Ripper J. American Stories: Living American History. Volume 2: From 1865
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AMERICAN STORIES
208
Harry Truman burnished his aura as a tough defender of human liberties. In
March 1947, he instituted a loyalty program for all federal employees de-
signed
to root out “any disloyal or subversive person.” The program targeted
anyone with “totalitarian, fascist” or “communist” inclinations.
9
Meant to
safeguard American democracy, the loyalty program arguably damaged it by
suppressing individual political freedoms and by creating a heightened mood
of mistrust. In February 1948, Truman asked congress to authorize the civil
rights legislative agenda he had outlined before the NAACP on the Washington
Mall. In April, he pushed through the Marshall Plan, a massive aid package to
rebuild Europe, named after George C. Marshall, now secretary of state and
one of America’s favorite sons due to his very public role during the war as
army chief of staff. George Marshall recommended the plan after studying a
3,500-word telegram from a brilliant State Department officer named George
F. Kennan, who worked out of the American embassy in Moscow. Kennan
asserted, in this “Long Telegram,” that the Soviet power elite—rather than
the Russian people themselves—would continue to be aggressive toward the
outside world indefinitely. Only by depicting democracies as hostile could
Stalin foist his cruel dictatorship onto the Soviet people. (Personally, Kennan
thought the United States and the Soviet Union could coexist to each other’s
mutual benefit. And he feared that if the United States overreacted to the So-
v
iets, Americans could “become like those with whom we are coping.”
10
) The
solution, in Kennan’s widely accepted opinion as made available to the public
in a 1947 Foreign Relations article, “Sources of Soviet Conduct,” published
under the pseudonym “X,” was to enact “firm and vigilant containment of
Russian expansive tendencies.” The word “containment” was key because
Kennan thought “threats or blustering” would merely spark similar macho
posturing from the Kremlin.
11
The Marshall Plan, therefore, allocated bil-
lions of dollars (roughly $13.5 billion by 1952) to rebuild the rubble piles of
European cities in order to create stable markets for American goods and in
order to fend off the encroachment of communism, which most Americans
believed would grow like a weed if the ongoing hard times in Europe were
not turned around. This economic aid made America immensely popular
throughout Western Europe, and it put many Americans to work producing
the food, cloth, and steel that Europe needed. This was pragmatic idealism,
the perfect fit for a Midwest president who preferred quiet evenings with his
wife, Bess, at their house in Independence, Missouri, to the hectic humbug-
gery of the nation’
s capital.
Stalin, however, refused money from the Marshall Plan, since taking it
would be an admission that the Soviet Union was unable to feed its own people.
He also prevented each Eastern European country under his domination from
accepting American aid. Stemming from this same mentality of retreat behind
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FROM WORLD WAR TO COLD WAR
his “iron curtain”—a term used by Winston Churchill in March 1946—Stalin
blundered big in June 1948. The city of Berlin had been divided into four
sectors, one belonging to the Soviets, the others to Britain, France, and the
United States. The whole city, however, was enveloped inside East Germany,
placing all Berliners at the mercy of the Soviets. Only one road and one rail
line led from West Germany into communist-encircled West Berlin, and its
residents had justifiable reason to fear the Soviet occupiers. Soviet soldiers
had raped 2 million German women in 1945 and 1946. Then the Soviets’
German communist protégés had clamped down on freedom of the press, on
a fairly held election for mayor in Berlin, and on other expressions deemed
threatening by a totalitarian mind-set that equated dissent with anarchy. In
June 1948, for reasons that continue to baffle, Stalin shut off Western access to
West Berlin, saying only that he was doing this for defensive purposes related
to issuance of a new deutsche mark by the Western powers, a monetary unit
of the capitalist world. The 2.5 million residents in West Berlin had enough
food to last one month at the most. Truman’s response was magnificent.
For the next year, Truman orchestrated the constant delivery of food, medi-
c
ine, coal, and other essential goods to West Berliners in a feat of philanthropic
flying dubbed the Berlin airlift. Truman turned the sky into a highway bustling
with transport planes and retooled bombers filled with goodies going in and
refugees going out. Every Berlin child’s best friend was Gail S. Halverson,
known as the “Chocolate Flyer” because he dropped little bundles of chocolate
bars and gum into prancing crowds of hungry kids only just starting to recover
from the reeling shock of round-the-clock wartime bombing. Donations from
the American Confectioners Association kept pace with Halverson’s demand,
and American schoolchildren contributed to what became known as Operation
Little Vittles by bundling the parachute chocolate bombs.
