threatened personal liberty by turning citizens into dependents. More recently, in The Forgotten Man, Bloomberg financial columnist Amity Shlaes resurrects the Goldwaterite reading of the Roosevelt years, arguing that the New Deal sapped the vitality of the free market and--in her most hyperbolic moment--that "government intervention helped make the Depression Great" by dampening competition, over-regulating business and coddling the common man with make-work programs rather than unleashing his entrepreneurial spirit.
For the past forty years, however, most conservatives have reserved their criticism of the New Deal for corporate boardrooms and think-tank seminars. One reason for their silence was political pragmatism. The right had little to gain by publicly thrashing a president whose memory was held dear by the blue-collar whites whom Nixon, Reagan and the Bushes assiduously courted. The war on poverty, black power, the counterculture, feminism and the sexual revolution made for more convenient targets. But as Republicans fought the culture wars, conservative activists captured executive branch agencies and the federal courts, chipping away at welfare, Social Security and scores of federal regulations. The strange result was that while Ronald Reagan once claimed FDR as a personal hero, his wing of the Republican Party gutted liberalism.
The fragmentation of the New Deal coalition in the post-1960s years was mirrored in the increasingly fragmented scholarship on the New Deal. One group of liberal intellectuals--who took the conservative critique of identity politics seriously--called for a reinvigoration of a Rooseveltian spirit of civic nationalism as an alternative to both the libertarianism of the Reagan years and the divisive politics of the culture wars. For writers as diverse as Michael Tomasky and Richard Rorty, the New Deal was the triumph of class politics; it unified Americans across racial and ethnic lines in service to the common political and economic good. But their wistful view of a politics of unity was challenged by other scholars who contended that Roosevelt's signature programs, including the Social Security Act, the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, the Federal Housing Administration and the GI Bill, mostly excluded blacks, while New Deal welfare programs stigmatized the poor and disadvantaged women. Rooseveltian liberalism was above all constrained by the power of conservative Southern Democrats who used their clout to thwart social democracy. As political scientist Ira Katznelson memorably put it, the New Deal was the "strange marriage of Sweden and South Africa."
At the dawn of the Age of Obama, the heroic, liberal Roosevelt is back in fashion. The front tables at bookstores groan under the weight of massive biographies of the thirty-second president, among them jailed financier Conrad Black's surprisingly favorable Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom and Jean Edward Smith's widely praised and magnificently written FDR. A new addition to the pile is another sprawling account, Traitor to His Class, by the prolific University of Texas historian H.W. Brands.
The prospect of plowing through another full-scale biography of Franklin Delano Roosevelt is daunting, especially when it offers few revealing or novel insights into FDR's life, his pre-presidential career, the New Deal and World War II. Predictable, yes, but Traitor to His Class is reliable and compulsively readable. Brands writes in the vein of FDR's earlier, liberal chroniclers: his is a mostly favorable account of Roosevelt's career, with an emphasis on the dramatic turning points in the Depression and war, and on the president's leadership style. But the Roosevelt who emerges from Brands's book is less a rebel against privilege than a humane and ultimately pragmatic politician, one whose bout with polio spurred him to greater sympathy with the downtrodden but who was scarcely a radical, despite his occasionally fiery antibusiness rhetoric. Like many elites, especially from his home state of New York (including many who enthusiastically joined the ranks of New Dealers), FDR combined a sense of noblesse oblige with a faith in the application of expertise to solve pressing social and economic problems.
Roosevelt may have dramatically expanded the size of the government and its public spending, but his programs were seldom as large in scale or as revolutionary as they first appeared to be. The New Deal did not centralize governmental power as its critics had feared it would; it left the administration of the most important relief efforts--unemployment insurance, old age assistance, aid to dependent children and job-creation programs (the Public Works Administration excepted)--in the hands of state and local officials who used federal funds as a form of local patronage and who often shunted aside politically marginal groups like African-Americans. Roosevelt's populist rhetoric was belied by his administration's close collaboration with big business. His Social Security Act was a two-tiered program that provided generous benefits for the elderly but was penurious toward unmarried mothers and their children. His housing programs excluded minorities and disadvantaged central cities. And his most long-lived work programs lasted less than a decade. As historian Alan Brinkley recently argued, "the New Deal has often seemed as significant for its failures and omissions as for the things it achieved." Brands's biography would have been more powerful had it paid more attention to FDR's failures and omissions.
Like Brands, Adam Cohen echoes the first generation of liberal scholarship on the New Deal in Nothing to Fear, the newest of three books on FDR's first hundred days to appear in the past three years. In Cohen's view, FDR's first hundred days were nothing less than "the third great revolution" in American history. Cohen, a member of the New York Times editorial board and co-author of an excellent book on mid-twentieth- century Chicago boss Richard Daley, focuses on the president's inner circle--a professor, a social worker, a labor reformer, a crusading agricultural journalist and a cantankerous fiscal conservative. In Cohen's account, FDR is the nation's improviser in chief, someone with few strong convictions and shockingly little expertise on economic issues. Labor Secretary Frances Perkins considered the president to be economically "illiterate." But FDR turned his weakness into a strength. "Roosevelt does not have the extreme pride of personal opinion that has characterized some of our more bull-headed presidents," wrote Henry Wallace, shortly before FDR appointed him as agriculture secretary. "He knows that he doesn't know it all, and tries to find out all he can from people who are supposed to be authorities."
Roosevelt's lack of convictions (other than a sense of urgency to address the Depression) was remedied by his ability to delegate policy-making to what he called a "factocracy," a talented and unorthodox group of advisers, many of whom had little experience in Washington. Through artfully drawn vignettes of budget director Lewis Douglas (the one Washington insider), confidant Raymond Moley (a Columbia economics professor), Wallace (who edited his family's farm newsweekly), Perkins (a longtime advocate for working women) and public works administrator Harry Hopkins (a social worker), Cohen compellingly conveys the extraordinary sense of possibility in Roosevelt's administration, even in one of the bleakest moments in American history.
Roosevelt's first hundred days were unprecedented in their scope and ambition. Barely settled in the White House, his administration stabilized the nation's collapsed financial system. He repealed Prohibition--in an act that enhanced his popularity and stimulated at least one vital sector of the economy. Altogether he signed fifteen major pieces of legislation in just a little more than three months. Roosevelt created the Tennessee Valley Authority, a massive public works project meant to modernize the region's economy. The newly minted Agricultural Adjustment Administration provided crop subsidies to farmers, regulating output and stabilizing prices in the deeply depressed agricultural sector (although privileging large farmers and seldom benefiting tenant farmers or farm laborers). His job-creation programs--the Federal Emergency Relief Administration and the Public Works Administration--dramatically reduced the ranks of the unemployed and stimulated the economy by building roads, libraries, post offices, hospitals and schools. And through the National Industrial Recovery Act--the most controversial and least effective of these first programs--the Roosevelt administration instituted central economic planning, promoting a novel collaboration between business and government.
For good reason, Cohen is most sympathetic to Roosevelt's job creation and public works programs and their advocates--Perkins and Hopkins. His most sensitive portrait is of Labor Secretary Frances Perkins, the first woman to serve in a presidential cabinet. Through a detailed account of her career, Cohen captures the humanitarian and reformist impulses that coursed through the New Deal. A witness to the infamous Triangle Shirtwaist fire of 1911, a crusader for minimum-wage and hours laws, an idealist but also an astute political operative, Perkins used her cabinet post to lay the groundwork for the New Deal's staunchly prolabor policies. For the first time, the government allied itself with organized labor and working people--an alliance that Southern Democrats and probusiness Republicans would assail in the 1940s but that was arguably the New Deal's greatest contribution to mid-twentieth-century American prosperity.
Cohen's argument that Roosevelt's programs were revolutionary, however, overstates the case. Most of FDR's programs were inspired by similar local and state innovations in the early twentieth century, the expansion of regulatory powers under Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson and the interventionist economic policies of World War I. FDR also expanded Herbert Hoover's policy innovations. Cohen resuscitates the hoariest clichés about the Hoover administration as the last bastion of laissez-faire capitalism. To buttress his argument, he relies on the authority of one of Roosevelt's most partisan biographers, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. It was politically expedient for Schlesinger to draw a bright line between Hoover and Roosevelt. And it was made easier by Hoover's three-decade-long post-presidency--in which the bitter Republican spent most of his time railing against the New Deal. But Cohen discounts a whole generation of scholarship on Hoover that offers a far more nuanced portrait of his politics. Hoover was no libertarian. As secretary of commerce in the Harding administration and then as president, Hoover reorganized and dramatically expanded the federal bureaucracy. He stepped up antitrust enforcement--in contrast to FDR, who jettisoned antimonopoly politics while gesturing to it in his occasional denunciations of greedy business leaders. Hoover also created the Reconstruction Finance Corporation and signed the Federal Home Loan Bank Act, which restructured mortgage markets in an effort (that FDR would expand) to promote homeownership and spur the construction industry. The Tennessee Valley Authority grew out of Hoover-era public works projects, most notably the massive Boulder (later Hoover) Dam project. None of these programs were as ambitious as their New Deal counterparts, but they grew from the same Progressive roots that nourished Roosevelt's initiatives.
The political philosophy of Roosevelt's first hundred days was anything but coherent. The new administration mixed fiscal conservatism, central planning, large-scale government spending and public-private partnerships, localism and states' rights. Its successes were the result of experimentation, but so too were its failures. For example, Douglas, much more of a budget hawk and small-government advocate than Hoover, pushed through the Economy Act of 1933, which dramatically cut government spending, and in the process undermined the stimulative effects of Roosevelt's public works and jobs programs. Fiscal restraint characterized even FDR's most ambitious spending programs. None of the public works and job-creation programs of the early New Deal were sufficient to lower national unemployment rates below 10 percent. They stimulated modest growth--but together were not substantial enough to pull the country out of the Depression. FDR was so beholden to the principle of balanced budgets that in 1937 he dramatically cut federal spending and caused a devastating downturn. It would take the massive spending of World War II--still the most convincing demonstration of the power of Keynesianism to date--to reinvigorate the economy.
To note the limitations of the New Deal should not diminish its accomplishments. The legacy of the New Deal is inescapable: think of our post offices, bridges, highways and national parks, many of which began falling into decrepitude in the late twentieth century when Republicans axed domestic spending. Roosevelt and his successors failed to enact national health insurance, but they dramatically increased access to medical care through a massive hospital-building program. The programs launched in the first hundred days ended up delivering electricity to large parts of the United States, bringing the South into the First World. The New Deal's most important legacy, one hard to quantify, was that it transformed the relationship between citizens and the state, with enduring consequences. The New Deal launched a rights revolution--one embodied in FDR's calls for an expansive "economic bill of rights" that included decent housing, remunerative work and security in old age.
FDR's increasingly capacious sense of political rights was in part the outgrowth of innovative policy-making in the executive branch. But as historians like Lizabeth Cohen and Meg Jacobs (authors of important books on consumer politics) have shown, the New Deal was not simply developed and administered from the top down. It also sprang from political organization, grassroots mobilization, petitions, protest and disruption, or the threat of it. You wouldn't know this from Brands and Cohen, whose books share a weakness common to many presidential biographies. They offer rich insights into the life of Roosevelt and his advisers but relatively few glimpses of the times. The vast majority of Americans--the quarter of the population unemployed in early 1933, the masses lined up to recoup their money at failing banks, the wretched refugees of the Dust Bowl--appear mostly as passive bystanders, victims waiting to be saved by a heroic president. They listen to FDR on their radios, they write moving letters to the White House, but they are not the agents of change.
