Of Super bombs and primitives
On September 3, 1949, an American B–29 weather reconnaissance plane recorded a higher than normal radioactive count eighteen thousand feet over the northern Pacific. Two days later, a second weather plane flying between Guam and Japan picked up another dose of radiation. As the winds swept the cloud eastward, more planes were sent aloft to collect samples. Their air filters absorbed fission isotopes of barium and cerium. By mid-September, U.S. scientists were convinced: there had been an atomic explosion in Russia.
Truman was incredulous at first. “Are you sure?” he asked. “Are you sure?” The President did not believe the Soviets were capable of building a bomb so quickly. But the Pentagon had no doubt. The Air Force called the explosion Operation Joe, after Stalin, and immediately pressed to increase U.S. A-bomb production. In Congress, Arthur Vandenberg believed the news. “This is now a different world,” he said.
America was no longer an island, protected by two oceans from the ravages of war. What had happened to London and Berlin, Tokyo and Stalingrad—or more precisely and unthinkably, Hiroshima and Nagasaki—could now happen to New York and Chicago. A quiet sense of dread spread through the country when Truman announced on September 23, “We have evidence that within recent weeks an atomic explosion has occurred in the U.S.S.R.” In London, Lloyd’s gave peace less than an even chance.
Without its monopoly on the bomb, the U.S. could no longer feel complacent about military superiority. Truman had been able to ignore Forrestal’s pleas for more and better conventional forces because he believed that the bomb alone would check Soviet aggression. Now he could not be so sure.
To George Kennan, the news gave a terrible urgency to his own cause. He began to see his mission as not merely defusing tensions along the East-West divide in Europe, but taking the first steps toward nuclear disarmament. He had already given notice that he would step down as head of PPS “as soon as possible,” but now he undertook one last assignment: exploring the ramifications of the Soviet bomb for U.S. national security planning. He began planning, as it were, against doomsday.
Kennan had increasingly lost touch with, and control over, his own Policy Planning Staff. Its members had ignored his qualms about creating a Western Alliance in 1948. By the fall of 1949, a member of the staff recalls, Kennan had stopped trying to shape consensus. In meetings, he would be “wholly frank” and “listen closely.” But after the discussion around the table had gotten to the point where Kennan had “heard all he wanted to,” he would go off with his secretary to a little office he kept in the Library of Congress. There, undisturbed, he would write. Once done, the staffer recalls he was locked in; he would not compromise. Any tinkering, he believed, would ruin his document’s essence, its “inner worth.” He wanted the paper to be “pure Kennan, or nothing.”
The staffer who offers this description of Kennan’s modus operandi in the fall of 1949 is Paul Nitze. He was, at the time, Kennan’s deputy. He was about to become his successor as the State Department’s chief planner.
Paul Nitze was in many ways better suited than Kennan to the small world of postwar foreign policy makers. Urbane, fit, impeccably dressed, a slight patrician lilt to his voice, Nitze came by way of Harvard and Wall Street. He shared none of Kennan’s insecurity, and little of what Acheson called Kennan’s “sweetness of spirit.” He was, like Kennan, intense at times, and he had the same high sense of public duty and honor. One essential difference set them apart: whereas Kennan was tentative, beset by complexity and nuance when it came time to decide, Nitze went flat out. He was far more of a doer; he brought his intensity to carrying through on his ideals, even if at times that meant making them “clearer than the truth.”
As a boy growing up on the South Side of Chicago, the young Paul Nitze was sent off to school every day wearing a Buster Brown suit. Mocked and beaten up by local toughs, he joined an Italian street gang in self-protection. It was an early lesson, he later recalled, in power relationships.
Nitze’s father, scion of a well-to-do German family that had immigrated to the U.S. after the Civil War, was a professor of Romance languages at the University of Chicago. His mother loved young Paul “in a totally intense way,” he recalls. A flamboyant beauty, she shocked Chicago society by smoking cigarettes and cavorting with liberal and outrageous friends, including Sally Rand, the fan dancer, and Isadora Duncan.
Nitze grew up in the most intellectual of worlds, amidst the creative ferment surrounding the University of Chicago in its heyday. He later recalled, however, that as he grew older he found the endless discussions among Chicago professors vapid and ineffectual; the relentless talk made him yearn for a sense of accomplishment, for matters more concrete and tangible than, say, his father’s expertise in philology. The monotony was greatly relieved by long trips to Europe—for six months every two years during his boyhood. He was in Germany when World War I broke out; the Germans hissed at him for speaking English and his father had to sew an American flag on his sleeve.
A prodigy at the University of Chicago High School, Nitze was packed off to Hotchkiss at sixteen. “I enjoyed it,” he recalled. “I developed bad habits. I did not work but I played football and made friends.” His father wanted him to go to Yale along with most of his Hotchkiss classmates, but an “unattractively drunken” Yale alumni dinner in Chicago queered him on Old Eli. He went to Harvard instead.
There he began by rowing and getting A’s but soon fell in with a fast crowd of white-shoe boys, including Chip Bohlen. Bored with an economics course, he skipped the final exam to go to a house party in Newport, and received a zero. “In those days, grades didn’t count. Harvard was more like a European university. You just tried to absorb wisdom. We all drank too much, had girls, and a rich glorious life.” Exertions included paddling a small craft from Ipswich, Massachusetts, to New York City with a Porcellian chum, Freddie Winthrop, on a drunken dare after Nitze had just recovered from a bout of hepatitis. They made it in eight days and Nitze ended up back in the hospital. He almost died.
Nitze was, he likes to recall, the last man hired on Wall Street before the Crash of ’29, joining Dillon, Read two weeks before Black Thursday. Despite the hard times, he became the pet of Clarence Dillon and flourished as an investment banker. Then, he recalls, “I did a deal badly.” It appeared that the firm was out $1.7 million, and as a result “Mr. Dillon ceased to know my name.” His downfall did serve, however, to bring him close to another Dillon, Read partner, James Forrestal, who appreciated Nitze’s new humility.
