From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776 (96 page)

Like Wilson, FDR cast a long shadow over twentieth-century U.S. foreign policy. He perceived earlier than most other Americans the ways that technology had shrunk the world and the interconnectedness of global issues. In the frantic months before Pearl Harbor, he began to articulate a new U.S. national security policy and toward that end to create the
trappings of an "imperial presidency." His wielding of presidential power, including looseness with the truth, infringement on civil liberties, and harassment of dissenters, is often justified in terms of the magnitude of the threat he faced. In the hands of his successors, it would be perverted to cover a multitude of sins. Within the Grand Alliance, he more than anyone else determined Allied strategies, which in turn decisively shaped postwar settlements. With a huge boost from Germany and Japan, he moved his nation away from its unilateralist tradition toward international cooperation. He defined and gave voice to U.S. war aims. Like Wilson, he believed that "Americanism" offered the best means to a peaceful and prosperous world. Yet while he presided over a vast accretion of U.S. power, he retained a keen sense of its limits. He understood better than most other Americans that diplomatic problems rarely had neat, definitive solutions. His vision of postwar allied cooperation tragically, if not surprisingly, proved an illusion. In large part because of that, the United Nations would prove an ineffectual instrument for maintaining the peace. Yet the ideals he so eloquently pronounced of basic human freedoms and international cooperation remain standards for today. More than any other twentieth-century U.S. leader, he projected a compelling image across the world. "The mere fact that he could make himself as much a personal friend of the little laborer in the Brazilian streets as he did of millions of Americans is a tribute to something more than politics," his adviser Adolf Berle commented on the day of his death. "The great secret was the tremendous well-spring of vital friendship which he somehow communicated far beyond the borders of his own country."
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One of the greatest flaws in his leadership was his refusal to confide in others the contours of his policies and aspirations, even as he understood them. His death thus left a gaping vacuum. Nowhere was this more the case than in his failure, even when he must have been increasingly cognizant of his own mortality, to educate Vice President Harry S. Truman. A border-state senator of middling reputation, the Missourian Truman was selected in 1944 as a compromise candidate in lieu of the incumbent, Wallace, anathema to Democratic Party conservatives, and the conservative James F. Byrnes of South Carolina, unacceptable to liberals. The vice president was not included in Roosevelt's inner circle after the inauguration. He knew little more about the deliberations at Yalta than could be read in the newspapers. He was not briefed on the atomic bomb. Well
might he exclaim upon learning of FDR's death: "I feel like I have been struck by a bolt of lightning."
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Truman was not without foreign policy views. During the 1930s, he had dutifully followed what appeared to be the national consensus by voting for the Neutrality Acts with few illusions they would keep the United States out of war. Like most Democrats, he was a confirmed Wilsonian. As the world moved toward war, he gravitated easily toward internationalism. He regularly voted for aid to Britain. Once war began, he assumed that the United States through the power of its ideals would be able to shape the new international order. Although he accepted the necessity of the wartime alliance, he despised Communism and thought Stalin as "untrustworthy as Hitler and [gangster] Al Capone."
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He had little sense of the complexity of the issues dealt with at Yalta and the ambiguity of agreements concluded there.