At best, both books give cameos to the Bonus Marchers, those World War I veterans who marched on Washington to demand that the country reward them for their sacrifice. Cohen devotes a paragraph to the pitchfork rebels of Iowa who rioted to protest foreclosures in 1933, leading to the imposition of martial law, and who had counterparts in nearly every rural area of the country in the early 1930s. The authors give a nod to the influence of militant labor activists. But their accounts downplay the firebrand leftists who gathered tens of thousands in mass demonstrations in nearly every big city; the unionists who used the economic dislocations of the Depression to organize workers to challenge corporate greed and demand workplace security; the millions of blue-collar workers, many of them immigrants and their children, who joined unions; and the urban blacks, fired up by FDR's promise to deliver them from poverty but outraged at the persistence of discrimination, who boycotted stores and who grew increasingly restive as the United States entered World War II.
Our history of the New Deal is woefully incomplete with these folks cast as extras in the drama of presidential politics. FDR's sense of urgency was not simply bred by his political genius, his leadership style or his personal experience. All of those mattered--they made him receptive to external pressure and, unlike Herbert Hoover, sympathetic to the plight of the "forgotten man." But the policy experiments of the New Deal were also the result of fear of upheaval and, later, concerns that radicals, whether communist or fascist, whether followers of Huey Long, Francis Townsend or Charles Coughlin, would prevail.
Whether Obama can tame the Great Recession, whether his mostly seasoned, Clinton-era circle of advisers will boldly experiment, and whether his presidency will ultimately be compared favorably with Roosevelt's, remains to be seen. It pays to recall that the New Deal was the result of presidential leadership and policy innovation, but also that the drama of the Great Depression and the New Deal played out in places far from the nation's capital--on New York City's streets, in Nebraska's cornfields, in Flint's auto factories and in California's shipyards. Perhaps the biggest difference between 2009 and 1933 is that Obama has not, at least yet, been seriously tested by organized pressure from below. That might ultimately be what distinguishes FDR's administration from Obama's.
Reprinted with permission from the Nation. For subscription information call 1-800-333-8536. Portions of each week's Nation magazine can be accessed at http://www.thenation.com.
Adam Kirsch: Did the Armenian genocide have its own Primo Levi?
Source: New Republic (4-2-09)
[Adam Kirsch is a contributing editor at The New Republic. This article originally appeared in Nextbook.]
A week before Germany's invasion of Poland, Hitler reportedly urged his generals to slaughter civilians--Slavs and Jews, the two most hated groups in Nazi ideology--without mercy. "After all," he flippantly asked, "who remembers the Armenians?" In fact, the attempted genocide of the Armenians by the Turks during the First World War was very well documented, at the time and ever since. Henry Morgenthau, the American ambassador to the Ottoman Empire during the massacres, wrote at length in his memoirs about this attempt to wipe an entire population off the face of the earth. The word genocide had not yet been coined, but that is clearly what happened in Armenia between 1915 and 1918; in fact, Raphael Lemkin, the Polish Jewish activist who coined the term, had the Armenian example in mind.
Yet it is true that the Armenian genocide has not entered into America's common cultural memory in the same way as the Nazi Holocaust. In part that is because it took place in the Ottoman Empire, from which few Americans come, rather than in Europe, where many Americans have their roots; in part it is because the U.S. never fought the Ottomans in World War I, as it did the Germans in World War II; in part it is because of the greater prominence of Jews than Armenians in American life. And sadly, it is also due to the continuing refusal of the Turkish government to acknowledge the crimes of its predecessor state, thus creating an illusion of controversy about a history that no historians doubt. (When the Turkish Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk spoke publicly about the Armenian genocide, he was charged with the crime of "insulting Turkishness" and forced to flee abroad.)
In 2007, the Anti-Defamation League was rightly embroiled in scandal when it supported the Turkish government's plea to the U.S. Congress not to officially recognize the Armenian genocide. (After much controversy, the director of the ADL, Abraham Foxman, tempered his stance.) For, as many writers urged at the time, it is surely incumbent upon Jews, above all, to remember the Armenians, whose oblivion Hitler counted on.
That is why the publication of Armenian Golgotha: A Memoir of the Armenian Genocide, 1915-1918 is especially noteworthy for Jewish readers. In this eyewitness account of the genocide, written in 1918 and now translated into English for the first time, Grigoris Balakian offers an Armenian equivalent to the testimonies of Holocaust survivors like Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel. Balakian, a priest of the Armenian Apostolic Church, was deported from Constantinople in April 1915, along with a large group of Armenian intellectuals and community leaders. For the next three years, until Turkey's defeat and surrender in September 1918, Balakian lived constantly under the shadow of death. Exiled, sent on forced marches, threatened by bandits and government officials, starved and sick, he managed to survive only by a combination of luck, daring, the corruption and inefficiency of Turkish officials, and the support of righteous non-Armenians who hid and fed him....
Michael Lukas: A Skeptic's Guide to Passover
Source: Slate (4-8-09)
[Michael Lukas is a writer currently finishing up a novel about the end of the Ottoman Empire. He lives in Berkeley, Calif.]
For thousands of years, skeptics and believers alike have debated whether the events described in the Passover story�the parting of the Red Sea, the 10 plagues, and the burning bush�actually took place. Roman Jewish historian Josephus Flavius speculated that the parting of the Red Sea "might be of God's will or of natural origin. Let everyone believe at his own discretion." The skeptic's skeptic, Sigmund Freud, called the Passover story "a pious myth," contending that Moses was a rebellious Egyptian prince who worshiped the sun god Akhenaton and made up the Jewish religion as a political ploy. In more recent times, scientific explanations of the Passover story range from formula-laden academic papers like "Modeling the Hydrodynamic Situation of the Exodus" to more popular inquiries such as Cambridge materials scientist Colin Humphreys' The Miracles of Exodus. Whether or not you subscribe to these theories, they beat listening to your little cousin sing the "Four Questions."
As anyone who has seen The Ten Commandments can attest, the parting of the Red Sea is one of, if not the most, climactic moments in the Passover story. As Exodus describes it:
And Moses stretched out his hand over the sea; and the Lord caused the sea to go back by a strong east wind all that night, and made the sea dry land, and the waters were divided. And the children of Israel went into the midst of the sea upon the dry ground; and the waters were a wall unto them on their right hand, and on their left.
Accepting the biblical account as a "possible 'qualitative' description of an event," Florida State oceanographer Doron Nof set out to investigate whether the parting of the Red Sea is "plausible from a physical point of view." Using a common phenomenon called wind set-down effect, he found that "a northwesterly wind of 20 m/s blowing for 10-14 h is sufficient to cause a sea level drop of about 2.5m." Such a drop in sea level, Nof speculates, might have exposed an underwater ridge, which the Israelites crossed as if it were dry land. Although the event is plausible, Nof estimated that the likelihood of such a storm occurring in that particular place and time of year is less than once every 2,400 years.
While scientists agree that wind set-down effect could have caused the Red Sea to part as described in the Bible, most biblical scholars and archeologists insist that the Israelites' crossing did not take place at the Red Sea at all. The original Hebrew (yam suph), they contend, should be translated as Sea of Reeds, not Red Sea. So where's the Sea of Reeds? It depends whom you ask. In the somewhat specious History Channel documentary Exodus Decoded, Simcha Jacobovici (aka the Naked Archaeologist) places the Israelites' crossing in the Bitter Lakes, a reedy marshland north of the Gulf of Suez that was subsumed during the construction of the Suez Canal. For his part, Walking the Bible author Bruce Feiler concludes that the Sea of Reeds is Lake Timsah, located halfway between Port Said and Suez. But The Miracles of Exodus author Humphreys argues that while the translation of "the Red Sea" may be incorrect, the Sea of Reeds nevertheless refers to the Red Sea, concluding that "there can be little doubt that the Red Sea crossing was made possible by wind setdown at the head of the Gulf of Aqaba."....
Sean Scallon: Carter Conservatism
Source: American Conservative (4-6-09)
[Sean Scallon is an author and journalist living in Arkansaw, Wisconsin.]
Jimmy Carter�s �Crisis of Confidence� speech, delivered from the Oval Office on July 15, 1979, has long been a symbol of Democratic defeat�and defeatism. Republican politicians from presidents on down have used it to tar Democrats as the party of �malaise,� a word that Carter himself never uttered in the address.
Rarely has a speech so backfired. Yet what if the text, obscured by recriminations, turns out to be one of the most conservative presidential statements of the last 30 years?
It was delivered as the Carter presidency was beginning to crater, as the turmoil of the Iranian Revolution caused oil prices to rise, and gas shortages once again afflicted the nation as they had six years before during the Yom Kippur War. Anger over higher prices and long lines at the pumps threw the administration into disarray. Carter wanted to make another speech on the energy crisis, the fifth of his presidency. But his advisers thought it would be ignored, if not ridiculed. Only something bolder, broader, and different from any speech hitherto made by a president could transform the situation. As Pat Caddell, the president�s pollster, wrote in the memo that was the genesis of the speech:
This crisis is not your fault as President. It is the natural result of historical forces and events that have been in motion for 20 years. This crisis threatens the political and social fabric of our nation. Yet, this crisis also presents the greatest opportunity for you as President to become a great President on the order of a Lincoln, Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt. More interestingly, it presents you with the opportunity, so rare in American history, to reshape the structure, nature and purpose of the United States in fundamental ways which your predecessors could only dream.
From Caddell�s point of view, the crisis was not really about gas or energy or anything that could be solved by legislation. In his polling data, he saw a crisis of spirit. For the first time since the Depression, Americans were no longer confident in the future. This was especially so as the great expectations of a �better world� of the 1960s became the disillusionments of the 1970s. By the end of the decade, the U.S. was facing both rising inflation and unemployment, a government that seemed to be a dysfunctional cockpit of brawling special interests, a world situation that was deteriorating in the aftermath of Vietnam, and an apathetic populace. Caddell thought Americans would be receptive to a speech that, instead of appealing to mom, apple pie, and the flag, laid out the nation�s problems honestly and bluntly.
Such a speech could also catalyze the political transformation that Caddell had been looking for since the administration began, one that �devises a context that is neither traditionally liberal nor traditionally conservative, one that cuts across traditional ideology. �What we require is not stew, composed of bits and pieces of old policies, but a fundamentally a new ideology.�
Caddell�s vision was Lincolnian in breadth and scope. He wanted Carter to deliver his own Gettysburg Address. Many within the administration thought Caddell had gone mad and tried to keep his ideas from the president. But Carter�s thinking paralleled Caddell�s. The president believed that the Vietnam War, the gold crisis of 1971, and the oil shocks had so hurt the economy with high inflation that Americans had begun to lose the standard of living to which they had been accustomed since World War II, a quality of life they saw as their birthright as leaders of the free world. This had caused the alienation that Caddell�s polling picked up...
John Q. Barrett: How NOT to win an appointment to the Supreme Court
[Professor John Q. Barrett, St. John�s University School of Law.]
President Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose first four years in the White House brought no opportunity to appoint a Supreme Court Justice, made five appointments to the Court during his second term:
� in 1937, Senator Hugo L. Black (D.-AL);
� in 1938, Solicitor General Stanley F. Reed;
� in 1939, Harvard Law School Professor Felix Frankfurter;
� also in 1939, Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman William O. Douglas; and
� in 1940, Attorney General Frank Murphy.
Each of these Justices came to the Court from public prominence. Most came from the Roosevelt Administration itself. These appointees were well known to the President. Their selections involved no surprises or mysteries.
In contrast, the process by which an outsider, W.E. Lantz of West Virginia, came to White House attention in early 1941 for a Supreme Court appointment has been little studied or understood. I also know of no scholarship regarding the process by which the White House promptly informed the Department of Justice of Lantz�s candidacy, or on the process by which DOJ then made Lantz�s potential appointment known to the Supreme Court.
Luckily, these processes are documented in the following paper trail, which begins a few weeks after Justice James C. McReynolds�s abrupt resignation from the Supreme Court:
� On February 21, Mr. Lantz, apparently believing that he was responding to a White House inquiry, wrote by hand to President Roosevelt�s appointments secretary, Marvin H. McIntyre:
Philippi W-Va Route 1
Feb 21 � 1941
Mr. M. H McIntyre Secretary
I received your Letter of 13 and
can Say that I am ready
to take associate Justice
of Supreme Court will you
tell me by return mail
how Soon the President
will make appointment
as Mr. Reynolds [sic] has Resig
ned the Job. So if Mr.
Roosevelt can favor
me with the Appointment
I will do my best to
favor you and him on
every opportunity[.] how much
does the Justice Job pay per
yr. or month.
Your Truly. W.E. Lantz
� McIntyre, after reading Mr. Lantz�s letter, wrote �Justice� (meaning the Department of Justice) across the top of the page and sent it to Attorney General Robert H. Jackson. On March 8th, Jackson dictated this letter and then sent it, along with a photocopy and a typed transcription of the Lantz letter, to Justice Frankfurter at the Supreme Court:
Dear Felix:
I think you should know how casually a Justice of the Supreme Court is created, and of what material.
Sincerely,
/s/ Bob
� When Justice Frankfurter received Jackson�s letter, he penned this note on the bottom of the page and sent it back to the Attorney General:
Dear Bob-
I now know what
is meant by
�meet me at
Philippi.�
But � or and �
W.E. Lantz ought to
make an interesting
colleague!
Always yrs FF
(These letters are real�nothing here is a belated April Fool�s joke, although some amusement obviously was had by McIntyre, Jackson and Frankfurter.)
For Mr. Lantz, alas, Supreme Court appointment never came. In June, President Roosevelt nominated Senator James F. Byrnes (D.-SC) to succeed Justice McReynolds (on the same day that the President also nominated Justice Harlan Fiske Stone to succeed retiring Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes and Attorney General Jackson to succeed Stone as Associate Justice). When Byrnes resigned from the Court a year later to take a White House position, FDR nominated Judge Wiley B. Rutledge to succeed Justice Byrnes. Justice Rutledge became FDR�s ninth and final appointee to the Supreme Court.
For any who think to follow Mr. Lantz�s example by writing to the White House seeking a Supreme Court appointment, I recommend better punctuation, less concern about salary, and the judgment not to offer to try to �favor� your appointing President.
Christopher Hitchens: Telling the Truth About the Armenian Genocide
Source: Slate (4-6-09)
[Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair and the Roger S. Mertz media fellow at the Hoover Institution in Stanford, California. ]
Even before President Barack Obama set off on his visit to Turkey this week, there were the usual voices urging him to dilute the principled position that he has so far taken on the Armenian genocide. April is the month in which the Armenian diaspora commemorates the bloody initiation, in 1915, of the Ottoman Empire's campaign to erase its Armenian population. The marking of the occasion takes two forms: Armenian Remembrance Day, on April 24, and the annual attempt to persuade Congress to name that day as one that abandons weasel wording and officially calls the episode by its right name, which is the word I used above.
Genocide had not been coined in 1915, but the U.S. ambassador in Constantinople, Henry Morgenthau, employed a term that was in some ways more graphic. In his urgent reports to the State Department, conveying on-the-spot dispatches from his consuls, especially in the provinces of Van and Harput, he described the systematic slaughter of the Armenians as "race murder." A vast archive of evidence exists to support this claim. But every year, the deniers and euphemists set to work again, and there are usually enough military-industrial votes to tip the scale in favor of our Turkish client. (Of late, Turkey's opportunist military alliance with Israel has also been good for a few shame-faced Jewish votes as well.)
President Obama comes to this issue with an unusually clear and unambivalent record. In 2006, for example, the U.S. ambassador to Armenia, John Evans, was recalled for employing the word genocide. Then-Sen. Obama wrote a letter of complaint to then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, deploring the State Department's cowardice and roundly stating that the occurrence of the Armenian genocide in 1915 "is not an allegation, a personal opinion, or a point of view, but rather a widely documented fact supported by an overwhelming body of historical evidence." On the campaign trail last year, he amplified this position, saying that "America deserves a leader who speaks truthfully about the Armenian genocide and responds forcefully to all genocides. I intend to be that president."
For any who might entertain doubt on this score, I would recommend two recent books of exceptional interest and scholarship that both add a good deal of depth and texture to this drama. The first is Armenian Golgotha: A Memoir of the Armenian Genocide, by Grigoris Balakian, and the second is Rebel Land: Travels Among Turkey's Forgotten Peoples, a contemporary account by Christopher de Bellaigue. In addition, we have just learned of shattering corroborative evidence from within the archives of the Turkish state. The Ottoman politician who began the campaign of deportation and extermination, Talat Pasha, left enormous documentation behind him. His family has now given the papers to a Turkish author named Murat Bardakci, who has published a book with the somewhat dry title The Remaining Documents of Talat Pasha. One of these "remaining documents" is a cold estimate that during the years 1915 and 1916 alone, a total of 972,000 Armenians simply vanished from the officially kept records of population. (See Sabrina Tavernise's report in the New York Times of March 8, 2009.)...
Gwynne Dyer: NATO at 60 faces growing pains that could threaten its survival
Source: Japan Times (4-5-09)
[Gwynne Dyer is a London-based journalist.]
The questions that nobody will ask out loud about the North Atlantic Treaty Organization: How much is enough?
How many new members can NATO afford to take on? If Georgia had already been a member last August, would NATO have gone to war with Russia in its defense? And how far beyond Europe should it try to operate?
When U.S. President Barack Obama asks NATO countries to send more troops to Afghanistan, few member nations will comply, but nobody will ask what a "North Atlantic" alliance is doing in the middle of an Afghan civil war.
Well, it is a party, after all, and nobody wants to spoil it. NATO marked its 60th anniversary Saturday in Strasbourg and Kehl, and that really is something to celebrate: The organization's survival for 20 years after the disappearance of the threat that justified its formation defies most historical precedents. It will probably be around for another 20, too, but quite soon it will have to rethink the heedless expansion of both membership and commitments that have characterized the last 20.
History offers few other examples of alliances that outlived the conflict that gave them birth, but NATO has added 10 new members since the collapse of the Soviet Union and has expanded its area of operations outside the North Atlantic region for the first time. Two more countries, Croatia and Albania, were welcomed into the alliance April 1, for a total of 28, and a further three (Macedonia, Ukraine and Georgia) have already been told that they will eventually be allowed to join.
Under President Nicolas Sarkozy, France is at last rejoining the NATO integrated military command structure that it left under Charles de Gaulle in 1966. The alliance accounts for 70 percent of the world's military spending, and towers above all potential rivals. This is a remarkably successful organization by any standard, and yet it is also remarkably uncertain about its role and its future.
NATO was never just a traditional alliance such as the Triple Entente of the early 20th century, which was basically a diplomatic agreement despite its success militarily. Members of the alliance didn't train together in peacetime; there was no effort to standardize equipment or coordinate weapons purchases; and there wasn't even much detailed planning for strategic cooperation in the event of war.
By contrast, NATO soon began to evolve an integrated command structure and a large bureaucratic infrastructure. When the end of the Soviet threat in 1989-90 removed the original motive for its existence, it automatically began searching for alternative justifications for its existing structures...
Christian Caryl: Think Again ... Japan's Lost Decade
Source: Foreign Policy (4-6-09)
[Christian Caryl is a Newsweek contributing editor and correspondent at large.]
"Japan's Economy Collapsed in the 1990s."
Not exactly. Decades of extraordinarily high growth in postwar Japan culminated in a huge asset price bubble that reached its peak in 1989. When the bubble finally popped in 1990, wiping out billions of dollars in accumulated wealth, the country's growth rates turned anemic. Between 1990 and 2003 Japan dipped into and out of recession. Despite these troubles, though, Japanese GDP in the 1990s ultimately continued to grow at an average of about 1.5 percent per year, measured in real terms. That translates to a 10 percent increase in the size of the economy over the course of the decade, well lower than the much more robust rates of growth in many other industrialized economies during the same period, but hardly a Great Depression. What's more, unemployment never rose over 5.5 percent -- a rate that would be considered quite an achievement in the United States or Western Europe.
The Japanese do refer to the 1990s as the "Lost Decade," but the label is a bit misleading. Productivity did slide, though not dramatically. If anything was lost in the course of those years, it was the sense of pride and exaggerated confidence that marked the previous era of frenetic growth. Japan lost belief in its own ability to create economic miracles. Yet its economy remained remarkably strong. Japanese automobile companies remained some of the world's most profitable. Japanese consumer electronics manufacturers and machine tool producers continued to post good results despite the rise of low-cost rivals elsewhere in Asia.
"The Government Made It Worse by Spending Too Much."
No. Government policy did exacerbate the slowdown, but the picture is much more complicated. Bureaucrats and politicians certainly spent too much on the wrong sorts of things, especially bridge-to-nowhere-style construction projects with limited usefulness. But economists have concluded that large chunks of the spending -- particularly on useful infrastructure, healthcare, and education -- brought substantial benefits. Adam Posen, deputy director of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, has argued that Japan's 1995 stimulus package actually spurred growth the following year. When the government tightened fiscal policy again soon afterward, growth tailed off again. The lesson: Spend, but spend intelligently.
Many students of the period point to other crippling errors. The Bank of Japan maintained high interest rates for too long after the slowdown became apparent. At one point an overly optimistic government raised taxes prematurely, which certainly prolonged the slump.
Policymakers hobbled by a dysfunctional political system dawdled for years when it came to cleaning up "zombie" companies (bankrupt in all but name) and getting financial institutions to dispose of toxic assets. That failure to take decisive action may have shaved points off Japan's overall growth rates and ended up leaving the country saddled with enormous public debt (peaking at 175 percent of GDP by one recent measure). Yet, a push to force banks to shed their nonperforming loans under the government of Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi starting in 2001 had notably positive effects on growth...
Michael Slackman: For Egypt, Promise of 1979 Peace Still Unfulfilled
Source: NYT (4-4-09)
[Michael Slackman is New York Times correspondent.]
In the past week, Egypt marked the historic 30-year anniversary of its peace treaty with Israel without any public celebration and only the barest public mention.
It is not surprising, really, that there was no cheering here. The timing could hardly have been worse, with memories still fresh of the Israeli offensive in Gaza.
But mention of the anniversary also served as a reminder of promises unfulfilled. Egyptians were told that the treaty would lead to a comprehensive peace, and it did not. They were told that it would allow the government to focus on political, social and economic development, instead of war. But they still live in an authoritarian state, defined for many by poverty.