Nitze’s first meeting with Forrestal had given him a sense of the future Defense Secretary’s intensity as well as his priorities. Forrestal had burst into the partners’ dining room where Nitze was eating lunch with old man Dillon to announce that he had come up with a plan to trump a competitor in a complex business deal. He said that he would act on the plan “the day after tomorrow.” Dillon told him to do it “tomorrow.” Forrestal had hesitated for a moment and come back with “Tomorrow afternoon.” “Why not tomorrow morning?” asked Dillon. “I’m getting married,” Forrestal ruefully explained. The next morning he married Josephine, and in the afternoon he arranged a bank merger.
Nitze himself worked too hard. He took no vacations for almost eight years. Finally, in the spring of 1937 the market turned slack, and he felt he could afford to take his wife, Phyllis (née Pratt, a Standard Oil heiress), and his children to Europe for a vacation. The trip was not relaxing. In Germany, he tried to find a Jewish business associate, but, it turned out, the man had been taken in by the Gestapo. He waved to another Jewish businessman he knew on the Parisplatz, but the man nervously scuttled away. He saw Hitler Youth, “arrogant and disdainful.” He became acutely aware of, and uneasy about, his own national origins.
When he returned to New York, instead of going back to Wall Street, he decided to take a full year off to study sociology, religion, and history at Harvard. Clarence Dillon told him that his sabbatical was “asinine, crazy.” But Nitze felt a strong need to understand the terrible forces loosed in Europe. Tutored by a White Russian émigré, he learned to “understand Communism” and grappled with Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West, an opaquely written and ardently Germanic study of historical determinism. The cumulative effect of visiting Germany and studying at Harvard was to make him an America Firster. He wanted to keep the U.S. out of the “coming apocalypse,” as much to avoid Stalinism as Nazism. The German-Soviet pact in 1939 and Russia’s invasion of Finland made him fearful of a most unholy alliance. Even after the Soviets switched sides and became an ally, Nitze says, he remained highly suspicious.
Upon his return to Wall Street in 1939, Nitze began having long talks with Jim Forrestal about Communism, even sharing his Harvard reading list with him. Both had a typical Wall Street aversion to Bolshevism, but also an uncharacteristic desire to read and think about it. The two further defied Wall Street convention by approving of FDR’s Keynesian economic policies; they understood better than their hidebound Republican friends that the economy desperately needed liquidity.
It was Forrestal who recruited Nitze to government. Nitze was fishing in Louisiana with August Belmont in June of 1940 when he received a telegram: “Be in Washington Monday morning. Forrestal.” When Nitze dutifully showed up in the office Forrestal occupied as one of FDR’s “Silent Six” advisers and asked what he was there for, Forrestal replied simply, “To help me.” “Who pays my salary?” Nitze asked. “Dillon, Read” was the reply. “Where do I live?” he asked. “With me,” said Forrestal. The working arrangement was “all totally illegal and improper,” Nitze recalls but it was a trifle compared to some of the shortcuts Forrestal would take in wartime Washington. Nitze quickly abandoned his isolationism; Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement, he later recalled, was “a rude but enduring lesson.”
War’s end found Nitze working on the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey with John Kenneth Galbraith and George Ball. The experience made them all doubtful about the efficiency of conventional long-range bombing, a skepticism that would affect their attitude toward the Vietnam War. But whereas Galbraith and Ball also developed a low regard for the military, Nitze became quite fascinated by it. In Galbraith’s acerbic view, Nitze became a “Teutonic martinet happiest in a military hierarchy.” It is more charitable to say that Nitze admired and befriended General Douglas MacArthur, the U.S. Supreme Commander in Japan. America’s Caesar even tried to hire Nitze to rebuild Japan’s economy after the war. The arrangement fell through when Nitze insisted on getting help from Washington, and MacArthur exploded, “I have absolutely no use for Washington at all, including the President!”
As a director of the Strategic Bombing Survey, Nitze was one of the first Americans to see the rubble of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Curiously, however, he was not overwhelmed by the devastation. His task, he later recalled, was to “measure precisely” the impact of the bomb—“to put calipers on it, instead of describing it in emotive terms.” While others saw the bomb as the ultimate proof of the futility of war, Nitze saw it as a weapon that could and probably would be used again. The damage in Hiroshima, he reckoned, was simply the equivalent of an incendiary bombing raid by 210 B-29s.
When Nitze returned home he sought to prepare America to survive a nuclear attack. In his report on strategic bombing, he recommended that the U.S. disperse its vital industry and medical facilities and consider adopting a nation-wide bomb shelter program. The country, he soon discovered, was more interested in returning to peace-time normalcy. When Nitze tried to convince New York City masterbuilder Robert Moses to construct civil defense shelters, Moses cut him off: “Paul, you’re mad, absolutely mad. Nobody will pay attention to that.”
Unsure what else to do, Nitze after the war drifted back toward Wall Street. He was about to take a job in 1946 running J. H. Whitney and Company when he was drawn back into government by Assistant Secretary of State for Economic Affairs Will Clayton. Nitze turned his formidable talents to European recovery. He recommended to Clayton a massive American aid program to restore Europe in December of 1946—four months before the Marshall Plan became a serious item on the agenda for Acheson, Kennan, and others.
Kennan was quick to spot Nitze’s brilliance. In the spring of 1947, he tried to hire Nitze as deputy of the Policy Planning Staff to handle economic questions. Ironically, in light of their later close alliance, Acheson vetoed Nitze. The two had sparred for bureaucratic reasons at the State Department during the war, and Acheson regarded Nitze as a “Wall Street operator.” Nitze’s performance in helping to write and sell ERP changed Acheson’s mind, and when Kennan asked again if he could have Nitze as his number two at PPS in the summer of 1949, Acheson assented.
One of Nitze’s chores was work as liaison with the Pentagon on military preparedness. It was from an Air Force colonel in the Pentagon, in October of 1949, that Nitze first heard about the Super bomb.