Faced with rising tensions in the alliance and listening to FDR's more hard-line advisers, Truman, in the manner that would become his trademark, at first took a tough stance. On April 23, in a face-to-face meeting at the White House, he gave Soviet foreign minister Molotov (ironically then in Washington on a courtesy call en route to the United Nations conference at San Francisco) what he called "the one-two, right to the jaw," sternly insisting that the USSR abide by the Yalta agreements. When a startled Molotov protested that he had never been talked to like that before—dubious, knowing who his boss was—Truman curtly retorted: "Carry out your agreements and you won't get talked to like that." The president's ill-conceived tough talk masked profound inner doubts. "Did I do the right thing?" he asked a friend shortly after.
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Two weeks later, in a singularly impolitic act that could not but stoke already rampant Soviet suspicions, the Truman administration on V-E Day summarily terminated lend-lease to the USSR, even turning back ships at sea. The move may have been necessary to meet congressional restrictions, as the administration insisted, but in the eyes of some of its proponents it was also intended to send a message to an ally in the process of becoming an adversary. It was handled without any consultation and in an unnecessarily crude and offensive manner.
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These first moves did not mark Truman's abandonment of FDR's efforts to cooperate with the Soviet Union.
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In fact, through the first months of his presidency, the new president veered back and forth between confrontation and conciliation, between a Rooseveltian optimism that he could deal with Stalin and the conviction that a newly powerful nation with virtue on its side could have its way with tough talk. In mid-May, the administration reversed course on supply ships bound for the USSR and sought to work out arrangements for aid during the war against Japan. Truman dispatched to Moscow the desperately ill Hopkins, known to be as close to Stalin as any American. While there, Hopkins carefully explained the lend-lease imbroglio. He secured face-saving concessions that enabled the United States to recognize the Polish government. At this time, a colorful assemblage of 282 delegates representing fifty-two nations was meeting in San Francisco to draft a charter for the United Nations Organization. Hopkins also secured Stalin's intercession to break a deadlock over use of the veto power in the Security Council, permitting approval of the charter on June 25.
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Yet gradually, almost imperceptibly, attitudes toward the Soviet Union changed. Returning to Washington after FDR's death, Harriman ominously warned of a "barbarian invasion of Europe." He did not despair of accommodation with the USSR. But he insisted that it could be achieved only by taking a harder line, including the use of U.S. economic power as a bargaining weapon, a position many U.S. officials now endorsed.
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Reports poured in from Eastern and Central Europe of the Soviets' use of heavy-handed, repressive measures to impose their will on local populations. The end of the European war on May 8, 1945, removed one major reason for remaining quiet in the face of Soviet violations of self-determination. The successful July 16 testing of an atomic weapon at Alamogordo, New Mexico, during the last Big Three conference at Potsdam outside Berlin eliminated yet another reason for conciliating an increasingly difficult ally. Soviet entry into the Pacific war was now deemed not just unnecessary but undesirable. Upon receiving word of the test, Stimson observed, Truman was "tremendously pepped up" and took on "an entirely new feeling of confidence." Faced with continued disputes over Eastern Europe and Germany, he and his new secretary of state,
James F. Byrnes, deferred agreements on major issues in hopes that use of the bomb against Japan, by demonstrating America's new power, would make the USSR "more manageable" in Eastern Europe.
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The dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 remains among the most controversial actions in U.S. history. Truman and his advisers justified their decision in simple and clear-cut terms: The bombs were used to end the war quickly and spare the estimated half million to a million U.S. casualties that would be incurred in invading the Japanese home islands. Revisionist historians, on the other hand, have questioned whether the bomb was necessary to end the war. They accuse Truman of scrapping FDR's policy of cooperation and using the bomb mainly to bludgeon the Soviet Union into accepting America's postwar aims. The controversy has raged for more than a half century, producing exhaustive research, scrutiny of the most minute details, and voluminous writing. It goes to the very heart of what Americans believe about themselves and how other peoples view them.
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The official explanation for using the bomb raises numerous questions. Estimates of possible casualties from an invasion were grossly inflated. The actual numbers given to Truman in the summer of 1945 were 31,000 casualties, 25,000 deaths, in the first thirty days; other estimates for the first phase run as high as 150,000 to 175,000.
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The president and his advisers perceived that Japan was on the verge of defeat. They saw options to end the war other than invasion or use of the bomb. They could blockade the Japanese home islands and continue the ferocious conventional bombing campaign launched in late 1944; they could modify the unconditional surrender policy to lure Japanese moderates into suing for peace. Stalin had reaffirmed to Hopkins his determination to enter the war. The shock effect of Soviet belligerency might force a Japanese surrender.