Egyptians were told that the treaty would give them a voice to advocate for the Palestinians. But few see it as having turned out that way.
�Today Egypt is not influential in anything,� said Osama Anwar Okasha, a leading Egyptian television writer. �It is a third-class country in this region. Egypt was the leading country and it gave up this leading role. Now it is like a postman, delivering messages.�
The public mood is dark all around right now, and the sentiment points to the treaty as the start of Egypt�s decline and diplomatic impotence.
�Of course the treaty is not the cause of all of this, but it was the initial seed,� said Fahmy Howeidy, a writer and political analyst in Cairo.
The peace treaty between Israel and Egypt is a bedrock of the Middle East peace process, positioning Egypt as a key player in every international diplomatic effort to resolve the Palestinian conflict. It is a pillar of Egypt�s foreign policy, as well, and an institutional given among Egypt�s governing class. President Hosni Mubarak has demonstrated that he is committed to the treaty, and to the diplomatic process and political system that built and supports the treaty.
�The government has been criticized by Arabs and so on during the Gaza attack but it stood its ground and did not waver because of these attacks against the peace treaty,� said Abdel Raouf El Reedy, chairman of the Egyptian Council for Foreign Affairs and a former ambassador to the United States. �When it comes to the government and the establishment there is a very strong commitment to the peace treaty.�
The government�s supporters often respond to the call for abrogating the treaty with one question: What then? Not only would Egypt lose about $1.4 billion a year in aid, but, they argue, it would have less leverage, less credibility with the West and a greater likelihood of being dragged into a war, once again.
But Mr. Mubarak finds himself stuck in a recurring loop of history, playing the same defensive arguments over and over, struggling to convince his citizens and his neighbors that the treaty is essential to stability and peace...
Michael Crowley: Will Obama renege on his campaign promise to recognize the Armenian genocide?
Source: New Republic (4-15-09)
... Obama is the first American president elected after explicitly promising to invoke the dreaded G-word. And, thus, a trip designed to defuse tension between the United States and the Muslim world will have the small matter of genocide culpability hanging over it like a foul odor.
As a candidate, Obama was perfectly clear. "The facts are undeniable," he said in a January 2008 statement. He called the massacre not an allegation or matter of opinion--many Turks maintain that the killing resulted from anarchy accompanying the Ottoman Empire's collapse--but a clear exercise in race-based killing: "As president," he vowed, "I will recognize the Armenian genocide." Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton, who said America's "morality" and "credibility" demanded such a statement, agreed. And why not? Last year, all were presidential candidates looking for easy ways to sound bold and noble, not to mention courting Armenian-American votes and money.
But, now that Obama is in the Oval Office, the world may seem rather more complex than it did on the campaign trail. The smell of capitulation is in the air. "At this moment, our focus is on how, moving forward, the United States can help Armenia and Turkey work together to come to terms with the past," a National Security Council spokesman told the Los Angeles Times last week. When a top Turkish official emerged from a recent meeting with National Security Advisor Jim Jones, he sounded sanguine on the question, declining to say whether Obama was standing by his campaign promise, yet adding cheerily that he and Jones "went through all these issues in a very friendly and cooperative manner."
Obama has also been joined by a new cadre of influential advisers. Take his chief of staff. When Congress considered a genocide resolution in late 2007, then-Representative Rahm Emanuel opposed it. The new State Department official with purview over Turkey, Assistant Secretary for European and Eurasian Affairs Phillip Gordon, has warned about a possible anti-American backlash in Turkey resulting from recognition, and, in 2006, Gordon wrote that "[u]ltimately, historians, not governments, should be the ones to decide these sensitive issues." Jones has close ties to the Turkish military from his time as Supreme Allied Commander in Europe. And Obama's defense secretary, Robert Gates, strongly opposed the 2007 resolution, which he feared could result in Turkey cutting off supply lines the United States relies on to support its troops in Iraq....
The Armenian-Americans who supported Obama in November (John McCain never endorsed genocide recognition) expect him to use the occasion to say the magic word.
But sources on Capitol Hill and those familiar with Ankara's thinking both predict Obama will punt on the issue. "I fully expect him to fold," laments one human rights activist who wishes otherwise. "I would be shocked if he didn't." But the real shock should be in seeing Obama break such a clear promise. Reasonable people can differ on whether recognizing the genocide is worth the possible consequences. It is not debatable, however, that Obama made a promise, or that he ran as a man of integrity and principle. ...
Sean L. Malloy: Four Days in May ... Henry L. Stimson and the Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb
Source: Asia Pacific Journal (4-4-09)
[Sean L. Malloy is an assistant professor of history at the University of California, Merced and the author of Atomic Tragedy: Henry L. Stimson and the Decision to Use the Bomb Against Japan. This is a revised and expanded version of a chapter of Atomic Tragedy.
Reprinted material from �The Ordeal of Henry L. Stimson,� in Atomic Tragedy: Henry L. Stimson and the Decision to Use the Bomb against Japan,� by Sean L. Malloy. Copyright � 2008 by Cornell University. Used by permission of the publisher, Cornell University Press.]
Among the myriad controversies surrounding the American use of nuclear weapons against Japanese cities in August 1945 is the seemingly simple question of exactly when President Harry S. Truman decided to use the bomb. The closest thing to a presidential directive regarding use was an order dispatched on July 25, 1945 from Acting Army Chief of Staff Thomas T. Handy to General Carl A. Spaatz, commander of the United States Army Strategy Air Forces. The directive, personally approved by Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson, authorized the delivery of the �first special bomb as soon as weather will permit visual bombing after about 3 August 1945. . .� The bomb was to be used on one of four target cities (a list that included Niigata and Kokura as well as Hiroshima and Nagasaki) and no further orders were required for the use of additional bombs, which were to be �delivered on the above targets as soon as made ready by the project staff.� [1] But while this directive was almost certainly discussed with the president before its approval, Truman never signed this or any other order with respect to the use of the atomic bomb against Japan. More significantly, the order was itself the product of an extended series of discussions and decisions that in some cases went back months or even years prior to the summer of 1945. While significant as a link in the chain of operations that culminated in the atomic bombings of August 6 and 9, historians must look beyond the July 25 directive to understand exactly when and how Truman committed to the use the bomb.
Piecing together when (and why) American leaders decided to use the bomb requires us to abandon the simplistic notion that Truman confronted a binary choice between use and non-use. There is no evidence that any high-level American authorities ever considered the question of whether to use the atomic bomb. The �A-bomb-or-invasion� binary that has so enraptured some historians was simply not a question that Truman (or Roosevelt for that matter) ever directly addressed. What American leaders did discuss extensively, and sometimes heatedly, were the questions associated with how, where and when to use the bomb. Should it be used against Germany or Japan? What targets within those countries might be appropriate for such a weapon? Should there be a warning or demonstration first? How might the bomb be integrated into American diplomacy with respect to both allies and enemies? What implications might its use have for the postwar period? Fully addressing this complicated series of choices is beyond the scope of this essay. Instead, I draw here from my larger work on Stimson and the A-bomb decision to explore two important questions that shaped the context of use: the integration of the bomb into a larger diplomatic strategy aimed at securing Japanese surrender and the choice of targets within Japan. Key decisions on both of these questions were made over a period of four days in Washington from May 28-31, 1945. In both cases, Secretary of War Stimson was an important (but by no means all-determining) figure.
Born in 1867, only two years after the end of the American Civil War, Stimson had devoted much of his life to public service. A respected Republican statesman, he had a reputation for bipartisan service to his country. Prior to serving as secretary of war to Roosevelt and then Truman from 1940-1945, he had worked under Herbert Hoover as secretary of state and had been a presidential emissary to Nicaragua and governor general of the Philippines under Calvin Coolidge. His stint in the War Department from 1940-1945 was his second, having previously served as secretary of war under William Howard Taft. But while he had a long association with the military (one that included service as a fifty-year-old volunteer in the American Expeditionary Force during World War I), Stimson hated war. His fundamental conservatism, religious convictions, strong commitment to the rule of law (instilled by his mentor, the famous American lawyer and international jurist Elihu Root), and the sobering experience of World War I, led him to devote much of his career to preventing or at least containing the violence unleashed by war. He was particularly anxious to avoid violence against civilians. Thus while he strongly supported American entry into World War II as necessary to check the evil of a lawless Nazi regime, he simultaneously worried that the indiscriminate use of force in pursuit of victory would sow seeds of bitterness and hatred, undermining the foundations of any peace that followed. [2]
It was in the context of this overlapping set of military, diplomatic, and moral concerns that Stimson confronted the atomic bomb in the wake of the Nazi defeat in May 1945. Having been absorbed in the massive task of organizing victory in Europe, it was not until May 28, 1945, upon returning to Washington following a ten-day working vacation at his Long Island estate, that he felt prepared to tackle the issue that would dominate the remainder of his tenure in office. �I have made up my mind,� Stimson confided to his diary, �to make [the atomic bomb] my primary occupation for these next few months, relieving myself so far as possible from all routine matters in the Department.�[3]
Decoupling the Diplomatic Track with Japan
The first of the overlapping A-bomb-related questions that Stimson confronted following his return to Washington on May 28 involved Japan. Prior to 1945, discussions about the diplomatic implications of nuclear fission had focused almost exclusively on the Soviet Union and Great Britain. Indeed, for most of the war, Stimson had paid comparatively little attention to the Pacific theater. In February 1945, following a meeting with Marshall on �the coming campaign against Japan,� Stimson conceded that �I have never studied it or thought over it in the way that I had over the war in Europe.�[4] But starting in early 1945 and accelerating with the end of the war in Europe, Stimson and other American policymakers faced a decision on how to integrate the atomic bomb into their diplomatic and military calculations regarding Japan.[5]
After the war, Stimson and other defenders of the A-bomb decision insisted that they had faced a stark choice between a costly invasion of the Japanese home islands and the use of the bomb against Japanese cities.[6] In spring 1945, however, it was not certain that either an invasion or atomic bombs would be necessary to compel surrender. The Imperial Japanese Navy had virtually ceased to exist following the Battle of Leyte Gulf in October 1944. American submarines were strangling and isolating Japan�s home islands while Army Air Forces bombers gradually reduced its cities to ashes. Japan�s increasingly precipitous military decline did not necessarily mean that surrender was imminent. The brutal battle for Okinawa (the last stepping-stone on the path to the home islands) from April to Japan�s defeat on June 23, 1945, proved that Japanese resistance could still be quite fierce. But even as the fighting on that island raged, some in the Truman administration were pondering a combination of threats and promises that might hasten Japanese surrender and achieve vital American war aims through diplomatic means.
The stated policy of the Truman administration was that the United States would accept nothing less than Japan�s total and unconditional surrender. Truman had inherited this formula from Roosevelt, who had publicly proclaimed Allied war aims to include �an unconditional surrender by Germany, Italy and Japan� following a meeting with Churchill at Casablanca in January 1943.[7] In practice, however, Roosevelt�s own record on unconditional surrender was mixed. While he had insisted on applying that formula to Nazi Germany, Italy had been allowed to negotiate terms in September 1943 that fell short of unconditional surrender. The question in spring 1945 was whether similar flexibility ought to be granted to Japan if doing so might expedite the end of the war and save American and Allied lives.