Edward Teller, the scientist who had helped create the atomic bomb for the United States, was furious to learn that the Soviets now had one too. His answer was to build a bigger bomb—much bigger, one thousand times bigger, a hydrogen bomb detonated by nuclear fusion. In the fall of 1949, Teller made a crusade of the Super, as the H-bomb was then called, trying to convince any policy maker he could find that the U.S. could regain the nuclear edge over the Soviets with this fantastic weapon of destruction.
Teller was only too happy to tutor Paul Nitze. The State Department planner was a good pupil, with a technical mind and an easy grasp of numbers. Teller had a much simpler time with Nitze than Robert Oppenheimer had had trying to teach atomic physics to Acheson and McCloy in 1946. (Nitze did not need to pretend that neutrons and electrons were “little men.”) As Nitze watched Teller’s chalk race across the blackboard, he became convinced that the Super would work.
Other scientists were not so sure the Super could be built, and even less sure it ought to be. On October 10, David Lilienthal, the chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, wrote in his diary, “We keep saying, ‘we have no other course’; what we should be saying is ‘we are not bright enough to see any other course.’ The day has been filled, too, with talk about Supers, single weapons capable of desolating a vast area. . . . Is this all we have to offer?” Oppenheimer was, if anything, more troubled. As the head of a special advisory committee to the AEC asked to recommend whether or not to go ahead with the Super, he counseled other members to vote no. He saw technical problems: the Super was too big, it would use up too much fissionable fuel. But his real reservation was moral. He warned that “by its very nature [the Super] cannot be confined to a military objective but becomes a weapon which in practical effect is almost one of genocide.” In late October, Oppenheimer’s committee voted unanimously against developing the new bomb.
It fell to a special three-man national security committee created by President Truman to finally decide. One member, Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson, was in favor of the new bomb. Another, AEC chairman Lilienthal, was against. The swing vote was the Secretary of State.
Acheson had great regard for both Oppenheimer and Lilienthal. He had shared their desire to neutralize and control the bomb by sharing it with the Russians back in 1946. On November 1, Lilienthal came to him and gave him the moral and practical arguments against taking a new leap in the arms race.
Two days later, Acheson went to the Policy Planning Staff to ask their advice. Kennan was aggressively opposed to the new bomb. He had already allied himself with Oppenheimer, traveling up to Princeton in October to tell the scientist that the Soviets were paranoid and that a bigger bomb would just make them feel cornered and more dangerous. Now, with Acheson, he questioned what would be accomplished by building the Super “without showing the Russians any ray of light as far as their own [nuclear] policy is concerned.” Instead, Kennan wanted to investigate further possibilities for international control.
Acheson had some sympathy for this view. At the PPS meeting he at least toyed with the idea of an eighteen-to-twenty-four-month moratorium on testing the bomb “during which time,” as he put it, “you do your best to ease the international situation, come to an agreement with the Russians, put your economic house in order, get your people’s minds set on whatever is necessary to do, and if no agreement is in sight at the end of that time . . . then go ahead with overall production of both the Super bomb and the atomic bomb.”
But the Acheson of 1949 had himself evolved in his view of how to handle the Soviets, and in a direction entirely opposite from Kennan’s. He could understand how his friends Lilienthal and Oppenheimer would, for visceral reasons, not want to bring any more evil into the world and indeed would want to stuff the genie back into the bottle. But he could not understand “the logic” of their view. The Soviets, he believed, were sure to build the Super bomb if the U.S. did not. Acheson’s liberalism was by now all but eclipsed by his distrust of the Soviets. He told a Policy Planning staffer, Gordon Arneson, “You know, I listened as carefully as I know how, but I don’t understand what Oppie was trying to say. How can you persuade a paranoid adversary to disarm ‘by example’?”
As Acheson’s own thinking moved him closer to endorsing the Super, Kennan’s mind raced with the larger implications of U.S. nuclear policy. Vanishing into his hideaway at the Library of Congress, he began drafting a seventy-seven-page cri de coeur about nuclear arms. The paper became an obsession; in November and December he could work on little else. He later called it “one of the most important, if not the most important, of all the documents I ever wrote in government.”
The cold realism Kennan brought to big-power relationships left him totally when he considered nuclear bombs. He regarded them as instruments of genocide and suicide. They were in no sense ordinary weapons that could conceivably be used in a war. They would not “spare the unarmed and helpless noncombatant . . . as well as the combatant prepared to lay down his arms.” By building the Super, Kennan feared, the U.S. would escalate the arms race to a point of no return. He pleaded for a serious effort at international control, doubting that more than lip service had been paid to the idea, despite the earlier labors of Stimson, McCloy, Acheson, and Lilienthal. At the very least, he argued, the U.S. should forswear first use of nuclear weapons.
Kennan’s arguments were, as usual, farsighted. His discussion of “no first use” (the idea that the U.S. should exclude from its contingency planning the possibility or threat of being the first to use nuclear weapons) anticipated a debate that would pick up in the Kennedy Administration and rattle on into the 1980s. But, as usual, Kennan was out of kilter with the times. His paper had no discernible impact on policy making. Indeed, it was a tangent; the issue before Acheson was more narrowly whether or not to build the Super, not international control or “no first use.” And, as usual, Kennan harmed his case by showing his fragile emotions.
He was touchy even with Chip Bohlen. When Bohlen mildly accused him of “engaging in polemics,” Kennan wrote back with wounded feelings: “We have always argued warmly, with our gloves off. You know me well enough to take into account my polemical temperament. . . . I find my estimate of my own political usefulness here shaken by the depth of this disagreement, and others I have had with numbers of worthy people. I would be happier than ever if, as I hope, it will be possible for me next June to subside quietly into at least a year or two of private life.” This time Bohlen agreed; in December, he wrote Bob Lovett that he had had “for some time a feeling that a breathing spell for a year or so would not be at all a bad thing for his [Kennan’s] case.”