The administration rejected these alternatives. Blockade and bombing could require as long as a year and cost as much as an invasion. Some policymakers favored modifying the unconditional surrender policy to
facilitate peacemaking; others feared that a conciliatory approach might encourage diehards in the Japanese government and provoke a political backlash at home. Soviet entry might not compel a Japanese surrender. In any event, U.S. officials increasingly worried about Stalin's ambitions in East Asia and sought to end the conflict before the USSR could invade Manchuria and demand the spoils of war in Japan.

Dropping the bomb was thus an obvious choice for Truman, not even a decision in the usual sense of the word.
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He had inherited from FDR a weapon built to be used and a military strategy that emphasized winning the war at the lowest cost in American lives. In this case, far from abandoning Roosevelt's policies, Truman embraced them. Even though the casualty estimates were much lower than he and his advisers later claimed, in their eyes even the smaller figures easily justified use of what the president himself admitted was "the most terrible weapon in the history of the world."
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The bomb had been built at great cost to be used. Failure to employ it might have provoked popular outrage, even calls for impeachment.

The nation to be targeted removed any moral qualms about the bomb's use. At Pearl Harbor, Japan had inflicted physical devastation and humiliation on a proud nation. The ensuing conflict was especially vicious, a "war without mercy," according to historian John Dower, a fierce, unrelenting struggle between peoples of different races with deeply entrenched stereotypes of each other. Americans considered Japanese subhuman—Truman used the word "beast." The ferocity with which the "yellow vermin" defended remote Pacific islands, the suicide air attacks on U.S. Navy ships, and the atrocities inflicted on prisoners of war fueled fear, rage, and a thirst for revenge.
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Given the mentality of total war and the peculiar brutality of the Pacific war, Americans did not hesitate to use any weapon to subdue a fiendish and fanatical foe.

The bomb was not employed primarily to intimidate the Soviets, as revisionists have argued, but it did offer important collateral benefits. Stimson early recognized the huge implications of nuclear weapons for international relations in general and Soviet-American relations in particular. On several occasions, he urged consultation with Stalin, possibly even trading atomic secrets for political concessions. Truman and Byrnes,
in contrast, believed such a powerful weapon could give them the upper hand in postwar negotiations with Stalin. It might end the war before the Soviets could make advances in East Asia.
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Not surprisingly, Truman's calculatedly casual mention of the bomb at Potsdam caused Stalin to speed up his timetable for entering the Pacific war and accelerate his own nuclear project. Soviet-American jockeying for position in East Asia in the last days of the war against Japan and after fueled the tensions already aroused over European issues.
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Historians still vigorously debate whether the bombs or Soviet intervention were more important in Japan's decision to surrender, but there can be no doubt that the "double shock" of the two atomic bombs, along with the Soviet invasion of Manchuria, stunned Japan into surrender.
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The destruction was catastrophic. At Hiroshima on August 6, an explosion equal to 12,500 tons of TNT created a huge fireball and a flash of light three thousand times brighter than the sun. "We were struck dumb at the sight," a U.S. pilot recalled. On the ground, it produced a horrific picture of destruction and human agony.
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An area about five square miles was completely obliterated. An estimated 80,000 to 100,000 people (including twelve American prisoners of war) were killed instantly, another 40,000 later, and the entire toll 230,000. The less fortunate were burned beyond recognition or suffered a slow and excruciatingly painful death from radiation poisoning. The bomb dropped on Nagasaki August 9 killed 35,000 to 40,000. The bombs and Soviet intervention on August 8 sparked bitter debate between those Japanese who wanted to end the war and others who preferred to fight to the death. All the while, the United States continued to devastate Japan with conventional bombing. Finally, on August 14, even while some military leaders plotted a coup, Emperor Hirohito intervened. His influence carried the day. By giving strength to the peace forces, a cabinet minister later affirmed, the bombs and Soviet intervention were "gifts from heaven."
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The United States' use of the bombs was inevitable, but the peculiar devastation they caused and their lasting effects leave haunting questions as to whether they were absolutely necessary and morally justifiable.