In May 1949, the Soviets removed the barriers and blockades around West
Berlin. The crisis had passed, and it had served only to strengthen America’s
image and to weaken Stalin’s. Within four years, the United States and the
Soviet Union had gone from allies to adversaries. Together they had defeated
German Nazism, yet by 1949 the United States had cozied up to Germany and
begun to rearm its military even as West German democracy sprouted with
U.S. insistence and encouragement. Of more lasting significance in the deep-
ening
trenches of the Cold War separating communists from capitalists was
the creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in April 1949,
the last month of the Berlin blockade and airlift. The original twelve NATO
members—the United States, Canada, and most of the countries of northern
and western Europe—committed themselves to defend one another in time
of peril. This was the first mutual defense pact the United States had signed
in more than 100 years. General Dwight D. Eisenhower became NATO’s first
AMERICAN STORIES
210
supreme commander, a signal that he as well as Truman no longer believed
Stalin could or should be trusted.
By
late 1948, the ongoing airlift had made Harry S. Truman eminently
more electable. With his loyalty program in place and his willingness to
outmaneuver the Soviet blockade of Berlin, Truman appeared tough, caring,
and capable. Still, the Democrats had been in power since 1932, and polls
indicated that Thomas E. Dewey of New York was going to steal the election
with no problem at all. Truman thought otherwise and campaigned otherwise,
touring the nation on a whistle-stop extravaganza reminiscent of Woodrow
Wilson’s in 1920. The difference was that Wilson suffered a stroke and lost the
election while Truman came into his own, seeming revitalized by the small-
town crowds that cheered him. When the train left Washington, DC, at the
beginning of the tour, Truman’s vice-presidential candidate, Alben Barkley of
Kentucky, called out, “Give ’em hell, Harry!” Journalists grabbed the sentence
out of the air, tossed it into their papers, and made it Truman’s slogan. A large
bloc of southern Democrats bolted from the ticket, joined the States’ Rights
Party, and nominated their own “Dixiecrat,” segregationist candidate, Strom
Thurmond, governor of South Carolina. With the Dixiecrats gone from the
Democratic Party, Truman no longer had to play to their prejudices. So he
gave them even more hell and integrated the armed forces.
And
contrary to the forecasts of political pundits, newspaper hacks, and
fortune-tellers, Truman won the election. He would be president for four more
years, a string of forty-eight months that would witness the baby boom, vet-
erans
going to college and buying suburban homes with money from the GI
Bill, and commercial television’s flickering fandango. Although the economic
heyday and new consumer novelties lifted the nation’s mood, nothing con-
tinuously
dominated the presidential agenda more than the Cold War during
the long decade following the armistice with Japan. In 1949, Mao Zedong’s
communist forces won control of China, and the Soviets detonated their own
atomic bomb. Then, in 1950, a war started in Korea sponsored by Soviet
and Chinese communists. Truman would need to figure out not only how to
give ’em hell, but who to give the hell to in the first place. By the late 1940s,
Americans’ fears of international communism transformed into a second red
scare: a resurgent fear of domestic communism, spies, and boogeymen.
Alger Hiss and Joseph McCarthy: Spies, Superbombs,
and Cir
cus Politics
In 1949, J. Robert Oppenheimer, one of the atom bomb’s central creators,
came out in opposition to use of the as-of-yet undeveloped “superbomb,”
more commonly called the hydrogen bomb, a horrifically powerful weapon.
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FROM WORLD WAR TO COLD WAR
When the United States set off the first hydrogen explosion on the Pacific
island of Elugelab in 1952, the force of the blast was three times greater than
the combined force of all the bombs that had exploded during all of World
War II; Elugelab literally evaporated. Oppenheimer’s ordeal during the late
1940s and early 1950s speaks to the variant, and often clashing, opinions of
Cold War Americans about the best ways to remain both safe and ethical in
the face of world-wrecking technologies.