Acheson had genuine affection for Kennan. “I have rarely met a man the depth of whose thought, the sweetness of whose nature combined to bring a real understanding of the problems of modern life,” he told a War College audience in December. The speech lifted Kennan out of a deep funk; that night he wrote Acheson that he had badly needed some cheering up, because when he had awakened that morning he had been tempted to go into his baby’s room and say, “Go on, get up. You’re going to work today. I’ll get in the crib.” Yet this was just the sort of self-pity Acheson could not abide. In private with Kennan, Acheson was a good deal less sympathetic. When Kennan kept after him with his antinuclear screed, Acheson finally snapped at him, “If that is your view you ought to resign from the Foreign Service and go out and preach your Quaker gospel, but don’t do it within the department.”
Acheson was hearing an entirely different message from Kennan’s number two that fall. To Paul Nitze, the issue was not moral but practical: Would the Super work? He was convinced from his lessons with Edward Teller that the new bomb could be “weaponized.” Unlike Kennan, Nitze did not regard nuclear war as unthinkable. His experience with the Strategic Bombing Survey had taught him that the bomb was just one more weapon, more devastating perhaps, but not qualitatively different from other bombs. What is more, he told Acheson that the real lesson of the Soviet bomb was not merely that the U.S. should proceed with the Super, but that it should build up conventional forces. The bomb was no longer enough to keep the Soviets in check. Nitze had gone to Europe with a group from the Pentagon that summer at the invitation of British military planners. The expedition had been a revelation. The British showed him their working sheets. To stop the Soviets at the Rhine, they estimated, would cost NATO $45 billion, or three times the cost of the Marshall Plan and three times current U.S. spending on defense. To Nitze, the real mission became clear; to wake up the Administration and Congress and make them spend more money, much more money, on defense.
Nitze shared his views with Acheson, who was of like mind. Acheson knew full well that NATO was a shell. At the signing ceremony for the North Atlantic Treaty that spring, Acheson had sardonically noted that the band’s selection of show tunes from the Broadway hit Porgy and Bess was appropriate: “I’ve Got Plenty of Nothin’” and “It Ain’t Necessarily So.” Acheson was tired of hearing morality lectures. Here was a planner who would give him the facts, a realist who understood power, who spoke clearly and to the point. In November, Acheson decided to make Nitze the new head of PPS.
State’s new planner was a technician and a numbers man, a pragmatist, who understood the military and liked it. Military considerations had been almost missing from Kennan’s planning. Kennan was emotional, intuitive, he understood broad forces that swept nations, but little about the physical requirements of stopping Soviet tanks at the Rhine. Personally, Kennan and Nitze were friends—true friends. More than three decades later, the warmest toast to Kennan at his eightieth birthday party would be spoken by Paul Nitze. But in the intervening years, they came to represent opposing points of view on how to deal with the Soviet Union.
Kennan did not formally turn over PPS to Nitze until January 1, 1950, but in fact Nitze held sway by mid-November. Significantly, when Acheson had to pick a staffer to run his working group for the special committee appointed by Truman to decide on the Super, he chose Nitze, not Kennan. The committee’s conclusion was foregone. It recommended to Truman that development proceed. The committee also urged that the U.S. undertake a comprehensive study of U.S. national security policy. On January 31, the President agreed.
In death, James Forrestal’s wish was fulfilled. The study, known as NSC-68, would be a memorial to Forrestal’s unrelenting demand for military preparedness. In addition, it would come to be regarded as a blueprint for U.S. national security policy through the 1960s. To run a special interdepartmental group to write NSC-68, Acheson naturally picked his new planner, Nitze. At the same time, Kennan was dispatched on a fact-finding tour of South America.
The long-simmering and tragic case of Alger Hiss came to a head that winter. On Saturday, January 22, 1950, the prim young Brahmin was convicted of perjury. His first trial six months earlier had ended in a hung jury, but a second jury found that he had lied when he denied having given classified documents to a Communist agent. For the Republicans, the Hiss tragedy was a political deliverance.
By unfortunate timing, Acheson was scheduled to give a press conference on Tuesday, the day Hiss was to be sentenced. On Sunday, Acheson read the newspapers, full of gloating by Richard Nixon, Hess’s chief congressional prosecutor, and Republican insinuations that Hiss was barely the tip of a vast New Deal–Harvard-State Department conspiracy to surrender to Russia. From Hiss’s colleagues in the Administration came a resounding silence. But the man who had been taught by Brandeis that loyalty and honor are inseparable decided to speak out.
Acheson was not particularly fond of Alger Hiss, but he had worked with him and counseled him. As director of the State Department’s Office of Special Political Affairs, dealing with U.N. matters, Hiss had attended Acheson’s nine-thirty meetings back in 1946; a silver tray on Acheson’s desk bore Hiss’s signature, alongside those of other members of the “Nine-Thirty Club—or Prayer Meeting,” including Chip Bohlen and Dean Rusk, then a young State Department official. Hiss had clerked for Justice Holmes, an important credential to Acheson, and his brother, Donald, was Acheson’s law partner. As a favor to Donald, Acheson had secretly helped Hiss prepare his defense before the House Un-American Activities Committee a year and a half before.
In a reflective speech in 1946, Acheson had stated, “If one is to spin from his own visceral wisdom, he must say first, ‘I shall not be a fake.’” Acheson would not be a fake to himself, nor to Alger Hiss.
The night before his press conference, Acheson told his special assistant, Lucius Battle, that he would defend Hiss. Battle, who sensed the risk immediately, told Paul Nitze, “We’ve got to stop him.” At the morning meeting, the two men warned Acheson to be careful. He replied that he merely intended to read from the Sermon on the Mount. They were not entirely reassured.
At breakfast that Tuesday, Acheson had told his wife that he was sure he would be asked about Hiss. “I’m going to reply that I will not forsake him,” Acheson said. Alice, made of stoical stuff, had replied: “What else could you say?” “Don’t think this is a light matter,” he warned. “This could be quite a storm and it could get me in trouble.” Alice asked if he was sure he was right. Acheson, heading for the door, replied, “It is what I have to do.”