During a review of American military strategy in the Pacific on April 25, 1945, the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) recommended that ��unconditional surrender� should be defined in terms understandable to the Japanese, who must be convinced that destruction or national suicide is not implied.�[8] Several weeks later, Stimson received a �rather dramatic and radical� memorandum from his former boss, ex-president Herbert Hoover, warning that an invasion of Japan would be disastrous and suggesting that the United States should instead offer a clear set of surrender terms. Hoover's memorandum echoed ongoing discussions within the Army General Staff and the War Department's Operations Division (OPD) on clarifying or perhaps abandoning unconditional surrender. By the end of May, civilian leaders in both the War and State Departments, including Undersecretary of State Joseph Grew and Stimson deputy John J. McCloy, had determined to bring this question to the highest levels of the U.S. government.[9]
When Stimson arrived back in Washington on May 28, McCloy presented him with a memorandum urging a reconsideration of the policy of unconditional surrender. McCloy asserted that �Japan is struggling to find a way out of the horrible mess she has got herself into� and urged that the United States avoid seeking to impose a �Carthaginian� peace. On the subject of unconditional surrender, McCloy conveyed his belief that the United States could likely �accomplish everything we want to accomplish in regard to Japan without the use of that term.� Failure to clarify and perhaps soften American terms might �hold them off to the point where we go on digging them out of caves at considerable cost to ourselves when our important objectives can be won without this attrition.�[10]
On the same day, Grew (then acting as secretary of state while Edward Stettinius was attending the San Francisco Conference) suggested an even more specific change in U.S. policy. In a meeting with Truman, Grew, the former Ambassador to Japan, advised that the �greatest obstacle to unconditional surrender by the Japanese is their belief that this would entail the destruction or permanent removal of the Emperor and the institution of the Throne.� Grew understood that the institution of the emperor was the one unifying element of the Japanese political and military structure, �without which surrender will be highly unlikely.�[11] Suggesting that a recent series of devastating attacks on Tokyo inflicted by American bombers offered a fortuitous moment to issue such a clarification, Grew pleaded for a statement guaranteeing the postwar status of the emperor. According to Grew's later account of the meeting, the president indicated that �his own thoughts had been following the same line� but asked the acting secretary to clear the proposal with Stimson, Army Chief of Staff Marshall, and Secretary of the Navy James V. Forrestal.[12] The result was an informal conference of the president's chief military and diplomatic advisers in Stimson's Pentagon office on May 29, 1945.
Stimson, motivated by a desire to end the war quickly and entirely uninterested in dictating the form of the postwar Japanese government, was sympathetic to calls for modifying American surrender terms. From the outset of American participation in the conflict, he had sought to balance the goal of �complete victory� with that of shortening the war and thus reducing both the loss of life and the burden of reconstruction that would face the victorious Allies.[13] And though he had insisted on the importance of Germany's unconditional surrender, the secretary of war eagerly embraced compromises far short of that formula when it came to Hitler's partners and vassals.
The first example of Stimson's flexibility on surrender terms came early in the war, prior to the public formulation of the unconditional surrender doctrine. During the course of the November 1942 landings in North Africa, Stimson strongly supported the deal struck by General Dwight D. Eisenhower with Admiral Jean Francois Darlan, commander-in-chief of the Vichy military forces. The so-called Darlan deal, under which the former Vichy commander was granted political authority over French North Africa in exchange for an agreement not to oppose the American landings, produced howls of outrage in the United States and Great Britain. To Stimson, however, the Darlan deal accurately reflected the priorities of the Allied war effort. Germany, not Vichy France, was the main enemy, and continental Europe, not North Africa, was the important theater of operations.[14] The secretary of war supported the Darlan deal as a way to save American lives and hasten the end of the war.
Even after Roosevelt publicly proclaimed the unconditional surrender formula, the secretary of war was still eager to seek compromise outside the special case of Nazi Germany if it might shorten the war. Stimson repeatedly warned Roosevelt regarding what he laconically referred to as the danger of �too much unconditional surrender on Italy.� That nation posed little military threat by itself, and �the people of the United States,� Stimson observed, were not �interested the least little bit in taking a great part in the politics of Italy.� During the secret negotiations between American representatives and Italian Marshall Pietro Badoglio, the secretary of war repeatedly voiced support for a deal that allowed Italy a conditional surrender.[15]
Stimson�s willingness to compromise with Italy and Vichy France reflected his judgment that the pursuit of victory needed to be tempered with an appreciation of the dangers of prolonged warfare to the fragile foundations of what he termed �industrial civilization� around the world. The secretary of war approached the problem of Japan in general and the emperor in particular with the same calculation in mind. Following any surrender, the United States would have to disarm Japan�s military and seize many of its former bases in the Pacific in order to guard against any future acts of aggression. Beyond those basic requirements, he saw no need to engage in the sort of extensive reconstruction and rehabilitation that the Allies were implementing in occupied Germany. Stimson had never at any point in his career believed that the elimination of the emperor or the emperor system was necessary to check Japanese militarism. In the dying days of the war in the Pacific, he explicitly opposed any attempts to remake �the government of [Japan] as a whole in any such manner as we are committed in Germany. I am afraid we would make a hash of it if we tried.�[16]
At the meeting on May 29 including Marshall, Forrestal, Grew, and State Department Far East expert Eugene Dooman, Stimson �was inclined to agree with giving the Japanese a modification of the unconditional surrender formula without the use of those words.� He indicated, however, that �the timing was wrong and this was not the time to do it,� a sentiment with which Marshall voiced agreement.[17] Stimson and Marshall's opposition carried the day, and the meeting adjourned without any further action taken on the question of surrender terms for Japan. This delay turned out to be highly significant in shaping the context of the bomb�s use. Deliberations on surrender terms continued sporadically in the aftermath of this meeting, but by tabling the issue until an unspecified later date, Stimson and Marshall had decoupled the diplomatic track from discussion about the use of the atomic bomb at a crucial moment. In May-June 1945, American leaders made important decisions about both the use of the bomb and the invasion of the Japanese home islands without ever pausing to consider their minimum acceptable definition of victory.
Why did the secretary of war advise a delay in considering a modification of American surrender terms in May 1945? It was not any newfound commitment to the principle of unconditional surrender. The day after the May 29 meeting, Stimson wrote to Marshall and explicitly endorsed McCloy's suggestion that the United States should back away from insisting on an unconditional Japanese surrender.[18] In the weeks that followed, Stimson explicitly spoke in favor of allowing the Japanese to retain the emperor. Why, then, did he counsel delay at the crucial meeting on May 29?
Grew's account of the reasoning reason behind this delay was cryptic, recording simply that �for certain military reasons, not divulged, it was considered inadvisable for the President to make a statement just now.�[19] Stimson later claimed that he favored a delay because �we were having considerable trouble with the Japanese in the land campaign on Okinawa and some of us were afraid that any public concession at that time might have been taken as an indication of weakness.�[20] But none of the contemporary accounts of the May 29 meeting, including Stimson�s diary, mention the fighting on Okinawa as a reason for delaying a restatement of American terms. Instead we have a vague reference (in Grew�s diary) to �certain military reasons, not divulged.�[21] There was nothing secretive about the ongoing fighting on Okinawa and hence no reason for either Stimson or Marshall to offer such an elliptical response if this had been their primary concern. Moreover, even if such fears had made Stimson and Marshall hesitate to issue an immediate public statement on the emperor, there was no reason not to reach an internal consensus on the issue, agreeing on a revised set of terms that Truman could present when the time and tide of battle appeared fortuitous.
After the war, Grew and several of his former State Department colleagues were still frustrated and puzzled by the outcome of the May 29 meeting on surrender terms. Dooman privately blasted Stimson's postwar explanations for the delay, characterizing them as �disingenuous� and �sinister.�[22] After a discussion with Grew in 1947, former State Department official William R. Castle (who had worked under Stimson in the Hoover administration) confided his own suspicions: �I wonder whether Stimson, with Marshall, wanted the [the] war to continue long enough to give them a chance to try out the atom bomb on Japanese cities. The more I think of that performance the more I feel that it was indefensible as well as brutal.�[23] Hoover, without directly commenting on Stimson�s role in the process, privately confided that �[t]he use of the Atomic bomb, with its indiscriminate killing of women and children, revolts my soul.� But while neither Grew, Castle, nor Hoover had any way of knowing it, Stimson was, in fact, far from eager to use the bomb and ultimately made a last-ditch effort behind the scenes to secure surrender without the use of this terrible new weapon.[24]
The real explanation for Stimson�s seemingly curious performance on May 29 was his continuing uncertainty over how, exactly, to integrate the atomic bomb into American diplomacy. �It was an awkward meeting,� the secretary of war confided in his diary, �because there were people present in the presence of whom I could not discuss the real feature which would govern the whole situation, namely S-1 [the atomic bomb].�[25] Preoccupied with a wide range of issues relating to the use of the bomb and the shape of the postwar world, Stimson assumed that a formal decision on clarifying and perhaps softening surrender terms could wait until the bomb was closer to readiness. Once the bomb was tested and ready for use, he would presumably have a better idea of how to integrate this new weapon with diplomatic approaches to Japan.
According to McCloy, the secretary understood that the May 29 decision to delay a restatement of American terms �only postponed consideration of the matter for a time . . . for we shall have to consider it again preparatory to the employment of S-1.�[26] What Stimson did not appreciate was how difficult it would be to revisit the diplomatic track with Japan after the technical and military decisions about how to use the bomb were made in the days that followed the May 29 meeting. Ultimately, delay would contribute to a tragedy that the secretary of war would later regret.
�The Targets Suggested . . . Have Been Disapproved�
Having decided to temporarily table consideration of surrender terms on May 29, Stimson and Marshall dismissed the rest of the group while they stayed behind (with McCloy taking notes) to discuss more practical matters related to the use of the bomb. In considering �Japan and what we should do in regard to S-1 and the application of it,� Stimson and Marshall returned to a set of questions about use of the bomb that they had deferred in the early years of the American nuclear project. One of the subjects they discussed that afternoon was nuclear targeting and the mass killing of Japanese civilians.[27]
Stimson was acutely sensitive to the dangers of indiscriminate force in the pursuit of victory and consistently objected to the intentional killing of civilians. With respect to the atomic bomb, however, Stimson had joined Roosevelt in embracing its wartime development while deferring potential difficult questions about its use (including the question of targets) until the project was closer to fruition.[28] As a result, discussions of nuclear targeting prior to May 1945 had been almost entirely confined to the scientists and engineers at Los Alamos in concert with a handful of lower-level AAF officers. Driven by technical concerns, work at Los Alamos had gradually coalesced around a weapon optimized for use against cities and civilians. By December 1944, the only question so far as Los Alamos Ordnance Division chief William Parsons was concerned was which Japanese city would be destroyed first.[29] Beginning in late January 1945, AAF and Los Alamos personnel met with increasing frequency to discuss operational issues relating to the use of the atomic bomb, including the question of targeting. These meetings culminated in April with the formation of a group known as the Target Committee that included representatives from both Los Alamos and the AAF.[30]
The first Target Committee meeting on April 27, 1945, officially ratified the strategy of city targeting that had evolved from the work of Los Alamos and the Ordnance Division. The committee decided that in picking a target they should focus on �large urban areas of not less than 3 miles in diameter existing in the larger populated areas.�[31] At a second series of meetings on May 10-11 in Oppenheimer's Los Alamos office, the Target Committee formally rejected the idea of attacking an isolated military target, concluding that �any small and strictly military objective should be located in a much larger area subject to blast damage in order to avoid undue risks of the weapon being lost due to bad placing of the bomb.�[32] Operating under the same assumptions that had guided the research and development of the weapon as at Los Alamos, the AAF officers involved in selecting A-bomb targets understood the bomb primarily as a large blast weapon.[33] This logic, along with concerns over the ability of AAF planes to accurately deliver the weapon, led the committee to almost exactly reprise Parsons's earlier recommendations. The bomb would be used in a large urban area where it would be sure to destroy large numbers of lightly constructed buildings and in the process kill many Japanese civilians.