By
1950, Oppenheimer mistrusted the Soviet Union and felt that the su-
perbomb,
though “a dreadful weapon,” was one that the United States might
well use; the possibility was a “humane problem” that needed serious consid-
eration.
12
By 1952, the year of the Elugelab test, Oppenheimer thought that
committing to the hydrogen bomb as “the way to save the country and the peace
appears to me full of dangers.” He believed the hydrogen bomb “does have
to be done,” but did not think its existence would have the desired results.
13
Oppenheimer argued, probably mistakenly, that if the United States halted
work on the bomb, the Soviet Union would follow suit. A host of increasingly
influential military men and scientists thought Oppenheimer was being naive.
They included Omar Bradley, one of D-day’s heroes, and, more importantly,
Lewis Strauss, a millionaire navy rear admiral without a college education
who resented Oppenheimer’s moral nannying and his ivory-tower attitude and
demeanor. Strauss took up the hydrogen crusade with all the truculent force
of a man described as having “more elbows than an octopus.”
14
Oppenheimer
had little tact with meat-gravy-and-bullets bullies like Strauss. A few years
into the Great Depression, Oppenheimer had been totally unaware that the
nation was in a financial and social crisis. He did not listen to the radio or
read newspapers. What time was there for such distractions when neutrons
danced before his eyes? Oppenheimer was repeatedly described as the smart-
est
man that smart men had met, and he could be dismissive of unlettered
ideologues like Strauss.
In
1943, just as the Manhattan Project was gaining momentum, the Hun-
g
arian-born physicist Edward Teller—a hyper-intelligent paranoiac and lover
of classical piano—had suggested setting aside work on the fission bomb in
favor of creating the hydrogen bomb. His suggestion was bypassed, but Teller
did not let go of it. Convinced that the Soviets would never be trustworthy,
he continued to advocate for a hydrogen bomb in the aftermath of World War
II. Oppenheimer and numerous other intellectual and scientific celebrities
opposed Teller, many of them sickened at the thought of a hydrogen bomb’s
ruinous potential, its damning immorality, its lethal enormity. A few revela-
tions,
however, tipped the argument in Teller’s favor, revelations that set a
brittle cultural and political tone for the next forty years.
In
late August 1949, half a year into Truman’s second term as president,
AMERICAN STORIES
212
the Soviet Union detonated an atomic bomb. Flying from Japan to Alaska,
an American weather plane equipped with detection equipment registered
the radiation as it drifted outward over the North Pacific. This happened only
months after Mao’s communist conquest of China. On September 23, 1949,
Truman announced to a stunned nation that the Soviets had atomic capability.
Truman’s disclosure amplified the anxiety being generated by a high-profile
court case involving a suave, highbrow State Department official named Alger
Hiss, who was accused of having spied for the Soviet Union for more than
a decade. A former acquaintance and once-upon-a-time Communist Party
member, Whittaker Chambers, had indicated to a congressional investigative
committee—the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC)—that
Hiss was a Soviet agent. To many prominent people, the accusation sounded
ludicrous, totally impossible. Alger Hiss palled around with Supreme Court
justices and had been part of the American delegation at the Yalta Conference
in 1943. His pedigree spoke of herringbone suits and martinis. Hiss naturally
denied the charges and in turn defamed Chambers’s character, a relatively
easy thing to do given that Chambers was unattractive, obscure, and had
already admitted his own former Communist Party affiliation. However, a
young California congressman and HUAC member named Richard Nixon
followed through on Chambers’s claims and revealed that Hiss was lying, not
only about having been friends with Chambers but also quite likely about his
purported covert ties to the Soviet Union.
Alger
Hiss underwent two trials, the first ending in a mistrial. A fascinated
nation sat glued to their radios—and the few who had them watched the grainy
images on the small screens of their televisions. Hiss’s trial was the first ever
to be televised. With all the shadows and surprises of a good spy thriller, the
evidence of Hiss’s actual espionage turned out to be transcribed government
documents and rolls of film that Hiss had given to Chambers in the 1930s, all
initially squirreled away by Chambers in a dumbwaiter cavity in his mother’s
house. Before the trial, Chambers had moved the packet of incriminating evi-
d
ence into a hollowed-out pumpkin, which led journalists to refer to the whole
lot as the “Pumpkin Papers.” But since the film and papers were more than
five years old, Hiss had luckily passed the statute of limitations and could not
be charged with treason. Instead he stood accused of perjury, of lying when
under oath to HUAC: a congressional coven of men once described as “the
most unattractive men in American public life—bigots, racists, reactionar-
ies,
and sheer buffoons.”