Homer Bigart of the New York Herald Tribune asked the question: “Mr. Secretary, have you any comment on the Alger Hiss case?”
Acheson began by stating that the case was still before the courts so it would be improper for him to discuss it. Before his aides could breathe a sigh of relief, however, Acheson plowed forward: “I take it the purpose of your question was to bring something other than that out of me.” Then he stated: “I should like to make clear that whatever the outcome of any appeal which Mr. Hiss or his lawyers might take in this case I do not intend to turn my back on Alger Hiss.”
The words were to become permanently engraved next to Acheson’s name, a taunt to the Republican right, further proof of the terrible conspiracy at Foggy Bottom. As the reporters scribbled, Acheson went on to quote the words Jesus Christ spoke on the Mount of Olives according to Matthew: “‘. . . I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me.’”
On the Senate floor at that moment, the right-wingers were avidly chewing over the Hiss case. Karl Mundt, a HUAC member in his House days, fulminated about how Hiss and his “Harvard accent” had brought about the “entire subjugation of China by Communist forces directed from Moscow.” Senator William Knowland threatened to withhold State Department appropriations until Foggy Bottom disgorged its traitors. Senator Kenneth Wherry had just dug into the “secret agreement of Yalta” when Joe McCarthy burst onto the floor and interrupted.
“I wonder,” asked McCarthy, “if the senator is aware of a most fantastic statement the Secretary of State has made in the last few minutes?” McCarthy with feigned indignation and barely restrained glee read Acheson’s refusal to turn his back on Alger Hiss. Then he wondered aloud if the statement meant that Acheson would not turn his back on other Communists as well.
Expecting the worst, Acheson had asked for an appointment with the President. He found Harry Truman in his office reading the wire stories about his remarks. Truman smiled as Acheson entered the room. Acheson offered to resign, but the President would not even hear of it. As one who had been roundly criticized for going to the funeral of a “friendless old man just out of the penitentiary,” Truman said, referring to his own attendance at Kansas City Boss Tom Pendergast’s funeral in 1945, he had no trouble understanding what Acheson meant or approving of it.
That evening, Acheson delved into his feelings in a long letter to his daughter Mary:
Alger’s case has been on my mind incessantly. As I had written you, here is stark tragedy—whatever the reasonably probable facts may be. I knew that I would be asked about it and the answer was a hard one—not in the ordinary sense of do I run or do I stand. That presented no problem. But to say what one really meant—forgetting the yelping pack at one’s heels—saying no more and no less than one truly believed, this was not easy. I felt that advisers were of no use and so consulted none. I understood that I had responsibilities above and beyond my own desires.
The uproar swelled. “Disgusting,” sneered Nixon. Senator Bridges of New Hampshire announced that he would “go after” Acheson. Wherry insisted that Acheson “must go” as a “bad security risk.”
China was lost, and Russia had the bomb. Six days after Acheson’s press conference, Truman announced that the U.S. would develop a bigger bomb, the Super bomb. Albert Einstein went on television to say that “annihilation of any life on Earth has been brought within the range of possibilities. . . . General annihilation beckons.” Two days later, Klaus Fuchs, a scientist who had worked on the Manhattan Project, was arrested for giving the secret of the atomic bomb to the Soviets.
Joe McCarthy was still an obscure hack, voted the worst U.S. senator in one poll of the press corps, linked to a minor housing contractor’s scandal, more visible to Washington barflies than to his Wisconsin constituents. But on February 9, two weeks after Acheson’s press conference, McCarthy delivered a speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, that, to many, seemed to explain everything. Waving a piece of paper, he insisted in his high-pitched whine that he had in his hand a list of fifty-seven Department of State employees who were Communists.
The headlines began rolling, and McCarthy never looked back. He kept up the attack from the libel-proof precincts of the Senate floor, ranting about the “twisted bunch of intellectuals” who kept the President in thrall, the State Department “infested” with “vast numbers” of Reds and “espionage rings.” It was all smoke; the number of Reds in the State Department changed from day to day—57, 205, 81—and McCarthy never did catch a real Communist. But no matter. He had started up a strange and terrible machine: he charged, the press printed; he charged, the press printed. By the time the denials caught up they were buried inside the paper; on page one were new headlines, like “Jessup pal of Reds—McCarthy,” a slur on Acheson’s irreproachable ambassador-at-large, Philip Jessup. Many readers knew better, of course, but just as many did not. McCarthy tapped into an old and deep know-nothing vein of American nativism, a virulent blend of FDR haters, Harvard haters, Wall Street haters, Washington haters, and just plain haters. Many who did know better kept quiet out of fear. The Repubican leadership formally backed McCarthy on March 22, stating “the pro-Communist policies of the State Department fully justify Joe McCarthy.” Senate GOP leader Bob Taft, in a shabby moment of an estimable career, whispered to McCarthy, “If one case doesn’t work, try another.”
Acheson’s friends—his oldest friends, the ones who really counted—rallied around. On the night of the press conference at which he vowed not to turn his back on Hiss, Acheson was applauded at dinner by Jack McCloy; the next night at dinner by Chip Bohlen. Bob Lovett sent him a typically whimsical letter blaming snowfall on card-carrying Communist weathermen (“whoever is responsible for it is a nasty, double-jointed traitor to his country and his class and I hope he finds lumps in his mashed potatoes. If he does, and opens them up, he is quite apt to find either Bridges or Wherry in them”). Lovett also thoughtfully offered Acheson his house in Hobe Sound for the month of April to rest up and wrote, “I pray for you—quite literally.” The congratulatory letters poured in; from the headmaster of Groton, from Yale classmates (“You have plenty of guts!”), from his brothers in Keys. One, Boylston Adams Tompkins, assured him that his “real friends” would protect him from the “jackals.” Clark Clifford wrote, “The statements of McCarthy and his ilk remind me of curs snapping at the heels of a thoroughbred.”