Concerns about maximizing the bomb's blast effects also dictated another recommendation that emerged from the Target Committee: that it should be used against a relatively undamaged city. The first meeting of the Target Committee rated Tokyo low on the target list because it was �now practically all bombed and burned out.�[34] This inconvenient fact meant that Tokyo and other previously attacked Japanese cities lacked the abundance of light, undamaged residential and industrial structures that were the ideal targets for the bomb�s blast effects. Unconcerned or uninterested in effects produced by fire and radiation, the Target Committee decided that using the bomb against either a military target or an already damaged Japanese city would waste the bomb�s blast effects and produce disappointing results.
The third and final meeting of the Target Committee on May 28, 1945, culminated in the selection of Kyoto, Hiroshima, and Niigata as targets for the atomic bomb. All three cities harbored important Japanese war industries. However, in all these cities the most significant military-industrial targets were located on the fringes of the larger urban area. Targeting these war plants risked the possibility that an inaccurate delivery might result in the bomb�s exploding entirely outside the city. Moreover, even an accurate attack on one of these factories would fail to make use of the full power of the bomb as there were fewer light structures susceptible to blast on the urban fringes than in the city center. The meeting concluded with the Target Committee members� agreeing to a set of recommendations that explicitly endorsed targeting densely populated urban areas at the expense of any effort to hit military-industrial targets:
"[The Target Committee agreed] not to specify aiming points, this is to be left to later determination at base when weather conditions are known.
to neglect location of industrial areas as pin point target, since on these three targets [Kyoto, Hiroshima, and Niigata] such areas are small, spread on fringes of cites and quite dispersed.
to endeavor to place the first gadget in center of selected city; that is, not to allow for later 1 or 2 gadgets for complete destruction."[35]
This was a recommendation to use the bomb as a weapon for the obliteration of cities and the mass killing of civilians. And while targeting the atomic bombs in the center of Kyoto, Hiroshima, and Niigata ensured that some smaller, scattered military-industrial targets would be destroyed, it also virtually guaranteed that the most significant war industries associated with those three cities would be spared any significant damage.
Stimson and Marshall were unaware of the Target Committee's recommendations when they discussed the bomb in the secretary of war�s office on May 29. Unlike the approach of Parsons and the Target Committee, Stimson�s thinking about the bomb went well beyond technical efficiency. Civilian casualties were a regrettable but inevitable part of modern warfare. But to deliberately target civilians for mass killing not only was immoral but, by harming the international reputation of the United States, might undermine American leadership in the postwar world. Declaring that the �reputation of the United States for fair play and humanitarianism is the world�s biggest asset for peace in the coming decades,� Stimson repeatedly stressed that he was �anxious to hold our Air Force, so far as possible, to the `precision' bombing which it has done so well in Europe.� In a discussion with Truman on May 16, 1945, he explicitly linked his concerns over strategic bombing to the use of the atomic bomb, suggesting that �the same rules of sparing the civilian population should be applied as far as possible to the use of any new weapons.�[36]
In a telephone conversation with McCloy on May 21, Stimson and his assistant secretary discussed the question of the �big bomb� and �when it should be employed and how� with specific reference to �the moral position of the United States and its responsibilities.� Recounting this conversation, McCloy confided to his diary �the moral position of the U.S. weighs greatly upon [Stimson]� with respect to the use of the bomb.[37] Reflecting the concerns of the secretary of war, an outline for a presidential statement prepared by Stimson�s aides on May 25 and intended for release after the use of the bomb stressed that the United States would �[c]hoose a military target like a naval base if possible so that wholesale killing of civilians will be on the heads of the Japanese who refused to surrender at our ultimatum.�[38]
Concerns over the targeting of civilians surfaced again during the discussion between Marshall and Stimson on May 29. �The Secretary,� McCloy noted in a memorandum summarizing the discussion, �referred to the burning of Tokyo and the possible ways and means of employing the larger bombs.�[39] In the context of Stimson�s concerns about indiscriminate incendiary attacks against Tokyo, expressed both before and immediately after the May 29 meeting, this statement suggests that Stimson was troubled by the idea of using the atomic bomb against a primarily civilian target.[40] In response to Stimson�s comments, Marshall offered an explicit argument against using the atomic bomb against civilians:
"General Marshall said he thought these weapons might first be used against straight military objectives such as a large naval installation and then if no complete result was derived from the effect of that, he thought we ought to designate a number of large manufacturing areas from which the people would be warned to leave -- telling the Japanese that we intend to destroy such centers. . . . Every effort should be made to keep our record of warning clear. We must offset by such warning methods the opprobrium which might follow from an ill considered employment of such force."[41]
Marshall�s statement, with its emphasis on limiting the conduct of war against civilians and its attention to the international reputation of the United States, mirrored Stimson's long-held concerns on this subject. These intertwined moral and practical concerns sharply diverged from the recommendation of the Target Committee, with its emphasis on the total destruction of Japanese urban areas. The next day, these divergent approaches to nuclear targeting collided in the secretary of war's Pentagon office.
At 9:20 a.m. on May 30, Harvey Bundy placed a call to General Leslie Groves to inform him that the secretary wanted to see him �right away.�[42] When the general arrived at the Pentagon, he found that Stimson was intent on discussing the question of nuclear targeting. Groves had planned to submit the recommendations of the Target Committee directly to the army chief of staff at a later date and attempted to deflect Stimson's questions by declaring that �I would rather not show [the report] to him without having first discussed it with General Marshall.�[43] Stimson, according to Groves�s later account, reacted sharply to this attempted diversion: �Mr. Stimson said: �This is one time I'm going to be the final deciding authority. Nobody's going to tell me what to do on this. On this matter I am the kingpin and you might just as well get that report over here.��[44] While Stimson waited for Groves's staff to fetch the Target Committee's recommendations from his office across the Potomac, the secretary summoned Marshall to join them in a discussion of nuclear targeting.
Stimson's diary is elliptical in its description of the events of that morning, recording simply that �[w]e talked over the subject very thoroughly of how we should use this implement in respect to Japan.�[45] Groves's postwar memoir described the ensuing debate as focused primarily on the targeting of Kyoto. Stimson had visited that city in the 1920s while traveling to the Philippines. Citing Kyoto's status as Japan's intellectual and cultural capital, Stimson objected to its inclusion as a target and cited his belief that the targeting decision �should be governed by the historical position that the United States would occupy after the war. He felt very strongly that anything that would tend in any way to damage this position would be unfortunate.�[46] Stimson's concern with attacks on Kyoto (either conventional or nuclear) has been well documented.[47] It seems unlikely, however, that Kyoto was the only subject of conversation that morning. The underlying logic of the Target Committee's recommendation, with its narrow emphasis on technical factors and its endorsement of the deliberate destruction of an entire city, sharply contrasted with Stimson's thinking about the conduct of the war as well as Marshall's explicit suggestion that a military target should be given first priority.
A memorandum from Groves to Lauris Norstad, chief of staff of the Twentieth Air Force, written immediately after the May 30 meeting in Stimson's office, suggests that a larger controversy was brewing at the end of May 1945. �Will you please inform General Arnold,� Groves wrote to Norstad, �that this AM the Secretary of War and the Chief of Staff did not approve the three targets we had selected, particularly Kyoto.� The mention of Kyoto supports at least part of Groves's post facto account of the meeting. Yet the reference to "the three targets we had selected" suggests that Stimson and Marshall raised objections that went beyond the targeting of Kyoto.[48] When Norstad informed AAF Chief of Staff Henry Arnold of the decision, he omitted mention of Kyoto entirely, noting simply that �targets suggested by General Groves for 509th Composite Group have been disapproved, supposedly by the Secretary of War.�[49] Stimson's belated intervention threw into doubt the entire question of nuclear targeting on the eve of the May 31 meeting of the so-called Interim Committee.
May 31: Setting the Context of Use
The scattered and sometimes intense discussions in late May on the various questions that would determine the context of the bomb�s use culminated in a meeting of the Interim Committee on May 31, 1945. At 10:00 a.m., Stimson, Marshall, Groves, the regular members of the Interim Committee, and the newly created Scientific Advisory Panel, including physicists J. Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi, Arthur H. Compton, and Ernest O. Lawrence, assembled in the secretary of war�s Pentagon office. Stimson opened the meeting by declaring that �this project should not be considered simply in terms of military weapons, but as a new relationship of man to the universe.� He went on to warn that the bomb �must be controlled if possible to make it an assurance of future peace rather than a menace to civilization.� If not, it might become �a Frankenstein which would eat us up.�[50]
Most of the morning discussion dealt with postwar issues, including the question of whether (and on what terms) the U.S. should discuss atomic energy with the Soviet Union.[51] During an afternoon lunch break, at which time Marshall left to attend to other business, the committee informally discussed a noncombat demonstration of the bomb designed to impress the Japanese with the danger they faced. Oppenheimer had already voiced his opposition to a noncombat demonstration and apparently did so again at the May 31 meeting. According to Lawrence, Oppenheimer and Groves joined in asserting that �the only way to put on a demonstration would be to attack a real target of built-up structures.�[52] In advocating the use of the bomb in such a way as to maximize its blast effects against light structures, the two men were following the same logic that had guided development of the weapon at Los Alamos. In the face of this skepticism about the chances of an effective noncombat demonstration, the conversation spilled over into the start of an afternoon session that began with �much discussion concerning various types of targets and the effects to be produced.�[53]
The Interim Committee minutes offer limited insight into the nature of the debate over nuclear targeting, merely recording that eventually the secretary of war offered a conclusion with which the rest of the group expressed �general agreement.� Though insisting that �we could not concentrate on a civilian area,� Stimson apparently joined in the consensus that an isolated target or military base would not allow for a suitably dramatic demonstration of the bomb's power. In order �to make a profound psychological impression on as many of the inhabitants as possible,� the bomb would have to be used in an area where there were a large number of civilians to witness its effects. This recommendation ruled out both a noncombat demonstration and the use of the bomb against a strictly military target. It was agreed, following Conant's suggestion, that the best target would be �a vital war plant employing a large number of workers and closely surrounded by workers' houses.� No warning would be given to the Japanese prior to combat use.[54]
While the notion of using the bomb against a �war plant� may have soothed the consciences of those with qualms over the targeting of noncombatants, the course of action they were recommending entailed as a basic requirement the mass killing of Japanese civilians. Why did Stimson agree to this recommendation? His long-held moral and practical concern with limiting the conduct of war and the record of his thoughts and actions in the days prior to the meeting both indicated a fundamental revulsion at the idea of using such a devastating weapon without warning against a predominantly civilian target, a sentiment shared by Marshall (who was not present for the afternoon discussion of targeting). The frustratingly opaque nature of the official minutes of the May 31 meeting makes it impossible to determine why the secretary of war ultimately acquiesced in the decision to target Japanese cities and civilians. It is, however, possible to offer several plausible conjectures.