15
After more than eighteen months of trials, with
testimony from Supreme Court justices, a secretary, a government expert on
typewriters, former spies turned state’s witness, and both men’s wives, Alger
Hiss was found guilty on two counts of perjury on January 20, 1950. His
conviction landed him in jail for almost four years, and though he maintained
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FROM WORLD WAR TO COLD WAR
his innocence until his death in 1996, a document recently released by the
National Security Agency (NSA) from its VENONA files inclines most experts
to conclude that Hiss was indeed part of an elaborate series of spy rings run
throughout the nation, particularly in Washington, DC.
VENONA was the name of an NSA operation to decode incoming and
outgoing messages from Soviet officials in the United States to their bosses
back in Moscow. Few people at the time knew about VENONA’s existence
(although, laughably, the Soviets did) or about the evidence its equation-
wielding crypto analysts uncovered, but lack of evidence did not prevent an
opportunistic, parasitic, alcoholic, egomaniacal Wisconsin senator named
Joseph McCarthy from announcing at a minor Republican convention in
Wheeling, West Virginia, in September 1950 that he had a list of 205 known
communist agents working at the highest levels of the government, particu-
larly
in the State Department. As it turned out, the list had been in the public
domain since 1946, and of the few folks on it identified as communists, those
working for the State Department had already resigned. McCarthy’s accusa-
tions
were, in other words, false. But McCarthy’s claim—and subsequent
ones—rode on the waves of fear emanating from the Alger Hiss trial and
from Soviet nuclear capability.
By 1951, one of America’s most steadfast loyalists and defenders, George
C. Marshall (namesake of the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe and mentor
to Dwight Eisenhower), had become a favored target of McCarthy and his
fellow Republican congressional gangsters. By that point, McCarthy had ac-
cused
everyone but the pope and his own grandmother of being a communist.
With a showman’s innate sense for working a crowd, McCarthy established
a policy for right-wing Republicans to accuse Democrats of being “soft” on
communism and on national defense, accusations with no factual merit but
with tremendous political consequences. McCarthy would go on to wreak
terror and havoc throughout the United States until 1954, when his reign of
lies ended in a series of televised Senate hearings during which he unsuccess-
f
ully defended his crusade against the U.S. Army as a bastion of communism.
For more than thirty days, millions of television viewers sat transfixed and
bothered at the spectacle of McCarthy hurling spurious accusations at any
and all who opposed him and comporting himself, generally, with “no sense
of decency”—a fitting critique of McCarthy provided by Joseph Welch, an
army attorney whom McCarthy had attempted to slander.
16
Later in the year,
on December 2, 1954, the Senate officially condemned McCarthy, a symbolic
parallel to McCarthy’s loss of public good will, which had steadily eroded
throughout the year.
As the Alger Hiss trial was ending and McCarthy’s acid spittle was starting
to fly, one final jolt rattled the nation’s slipping sense of security. On June
AMERICAN STORIES
214
25, 1950, Kim Il-sung’s battle-hardened troops motored across the Korean
Peninsula’s thirty-eighth parallel. Secure inside Soviet-made tanks, the North
Korean communists shredded South Korean defense forces and occupied
Seoul, the southern capital, within ten days. Would the United States remove
its few military advisers and allow the communists to unify the peninsula
under their rule because it lay outside America’s “defense perimeter”? Or
would the United States throw its young men back into combat so soon after
the close of World War II? At a hastily convened meeting on June 27, 1950,
the United Nations Security Council denounced North Korean aggression and
decided to physically assist the tottering South Korean forces. The Security
Council was able to pass these resolutions only because the Soviet ambassa-
dor
had recently withdrawn from the council in a diplomatic huff. Under the
command of Douglas MacArthur, American forces in Japan, many without
combat experience, assembled for deployment. The U.S. Navy owned the
sea; the U.S. Air Force owned the skies; but Kim Il-sung owned all but a
southeastern crumb of Korea itself.