At first, Acheson felt fairly pleased with himself about the Hiss statement, recalls his assistant, Lucius Battle. He considered McCarthy, Wherry, Bridges and Co. beneath his contempt. He began calling them “the primitives.” When Alice was dragged in because she had joined a “leftist” organization called the Washington League of Women Shoppers, which boycotted stores that were unfair to their employees, Acheson made light of it, in his slightly haughty way. He explained to reporters that he had read to her the list of the other sponsors and she had said that it rather sounded like the Social Register and that her standing was going up. To the American Society of Newspaper Editors, Acheson was brusque. He stated: “I don’t ask your sympathy. I don’t ask your help. You are in a worse position than me.” He said that he was merely a “victim” while the press was a “participant.” He quoted John Donne at them: “‘Never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.’”
Truman was equally, if less eloquently, contemptuous. “Privately, I refer to McCarthy as a pathological liar, and Wherry as the block-headed undertaker from Nebraska,” he wrote Acheson on March 31. “Of course we can’t do that publicly but that’s exactly what they are.” Truman, like Acheson, refused to take them seriously. “I think we have those animals on the run,” he told Acheson in March.
The President and his Secretary of State underestimated the rabid pack. They would find the baying and howling harder and harder to ignore in the year ahead. It has become fashionable for historians to assume that Acheson was embittered and hardened by the vilification, made more inflexible and rigidly anti-Communist. Some of his friends share this assessment; Chip Bohlen, for one, asserts it in his memoirs. Acheson would deny that the primitives had any effect on him whatsoever, and it is impossible to know for sure what impact the right-wing assaults had on his innermost thoughts. Thirty years later, however, Alice said that the “attack of the primitives” took ten years off her husband’s life.
Acheson himself acknowledged in 1954 that his Hiss statement had hurt the department. In discussing the period with Nitze and other old colleagues, he realized that he had “brought down the lightning on their shoulders.” He added that “turn my back” was an “awful phrase” thought up “at the spur of the moment.”
Indeed, McCarthy’s witch-hunt tore through the Department of State. In February the department announced that it had fired ninety-one employees, mostly homosexuals, as security risks in the last three years. Over the next three years, the Loyalty Boards set up by Truman as a sop to the right wing in 1947 would fire hundreds more, of all types of innocents. Acheson tried fitfully to defend his troops, and he certainly did a better job of it than his successor as Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles. But he could not afford to take a high profile, to make a crusade out of protecting his underlings. He was damaged goods; he had exhausted his moral capital. By showing his courage in the defense of Hiss, he lost some of his ability to protect other State Department officials far more innocent of Communist ties than Hiss. Acheson was true to himself, and brave. But integrity can be an oddly selfish quality.
George Kennan was dead set against the writing of NSC-68. He did not believe there was a need for a massive military buildup. He did not believe that the Soviets would attack the U.S. unless provoked. The document would be clumsy and overstated, he feared, and serve only to inflame politicians who interfered with the successful conduct of diplomacy.
Kennan had his doubts about Nitze as well. The ex-Wall Streeter was fine for economic questions, but not for grand strategy. He was, like Lovett, too much of a banker, too much of a numbers man—only more intense than Lovett. Kennan had noticed that Nitze was not content until he could get numbers down on paper. He was so intense, Kennan later recalled, that when he wrote down numbers his pen would sometimes drive right through the paper.
In Kennan’s view, Nitze had succumbed to the seduction of military planning, to the “planner’s dummy.” The military always assumed the worst in its hypotheticals. Too much emphasis was put on the enemy’s capacity, not enough on his intentions.
Before leaving for South America in February Kennan wrote a last memo pleading for moderation. “There is little justification for the impression that the ‘cold war’ . . . has suddenly taken some turn to our disadvantage,” he wrote in a draft that he delivered orally to Acheson. The Soviet A-bomb “adds no new fundamental element to the picture . . . insofar as we see ourselves in any heightened trouble at the present moment, that feeling is largely of our own making.” He argued for “drastic measures to reduce the exorbitant cost of national defense.”
That was precisely the opposite of what Nitze was saying. At one of the Secretary’s morning meetings that month, Nitze stated that the risk of attack by the Soviet Union was “considerably greater” than it had been in the fall. There were increasing “signs of toughness” from the Soviets, he added, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff believed that the Red Army could attack Europe from a “standing start” without the usual signs of mobilization. As he expressed it in a memo: “Recent Soviet moves suggest a boldness that is essentially new and borders on the reckless.”
Actually, as Nitze later conceded, he was less concerned with Soviet intentions than capacity. The CIA reports of early February had shaken him. They forecast a Soviet stockpile of ten Nagasaki-size bombs by 1953, 200 by 1955. The intelligence agency estimated that roughly twenty bombs could put the U.S. out of war.
As Nitze saw it, maybe Kennan was right, maybe the Soviets would not attack. But how could he be so sure? What was really eating at Kennan, Nitze suspected, was that he believed a diplomatic elite should run foreign policy, without any interference from politicians or generals. To Nitze, Kennan was a diplomat only. He knew nothing about the military or defense strategy. That summer, Kennan had told Nitze that two divisions of marines would be enough to defend Europe. Nitze thought this was a ridiculous assertion and a mark of Kennan’s naïveté.
Nitze understood that the U.S. had to be prepared to fight a total war. It had to be able to control the skies, transport troops by air and sea, blunt armor attacks with armor. The minimum price tag for total preparedness Nitze knew from examining British and U.S. estimates was $40 to $50 billion. That was roughly three times what the Administration currently allotted to defense, but Nitze believed that the U.S. economy could afford the cost. As a Keynesian, he believed that deficit spending could fuel the economy enough to sustain much greater military spending. He had consulted with Leon Keyserling of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, who privately agreed.
The real question was whether Congress and the Administration would pay for it. The public had to be persuaded. The way to do that, Nitze knew from experience was to scare them: to tell them that the Soviets were intent on world domination, that they were poised to attack, and that the U.S. had to meet them everywhere. That was the message that Nitze gave to the drafters of NSC-68: he told them to “hit it hard.”