Perhaps the most important limiting factor in the May 31 discussion of targeting was the type of weapon that Los Alamos was on the verge of producing. From 1944 onward, Los Alamos scientists and engineers had been working on a bomb designed to destroy the kinds of light structures found in abundance in Japanese cities. It was a concern with maximizing the destructive effects of the type of weapon produced by Los Alamos that had led the Target Committee to recommend using �the first gadget in center of selected city� at their final meeting on May 28.[55] Though Stimson and some others on the Interim Committee were troubled by city targeting, as were some scientists connected to the Manhattan Project, their reservations could not change the fact that the bomb as designed was optimized for the destruction of cities and civilians. Given the time and money spent developing the bomb, the ongoing war in the Pacific, and the fact that Groves, Oppenheimer, and the Target Committee all endorsed use against a city, it is likely that Stimson saw the kind of mixed civilian and military-industrial target suggested by Conant, combined with the removal of Kyoto from the target list, as a lamentable but ultimately acceptable compromise.[56]
Another explanation for Stimson's decision to support the use of the bomb against Japanese cities was the so-called shock factor. In an influential article on the A-bomb decision published in Harper's under Stimson�s name in 1947, he directly linked the decision to use the bomb without warning on Japanese cities to the need to produce �the kind of shock on the Japanese ruling oligarchy which we desired.�[57] The shock factor appears to have played an important but ultimately superficial role in the May 31 deliberations. Despite the loose talk of making a �profound psychological impression� on the Japanese, there does not appear to have been any discussion about calibrating the use of the bomb to achieve specific diplomatic objectives.[58] Without an overall agreement on a diplomatic approach to Japan, including the issue of surrender terms, and without any experts on Japan present at the Interim Committee meetings, such a discussion was simply not possible. As Oppenheimer later put it, �We didn't know beans about the military situation in Japan.�[59] Rather, the Interim Committee's discussion of the shock factor on May 31 appears to have focused not on �the Japanese ruling oligarchy� but rather on the effect that the bomb might have on Japanese civilians. This approach echoed a similarly superficial discussion of the psychological effects of the bomb during the course of the Target Committee's meetings at Los Alamos on May 11-12.
Technical concerns over the delivery and efficacy of the bomb had already dictated the choice of Japanese cities as targets by late 1944. It was in picking which city to attack that psychological factors came into play. The Target Committee ultimately selected Kyoto, the intellectual center and historical capital of Japan, as the best initial target in part because its inhabitants were �more highly intelligent and hence better able to appreciate the significance of the weapon.� The goal was not simply to obtain "the greatest psychological effect against Japan" but also to make �the initial use sufficiently spectacular for the importance of the weapon to be internationally recognized.�[60] The Target Committee apparently left unexamined the question of how incinerating and terrorizing the �highly intelligent� citizens of Kyoto might push the Japanese government into capitulation. This macabre and shallow reasoning was reflective of a greater disconnect between the planning for military operations against Japan and the diplomatic efforts to leverage military success into a Japanese surrender that characterized the last months of the war in the Pacific.
On May 31 the Interim Committee apparently embraced the Target Committee's ill-defined formulation of the bomb as a psychological weapon. The desire to make �a profound psychological impression on as many of the inhabitants as possible�� clearly helped to justify the use of the bomb against cities and civilians. But as with the Target Committee's deliberations, there is no evidence that Stimson or any of the other Interim Committee members wrestled with the practical question of how the mass killing of civilians with atomic weapons might bring the Japanese government to surrender. At the May 31 meeting, the technical details of the bomb's use remained almost entirely divorced from the important diplomatic question of how -- and on what terms -- to end the war in the Pacific.
The ongoing conventional bombing of Japan also likely played a role in helping to validate the strategy of city targeting with nuclear weapons. The decisions at Los Alamos that had led to the design of a bomb optimized for use against cities and civilians were both independent of and predated the violent incendiary campaign against Japan begun by the AAF in March 1945. But in struggling with the question of what to do with this new weapon, the precedent set by conventional attacks on Tokyo and other Japanese cities almost certainly made it easier for the Interim Committee to consider using the weapon in the way envisioned by Parsons and the Target Committee.
A combination of self-deception and misleading information with respect to the nature of the target probably helped to seal Stimson's assent to the May 31 targeting recommendations. The self-deception came in the form of his willingness to accept that a �vital war plant employing a large number of workers and closely surrounded by workers� houses� constituted a primarily military target. Stimson's self-deception was facilitated by Groves, who apparently withheld information about the targeting of the weapon at the May 31 meeting and in subsequent discussions prior to use. At the Target Committee meeting on May 28, it had been explicitly decided �not to specify aiming points� and �to neglect location of industrial areas as pin point target, since on these three targets, such areas are small, spread on fringes of cities and quite dispersed.�[61] The 509th Composite Bomb Group subsequently adopted the Target Committee's recommendation in planning the strikes of August 6 and 9. Air crews at the 509th�s forward base on the island of Tinian were allowed to select their own aiming points in order to maximize the bomb's effect on the city as a whole at the expense of hitting any particular military-industrial target.[62] Groves, however, did not correct either Stimson or Conant on May 31 (or later) when they suggested that the bomb would be employed against a specific military-industrial target rather than used in a deliberate attempt to annihilate an entire city.
The difference between the Interim Committee's May 31 recommendation on targeting and that offered by the Target Committee (and subsequently followed by the 509th in the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki) was in some ways minor. Both accepted use against a city; the only difference was the aim point within the city. But to Stimson this point was likely important in that it allowed him to believe that he was not intentionally targeting civilians for mass killing. Moreover, as events at Nagasaki would later reveal, the seemingly academic question of aim points had real life-and-death significance for the bomb's potential victims.
�Outdoing Hitler in Atrocities�
Events proceeded rapidly following the conclusion of the marathon meeting of the Interim Committee on May 31, which served as the capstone to four days in which the pivotal issues of sometimes heated discussion related to unconditional surrender and nuclear targeting. On June 6, Stimson met with Truman to present the committee�s recommendations. By this point, prior to both Truman's approval of the plan to invade Japan and the meeting at Potsdam that culminated in the final American ultimatum to the Japanese government, the top political, military, and scientific figures involved in the Manhattan Project had already signaled their assent to a set of policy guidelines that would determine the use of the bomb. The United State would use nuclear weapons on Japanese cities. There would be no prior public statement or warning to Japan about the bomb. Nor would there be any attempt to enter into negotiations with the Soviet Union about postwar international control of atomic energy prior to combat use.
As he presented these recommendations to the president, Stimson exhibited a seemingly schizophrenic attitude toward the moral issues involved. In the course of the June 6 meeting, the secretary of war again raised his objections to the conventional area bombing of Japanese cities, stating his desire �to hold the Air Force down to precision bombing� if possible. Stimson offered two reasons for opposing indiscriminate attacks on Japanese cities:
"[F]irst, because I did not want to have the United States get the reputation of outdoing Hitler in atrocities; and second, I was a little fearful that before we could get ready the Air Force might have Japan so thoroughly bombed out that the new weapon would not have a fair background to show its strength."[63]
In his linkage of American area bombing to Nazi atrocities, Stimson was expressing long-held concerns about the need to restrain the conduct of the war for both practical and moral reasons. This concern was fresh in the secretary of war's mind -- he had recently heard chilling private testimony from a congressional committee that had investigated Nazi war crimes in Europe, including the notorious death camps at Dachau and Buchenwald.[64] Yet after initially raising objections to city targeting with either conventional or nuclear weapons, Stimson was now apparently willing to sanction the use of indiscriminate force against Japanese civilians in the form of the atomic bomb. In response to his secretary of war's tortured logic, Truman �laughed and said he understood.�[65]
Presented with a two billion-dollar weapon designed for the destruction of cities, Stimson undoubtedly hoped that, however terrible, the bomb might speed the end of the war and obviate further bombing as well as the planned invasion of the Japanese home islands.[66] Oppenheimer's rejection of a noncombat demonstration and the combination of deception and self-deception on the types of targets to be hit likely helped him to rationalize the course of action that he recommended to Truman on June 6. Ultimately, however, the position of endorsing indiscriminate nuclear killing in order to end indiscriminate conventional killing proved to be an uncomfortable one for the secretary of war. For the next two months, Stimson and others privy to the atomic secret continued to explore alternatives even as preparations for use of the bomb against Japanese cities went forward.
By early July, Stimson belatedly acted on the advice of Grew and others, suggesting to Truman that any future statement to Japan should include the reassurance that �we do not exclude a constitutional monarchy under her present dynasty.�[67] At the Potsdam Conference in mid-July (which he attended as an informal advisor to Truman), the secretary of war urged the president to issue a clarification of American terms, including a statement on the Emperor, prior to the use of the bomb. If the Japanese continued to resist after such a clarification, then, and only then, �the full force of our newer weapons should be brought to bear� along with �a renewed and even heavier warning, backed by the power of the new forces and possibly the actual entrance of the Russians in the war.�[68] Apparently frustrated when Truman and Secretary of State James F. Byrnes refused to consider issuing a statement on the Emperor as part of the July 26 Potsdam Declaration, Stimson also sought to revisit the targeting issue. In a series of conversations with AAF Chief of Staff Arnold at Potsdam, Stimson discussed the bomb�s effects on �surrounding communities� and �the killing of women and children.�[69]
The last-minute American deliberations about the bomb and surrender terms at Potsdam have been the subject of intense academic study and much controversy. But while Truman and Byrnes have borne the brunt of the criticism for their failure to offer a clear statement of the postwar status of the emperor at Potsdam, Stimson and Marshall also played an important (if inadvertent) role in determining this outcome. By temporarily tabling any reconsideration of American surrender terms several months earlier at the May 29 meeting, the secretary of war and army chief of staff forfeited what was almost certainly the best opportunity to join the diplomatic track with discussions over the use of the bomb. The hectic, tension-filled atmosphere of the Potsdam Conference proved to be an inauspicious place for a reasoned discussion of the unconditional surrender issue. The same could be said of the targeting issue. If the intransigence of Japanese leaders, abetted by the American delay in clarifying surrender terms, ultimately made the use of the bomb inevitable, it did not necessarily follow that it had to be used without warning against cities and civilians. But once again Potsdam proved to be a poor venue in which to belatedly revisit the complicated technical and operational issues related to nuclear targeting. Though Stimson (with Truman�s assent) did manage to keep Kyoto off the targeting list, his ruminations on �the killing of women and children� were not enough to overcome the momentum toward city targeting that began at Los Alamos and was ratified by the Target Committee and Interim Committee in late May.
None of the evidence or arguments above should be taken to imply that all the important choices about use were finalized by May 31. But the accretion of previous decisions, taken either consciously or as a result of simple inaction or inattention on the part of the relevant policy makers, made last minute reconsideration of issues such as surrender terms and targeting difficult even under the best of circumstances. The sheer number of issues under consideration at Potsdam and the time pressure associated with the ongoing fighting with Japan, imminent Soviet entry into the Pacific War, and the looming disputes over the postwar settlement, made such reconsideration next to impossible. In that respect, unraveling the atomic bomb �decision� requires a close engagement with the series of technical, political, military, and diplomatic decisions that worked to gradually shape the context of use long before the Enola Gay left on its fateful mission in August 1945.