The
upcoming three-year war in Korea solidified a conservative bastion
within Congress; made the Cold War into something more and worse than
simple posturing and ideological jabs; helped draw the United States into
Vietnam by making the goings-on in Southeast Asia part of American geopo-
litical
interests; intensified the fear-based political theater of men like Joseph
McCarthy; entrenched “the militarization of American life”
17
by providing
justification for an ever-growing military budget; and killed 33,629 American
GIs in a conflict that ended with the reestablishment of the original parallel
dividing North from South Korea. While the war did not result in the use of
an
atomic bomb, the intensified fearful and conservative mood in the United
States did lead to the official ouster of J. Robert Oppenheimer from all his
official government jobs and the loss of his security clearances. Suddenly,
Edward Teller’s hydrogen superbomb seemed necessary to a nation gripped
by fear—and, in fact, President Truman authorized funding for the superbomb
in January 1950, just before the start of the Korean War. Oppenheimer’s
loyalty seemed suspect, though it was not. Teller and his ally, Rear Admiral
Strauss, accused Oppenheimer of obstructing work on the superbomb, and
even Harry Truman was disenchanted with the skinny father of the atom
bomb. When Oppenheimer and Truman first met soon after Hiroshima and
Nagasaki, the scientist had said to the president, “I feel we have blood on
our hands.” As bloodstained as Oppenheimer, the president did not appreciate
the implication of guilt and later told a senior adviser, “Don’t you bring that
fellow around again. After all, all he did was make the bomb. I’m the guy
who fired it off.”
18
Sixty-six years old in 1950, President Harry S. Truman was already under
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FROM WORLD WAR TO COLD WAR
indirect attack from Senator McCarthy, who enjoyed targeting Democrats in
Truman’s administration as either communist sympathizers or “soft on com-
munism.”
Although General MacArthur led a daring amphibious assault at
Inchon in September 1950, soon retaking Seoul, his follow-up drive through
North Korea gave Mao Zedong an excuse to send 300,000 Chinese troops
into Korea, where they turned the whole war into a mud-and-ice stalemate
reminiscent of World War I. As Truman tried to arrange for a cease-fire during
the spring of 1951, wild-card MacArthur fired off press releases about how
he wanted to escalate the war. Truman fired MacArthur. It had to be done.
MacArthur was ignoring the president’s constitutional role as commander
in chief. The United States could no longer wave the nuclear threat at North
Korea, as MacArthur seemed to have been doing, because the Soviet Union
could strike back. However, with a hydrogen bomb in the American arsenal,
people in Teller’s camp argued, the Soviets would have to tread warily—the
old my-gun-is-bigger-than-your-gun routine.
The most dangerous man in the United States during the 1950s may have
been J. Edgar Hoover, long-term director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation
(FBI). A man with no wife, no children, little contact with his birth family,
a gambling habit, and secret files full of morally damning evidence about
most American politicians, Hoover extolled himself as the defender of the
American family. As one of the nation’s top cops, Hoover regularly ordered
illegal wiretaps that he would use in his personal campaigns to rid America of
Americans he did not like. It was Hoover who had supplied Joseph McCarthy
with what passed for FBI “evidence” (often hearsay or stories many years
out of date) about communists in America. J. Edgar Hoover was corruption
personified, and along with Lewis Strauss and Edward Teller, Hoover had
it in for J. Robert Oppenheimer, who seemed to these three archconserva-
tives
the most un-American American of all by 1953. After all, he had been
a “fellow traveler” (i.e., communist) in the 1930s; his brother, Frank, was a
communist; and he had complicated hydrogen bomb policy from his roost as
head of the General Advisory Committee (GAC), part of the Atomic Energy
Commission, which controlled nuclear policy from 1946 onward. Though
no longer with the GAC in 1953, Oppenheimer still had top-level security
clearance and advised the GAC.