Joining Nitze in urging this course was a special consultant brought in to speak to the interdepartmental group working on NSC-68: Robert Lovett. Since leaving Washington a year earlier, Lovett had been quietly working as a banker and resisting Acheson’s attempts to bring him back into government, most recently as ambassador to England. In mid-March, Lovett flew down and delivered the drafters a pep talk that sounded a great deal like their final product. “We are now in a mortal conflict,” Lovett said, abandoning his usual caution. “We are in a war worse than we have ever experienced. It is not a cold war. It is a hot war. The only difference is that death comes more slowly and in a different fashion.”
This urgency had to be conveyed in the document, Lovett insisted. The conclusions should be written “in almost telegraphic style” with “Hemingway sentences.” Lovett added: “If we can sell every useless article known to man in large quantities, we should be able to sell our very fine story in larger quantities.” His almost desperate effort to build an Air Force from scratch as Hitler was rolling through Europe had forever convinced Lovett that the U.S. should never again be unprepared. He agreed with Nitze that the country could afford to spend much more for defense. “There is practically nothing that this country can’t do if it wants to.”
Like the Truman Doctrine pledging to defend freedom everywhere, NSC-68 was written quickly and by committee. It was a selling job, not a precise delineation of U.S. commitments. The language was ominous and lurid. “The grim oligarchy of the Kremlin . . . is seeking to demonstrate to the Free World that force and the will to use it are on the side of the Kremlin. . . . The implacable purpose of the slave state is to eliminate the challenge of freedom.” The document stressed Soviet ideology: “The Soviet Union, unlike previous aspirants to hegemony, is animated by a new fanatic faith, antithetical to our own, and seeks to impose its absolute authority over the rest of the world.”
The most important new idea was a concept later to be known as “flexible response.” The Soviets, NSC-68 argued, are expansionist everywhere. The Free World lacks the resources to thwart such expansion locally.
The U.S. will therefore be confronted more frequently with the dilemma of reacting totally to a limited expansion of Soviet control or not reacting at all (except with ineffectual protest and half measure). Continuation of present trends is likely to lead, therefore, to a gradual withdrawal under the direct or indirect pressure of the Soviet Union, until we discover one day that we have sacrificed positions of vital interest.
This was the nub: The U.S. had to be able to fight small conventional wars, and fight them anywhere, or one day it would find the Red Army in Paris. There was no effort to distinguish between vital and peripheral interests. “The assault on free institutions is worldwide now, and in the context of the present polarization of world power, a defeat of free institutions anywhere is a defeat everywhere.”
In April Bohlen was flown back from Paris, where he was still serving as minister in the U.S. Embassy, to comment on the draft. Already he was worried about the hawkish drift in Nitze’s thinking. When his old clubmate had visited Paris five months before, they had engaged in “long and gloomy debates.” Bohlen, meanwhile, had patched up his differences with Kennan, and on a trip to Washington in January had enjoyed, as he wrote his wife “many long and on the whole satisfactory talks with George.”
Bohlen found himself, as he often did, somewhere between Kennan and the current consensus. He agreed that it was necessary to build up conventional forces, though perhaps not quite as much as Nitze had in mind. But he did not agree that the Soviets intended to “dominate the world,” or that war was “inevitable.” Worried that the U.S. was overstating its commitments, he wrote Nitze that NSC-68 “oversimplifies the problem.”
Nitze could not understand what Bohlen was so riled up about. He believed NSC-68 was essentially restating what Kennan himself had written about the Soviets in the X-Article and a host of PPS papers. At Bohlen’s insistence, Nitze made some changes that he regarded as purely cosmetic, but which Bohlen regarded as essential. As Soviet aims, Nitze had originally listed world domination first. Bohlen persuaded him to describe “protecting their own borders” as the Soviets’ top priority. Second came controlling their satellites. Then only third came global expansion.
As he had with Kennan, Nitze attributed his differences with Bohlen to his adversary’s ignorance of military capability. As Nitze later recalled their conversations, Bohlen did not believe that the Soviets were technically capable of mounting a modern offensive blitzkrieg. He thought the Soviet bureaucracy was so incompetent that it could do little right. The fallacy of Bohlen’s judgment came clear to Nitze that spring. When the CIA reported that the Soviets were building 315 MiGs a month, while the U.S. was producing only half a dozen F-86s, Bohlen said the estimates were preposterous, that the Soviets could never produce so many. The CIA estimate was based on the square footage of certain Soviet factories, not on actual sighting of planes. Nitze decided to try a test case. He got the CIA to photograph a Soviet base on Sakhalin Island north of Japan. The CIA had predicted that it would find thirty to forty MiGs there. In fact, the U.S. spy plane photographed fifty. Nitze felt vindicated. “Chip,” he later recalled, “didn’t know what he was talking about.”
Nitze was careful to involve the Secretary of State in these discussions. Acheson talked to Nitze almost daily about the report through the late winter and early spring; from time to time, the Secretary would slip through the back door of his office into Nitze’s and sit in on the discussion as the drafters worked around the table.
Acheson was pretty well fed up with Kennan’s advice, but he liked and admired Bohlen and, though he regarded him as somewhat a devil’s advocate, he listened to his views. Through three long sessions with Acheson and Nitze, Bohlen tried to explain his objections. Finally Acheson threw up his hands and exclaimed that he could not understand what Bohlen was talking about. As far as he could tell, the document already said what Bohlen wanted it to say, which was what the Soviet experts had been saying all along. The Secretary didn’t have time to quibble over nuance.
Like Nitze, Acheson was more worried about selling the critical U.S. military buildup. Initially, Nitze and his PPS staff had intended to make large portions of the document public. Indeed, that was why the language was so loud and simplistic. The staff referred to the project as “Operation Candor.” Acheson, however, objected to full disclosure. He wanted to keep the document classified, for distribution only to those with top-secret classification, and he wanted to leave out any mention of cost altogether. When Nitze showed him the “back of the envelope figure” of $50 billion, Acheson replied, “Paul, don’t put that figure in the report. You’re right to tell me and I’ll tell the President, but don’t put any figure in the report.”