Notes
[1] Acting Chief of Staff Thomas T. Handy to General Carl A. Spaatz, July 25, 1945, Carl A. Spaatz Papers, Library of Congress, box 24, �July, 1945.�
[2] On Stimson and his complicated relationship to the bomb see Sean L. Malloy, Atomic Tragedy: Henry L. Stimson and the Decision to Use the Bomb Against Japan (Ithaca, 2008). Other biographical treatments of Stimson include David Schmitz, Henry L. Stimson: The First Wise Man (Wilmington, Del., 2001); Godfrey Hodgson The Colonel: The Life and Wars of Henry Stimson, 1867-1950 (New York, 1990); Elting Elmore Morison, Turmoil and Tradition: A Study of the Life and Times of Henry L. Stimson (Boston, 1960).[3] Henry Lewis Stimson Diaries (microfilm edition), Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library (hereafter cited as Stimson Diary), May 28, 1945.
[4] Stimson Diary, February 27, 1945.
[5] Though its focus is split between the USSR, Japan, and the United States, Tsuyoshi Hasegawa's Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan (Cambridge, Mass., 2005) is probably the best single source on the debate within the American government over surrender terms in 1945. Also see Richard B. Frank, Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire (New York, 1999), 214-21.
[6] The original and most influential statement of this orthodox defense of the bomb was Stimson, �The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb,� Harper�s (February 1947): 97-107. For more contemporary restatements of this position see Robert James Maddox, Weapons for Victory: The Hiroshima Decision (Columbia, Mo., 2004); Robert Newman, Truman and the Hiroshima Cult (East Lansing, Mich., 1995).
[7] Foreign Relations of the United States, The Conferences at Washington, 1941-1942, and Casablanca, 1943, (Washington, D.C.) 837 (hereafter cited as FRUS).
[8] Joint Chiefs of Staff 924/15, April 25, 1945, box 169, section 12, record group 218, National Archives II, College Park, MD.
[9] Herbert Hoover Memorandum, May 15, 1945, Formerly Top Secret Correspondence of Secretary of War Stimson, record group 107, box 8, National Archives II, College Park, MD. (hereafter cited as �Safe File�); Stimson Diary, May 16, 1945.
[10] McCloy, �Memorandum for Colonel Stimson,� May, 28, 1945, �Safe File,� box 8.
[11] Grew, �Memorandum of Conversation with the President,� May 28, 1945, enclosed in Grew to Stimson, February 12, 1947, Henry Lewis Stimson Papers (microfilm ed.), reel 116, Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library, (hereafter cited as Stimson Papers).
[12] Joseph Grew to Stimson, February 12, 1947, Stimson Papers, reel 116.
[13] Stimson to Roosevelt, March 15, 1944, Stimson Papers, reel 109.
[14] Stimson Diary, November 18, 1942; David M. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945 (New York, 1999), 582-83; Robert Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy 1932-1945 (New York, 1979), 364-66.
[15] Stimson Diary, June 14 (�politics of Italy�), July 1(�too much unconditional surrender�), 1943. Also see Stimson to Roosevelt, September 20, 1943, Stimson Diary.
[16] Stimson, �Memorandum for the President: The Conduct of the War with Japan,� enclosed in Stimson to James F. Byrnes, July 16, 1945, Stimson Papers, reel 113.
[17] Others present included the director of the Office of War Information (OWI), Elmer Davis, and Judge Samuel Rosenman, counsel to the president. Stimson Diary, May 29, 1945; Forrestal Diary, May 29, 1945.
[18] Stimson, �Memorandum for the Chief of Staff,� May 30, 1945, �Safe File,� box 8.
[19] Grew Diary, May 29, 1945, reprinted in Grew, Turbulent Era: A Diplomatic Record of Forty Years, 1904-1945 (Cambridge, Mass., 1952), 1434.
[20] Stimson to Joseph Grew, June 19, 1947, Eugene H. Dooman Papers, box 2, Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford, Calif. (hereafter cited as Dooman Papers).
[21] Grew, Turbulent Era, 1434.
[22] Eugene Dooman to Joseph Grew, June 30, 1947, Dooman Papers, box 2.
[23] February 9, 1947, The Diary of William R. Castle (microfilm of original), Houghton Library, Harvard University.
[24] Herbert Hoover to John C. Laughlin, August 8, 1945, Hebert Hoover Presidential Library, West Branch, Iowa, Post-Presidential Individual File, �O�Laughlin, John C.� On Stimson�s last minute efforts at Potsdam to facilitate a Japanese surrender prior to the use of the bomb see Malloy, Atomic Tragedy, 121-32.
[25] Stimson Diary, May 29, 1945.
[26] John J. McCloy, "Memorandum of Conversation with General Marshall May 29, 1945, 11:45 AM," �Safe File,� box 12.
[27] Stimson Diary, May 29, 1945. For a lengthy discussion of nuclear targeting in World War II, see Sean L. Malloy, ��The Rules of Civilized Warfare�: Scientists, Soldiers, and American Nuclear Targeting, 1940-1945,� The Journal of Strategic Studies, Vol. 30, No. 3, 474-512.
[28] Malloy, Atomic Tragedy, 49-65.
[29] �Character and strength of buildings in different parts of the city� and the �Contour of the ground� were the factors that Parsons suggested would be most important in selecting cities for destruction. William Parsons to William Purnell (via Leslie Groves), December 12, 1944, Correspondence (�Top Secret�) of the Manhattan Engineer District, 1942-46, microfilm publication M1109, file 5D, National Archives (hereafter cited as Groves �Top Secret�).
[30] AAF Target Committee members were Brigadier General Lauris R. Norstad, Colonel William P. Fisher, Colonel Paul W. Tibbets, Dr. David M. Dennison, and Dr. Robert Stearns. Manhattan Project representatives included Dr. John von Neumann, Dr. R. Bright Wilson, Dr. William Penny, Dr. Norman F. Ramsey, Colonel Lyle E. Seeman, and Major Jack Derry (who wrote the summary notes after each meeting).
[31] Jack Derry, �Notes on Initial Meeting of the Target Committee,� April 27, 1945, Groves �Top Secret,� file 5D.
[32] Derry, �Summary of Target Committee Meetings on 10 and 11 May 1945,� Groves, �Top Secret,� file 5D.
[33] One of the important criteria used by the committee in selecting a target was that it �be capable of being damaged effectively by a blast.� Ibid.
[34] Derry, �Notes on Initial Meeting of the Target Committee.�
[35] Derry, �Minutes of Third Target Committee Meeting -- Washington, 28 May 1945,� Groves, �Top Secret,� file 5D.
[36] Stimson to Truman, May 16, 1945, Stimson Diary.
[37] Diary of John J. McCloy, May 21, 1945, John J. McCloy Papers, box DY1, folder 17, Amherst College Library, Amherst, Mass. (hereafter cited as McCloy Diary).
[38] �Objectives,� [outline for draft of presidential address, author unknown but likely either Harvey Bundy or Arthur Page] May 25, 1945, Harrison Bundy Files Relating to the Development of the Atomic Bomb, 1942-46, Records of the Office of the Chief of Engineers, record group 77, microfilm publication M1108, file 74, National Archives (hereafter cited as Harrison-Bundy).
[39] McCloy, �Memorandum of Conversation with General Marshall.�
[40] On June 1, three days after this meeting with Marshall, Stimson summoned Arnold to question the general about "a bombing of Tokyo" that Stimson found objectionable insofar as it had apparently been aimed primarily at civilians and as such represented a breach �of my promise from Lovett that there would be only precision bombing in Japan.� Stimson Diary, June 1, 1945.
[41] McCloy, �Memorandum of Conversation with General Marshall.�
[42] Groves Diary, May 30, 1945, Papers of Leslie R. Groves, box 3, record group 200, National Archives II, College Park, Md. (hereafter cited as Groves Diary).
[43] Leslie Groves, Now It Can Be Told: The Story of the Manhattan Project (New York, 1962), 273; Stimson Diary, May 30, 1945. Also see the account in Robert S. Norris, Racing for the Bomb: General Leslie R. Groves, the Manhattan Project�s Indispensable Man (South Royalton, Vt., 2002), 386-87.
[44] Groves quoted in Len Giovannitti and Fred Freed, The Decision to Drop the Bomb (New York, 1965), 40-41.
[45] Stimson Diary, May 30, 1945.
[46] Groves, Now It Can Be Told, 275.
[47] Stimson Diary, June 1, 1945; Ira C. Eaker, "Memorandum for the Secretary of War," June 11, 1945, �Safe File,� box 8.
[48] Groves, �Memorandum to General Norstad,� May 30, 1945 (emphasis in original), Groves �Top Secret,� file 5D (emphasis added).
[49] The Diary of Henry H. Arnold, May 31, 1945, Henry H. Arnold Papers, Manuscripts and Records Division, Library of Congress (hereafter Arnold Diary).
[50] Gordon Arneson, �Notes of the Interim Committee Meeting,� May 31, 1945 (�this project,� �must be controlled�), Harrison-Bundy, file 100; Stimson Diary, May 31, 1945 (�Frankenstein�).
[51] For more on the debate over international control and the Soviet Union see Malloy, Atomic Tragedy, 80-95, 109-14, 131-34, 143-57.
[52] Ernest O. Lawrence to Dr. Karl K. Darrow, 17 August 1945, E. O. Lawrence Papers, box 28, folder 20, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.
[53] Arneson, �Notes of the Interim Committee Meeting,� May 31, 1945.
[54] Ibid.
[55] Derry, �Minutes of Third Target Committee Meeting.�
[56] Michael Sherry has reached a similar conclusion regarding Stimson and the bomb. Michael S. Sherry, The Rise of American Air Power: The Creation of Armageddon (New Haven, 1987), 295.
[57] Stimson, �The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb,� 105.
[58] The �shock� factor, while not entirely absent in wartime discussions became much more prominent and well defined after the war in post-facto justifications of the bomb�s use. For more on shock see, Alperovitz, The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb, 165-66; Michael Gordin, Five Days in August: How World War II Became a Nuclear War (Princeton, 2007), 39.
[59] Richard Polenberg, ed., In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer (Ithaca, 2002), 34.
[60] Derry, �Summary of Target Committee Meetings.�
[61] Derry, �Minutes of Third Target Committee Meeting.�
[62] For more see Malloy, Atomic Tragedy, 134-35, 166-69.
[63] Stimson Diary, June 6, 1945.
[64] �Transcript of Conference Held at 11 am, 9 May, 1945 with Stimson, Marshall and a Special Committee of the Senate and House of Representative Which Investigated �ATROCITIES� in Germany,� �Safe File,� box 2.
[65] Stimson Diary, June 6, 1945.
[66] For a version of this argument see Stimson, �The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb,� 107.
[67] Stimson, �Memorandum for the President: Proposed Program for Japan,� July 2, 1945, Stimson Diary.
[68] Stimson, �Memorandum for the President: The Conduct of the War with Japan,� enclosed in Stimson to James Byrnes, July 16, 1945, Stimson Papers, reel 113.
[69] Arnold Diary, July 22, 23, 1945; Henry H. Arnold, Global Mission (New York, 1949), 589.
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