I
n the spring of 1954, during the Senate investigation of McCarthy’s charges
against the army and right after a hydrogen bomb was tested on Bikini Atoll
(raining radioactive ash onto unsuspecting inhabitants of nearby islands), the
conservative cabal aligned against Oppenheimer brought him up for security
clearance hearings—a kind of quasi-legal trial. The proceedings relied on
illegal FBI wiretaps, the use of a private prosecuting attorney, and the skew-
ering
testimony of Oppenheimer’s former colleague, Edward Teller. Though
AMERICAN STORIES
216
Teller said that his old friend was “loyal to the United States,” he claimed,
“I would feel personally more secure if public matters would rest in” hands
other than Oppenheimer’s. The coffin had been nailed. Oppenheimer lost his
security clearance, which also “severed [him] from the cutting edge of work
in his field.”
19
Although Oppenheimer’s work as a physicist was hobbled,
most top-notch scientists retained their respect for him while turning their
backs on Edward Teller, whom they saw as fanatical in his campaign against
Oppenheimer.
Oppenheimer spent the next decade devoted to promoting science and to
engendering a more peaceful world; he died of cancer in 1967. Teller lived
until 2003, and though sick with intestinal problems and plagued by depres-
sion,
during the 1980s he was a major impetus behind development efforts
for President Ronald Reagan’s boondoggle “Star Wars” defense system of
satellite-to-missile laser beams. Hoover lived until 1972, running the FBI
like a feudal lord and spying on such admirable Americans as Martin Luther
King Jr., whom Hoover deemed as great a threat to American civilization as
Oppenheimer had seemed in the early 1950s.
Congressman
Richard Nixon of California used his role in the Alger Hiss
trial as a springboard to the vice presidency, a job he held from 1952 through
1960 under President Eisenhower. Nixon fancied himself the ultimate cold
warrior, a hunter of subversives and “reds,” and a champion of American mo-
rality
on par with J. Edgar Hoover. In 1969 he became president and in 1974
became the first president to resign, which he did to avoid impeachment for his
probable role in the Watergate scandal, essentially an illegal series of break-ins
and frauds that dismally recalled Hoover’s wiretapping operations.
Notes
1. Joseph Canon, “A Novel Idea of Oppenheimer,” in Cynthia C. Kelly, ed., Op-
penheimer and the Manhattan Project: Insights Into J. Robert Oppenheimer, “Father
of the Atomic Bomb” (Hackensack, NJ: World Scientific, 2006), 28.
2. Simon Sebag Montefiore, Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar (New York: Knopf,
2004), 499.
3.
Quoted in Ken Hechler, Working with Truman: A Personal Memoir of the
Whitehouse Years (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1982), 22.
4.
Nigel Rees, Brewer’s Famous Quotations: 5000 Quotations and the Stories
Behind Them (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2006), 208.
5. Jonathan
Daniels, The Man of Independence (Columbia: University of Mis-
souri Press, 1998), 330.
6.
With permission of the Ann Elmo Agency, Inc., all excerpts from Truman’s
diary are taken from Robert H. Ferrell, ed., Off the Record: The Private Papers of
Harry S. Truman (New York: Harper and Row, 1980), 44–45.
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FROM WORLD WAR TO COLD WAR
7. Harry S. Truman, “Address Before the National Association for the Advance-
ment of Colored People,” June 29, 1947, Harry S. Truman Library and Museum,
www.
trumanlibrary.org/publicpapers/index.php?pid=2115&st=&st1=.
8. Harry
S. Truman, “The Truman Doctrine,” March 12, 1947, in The Annals of
America, 1940–1949 (Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1976), 16: 434–436.
9. Annals of America, “Harry S. Truman, Loyalty Order,” 16: 446–450.
10. Quoted in Gaddis Smith, The Last Years of the Monroe Doctrine, 1945–1993
(New York: Hill and Wang, 1995), 69.
11. Quoted in Annals of America, 440–446.
1
2. Abraham Pais and Robert P. Crease, J. Robert Oppenheimer: A Life (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2007), 204.
13. Pais and Crease, J. Robert Oppenheimer, 188.
14. David Halberstam, The Fifties (New York: Villard, 1993), 39.
15. Halberstam, The Fifties, 12.
16. Thomas Patrick Doherty, Cold War, Cool Medium: Television, McCarthyism,
and American Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 204.
17. Robert H. Ferrell, Harry S. Truman and the Modern American Presidency
(New
York: HarperCollins, 1983), 129.
18. Pais and Crease, J. Robert Oppenheimer, 152.
19. Halberstam, The Fifties, 351, 353.