Acheson explained that he wanted to get the President and the top bureaucracy on board before he began selling to Congress and the public. The goal of NSC-68, he later stated, was “to bludgeon the mass mind of ‘top government’ so that not only could the President make a decision but that the decision could be carried out.”
Persuading the President would not be easy. Truman, wedded to balanced budgets, had steadfastly resisted the importuning of Forrestal for the previous three years. The new Secretary of Defense, curiously enough, would be an obstacle rather than an ally. Louis Johnson was more interested in his own political ambitions than in rebuilding the military. He had hitched himself to the balanced budget. He believed, incredibly, that he would be viewed as a savior by the public for holding down defense spending, and that in gratitude the people would elect him President in 1952.
Acheson loathed Johnson. He thought the Defense Secretary was loud, unprincipled, obnoxious, and a tool of the China lobby. Acheson’s judgment, subtracting slightly for his prejudice against politicians who reminded him of congressmen, was pretty nearly accurate.
Handling Johnson was difficult. He could not be allowed to know too much about NSC-68 while it was still in the drafting stages, or he might try to kill it. On the other hand, he could not just be presented with a fait accompli. On March 22, Acheson invited the Defense Secretary and the Joint Chiefs of Staff over to State for a briefing. So as not to attract newsmen, the Pentagon contingent entered by the basement, and came to Nitze’s office. Acheson started to explain the report when Johnson interrupted and asked if he, Acheson, had read it. Acheson said that he had. Johnson said that he had not and indeed had only heard of the report that morning. He told Acheson that he did not like being called into conferences without a chance to read the appropriate material, and added that this was the fourth time the Secretary of State had done this to him. He wanted no more of it.
Suddenly, he lunged forward with a crash of chair legs, pounded his fist on the table, and began accusing Acheson and Nitze of keeping him in the dark and trying to end run him. “I’m not going to be subjected to this indignity!” he stormed. “This is a conspiracy being conducted behind my back in order to subvert my policies! I and the chiefs are leaving now!” He stalked out. The meeting had lasted fourteen minutes. The Department of Defense representative on the committee, Major General James Burns, was so unnerved that he wept. Acheson decided that Johnson was “brain damaged.”
In later years, Nitze would concede that the language of NSC-68 “sounds extreme.” At the time, however, he thought he was squarely in the center. Acheson agreed with him, as did Lovett. Despite quibbles, he believed that Bohlen did too. Kennan—well, he was overwrought. But hadn’t he written the Long Telegram warning of the Soviet menace in the first place?
Acheson likewise hardly felt like a radical. From Europe, both McCloy, then U.S. High Commissioner in Germany, and Harriman, the U.S. administrator of the Marshall Plan, had weighed in to argue that European security depended on U.S. military might as well as economic aid. Indeed, Acheson thought he was holding off the true hawks, like one right-wing Republican senator, who at an off-the-record session with Acheson in January had urged a preemptive strike against Moscow. “Why don’t we get into this thing and get it over with before it is too late?” the senator demanded. Acheson responded bluntly that if preventive war was the policy of the United States he would resign.
Though Acheson wanted to keep NSC-68 itself under wraps, he began a PR campaign in February to lay the groundwork for the inevitable lobbying campaign of Congress. He felt beset by idiocy on all sides. There were the McCarthyites accusing the Administration of coddling Communists. At the same time, Senator Brien McMahon, chairman of the Joint Congressional Atomic Energy Committee, was urging the abolition of all nuclear weapons to be achieved by a “moral crusade for peace” and a $50 billion “global Marshall Plan.” Millard Tydings, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, proposed that the President convene a worldwide disarmament conference. U.N. Secretary-General Trygve Lie insisted that it was time for the U.S. to “sit down” with the Russians.
To Acheson, this was all poppycock. The Soviets, he told the press, understand only “situations of strength.” He warned against the “Trojan doves” of the Communist movement and called for an arms buildup. The U.S. could not afford to rely solely on the bomb; it could not, he told a Dallas audience, “pull down the blinds and sit in the parlor with a loaded shotgun, waiting.” After hearing Acheson talk at an off-the-record session at the Conference of State Governors in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, one governor remarked, “He scared hell out of us.”
Despite the global sweep of NSC-68’s rhetoric, its drafters and supporters were hardly unmindful of Lippmann’s injunction against skewing the balance of resources and commitments. They saw NSC-68 as a means of fulfilling existing commitments, not undertaking new ones. Testifying before the drafters in private session, Lovett urged that the U.S. “refrain from making commitments which are neither absolutely necessary nor within our capacity to fulfill.” Acheson himself told a congressional hearing that spring that the U.S. had to be careful not to take on more than it could afford. “I think we have to start out with the realization that the main center of activity at the present moment has got to be in Europe. We cannot scatter our shots equally all over the world. We just haven’t got the shots for that.”
This was hardly global intervention run amok. Indeed, Acheson had been widely criticized for excluding Korea from the U.S. defense perimeter in January. When John Foster Dulles came to Nitze in the spring and urged that the U.S. commit itself to defending Formosa from Chinese Communist invasion, Nitze disagreed. The U.S., he said, lacked the resources. (It is perhaps also worth noting that Nitze, the principal drafter of NSC-68, would be one of the few men in government to oppose U.S. involvement in Vietnam at the outset.)
The problem is that the cautionary, private views of men like Acheson and Nitze are quickly forgotten. Their bolder, simpler pronouncements, however, are remembered, and believed by ordinary citizens and their congressmen. In later years, NSC-68 would be held up by revisionist historians as the inevitable extension of the Truman Doctrine and a blueprint for disaster, responsible for the next two decades of East-West tension and the Vietnam War itself.
Acheson and Nitze hardly bear all the blame for a U.S. policy that pitted itself against global, monolithic Communism. Dulles, when he took over from Acheson under Dwight Eisenhower in 1953, would make a moral crusade of taking the Russians to the “brink,” and right-wing congressmen like McCarthy had all along fanned fear of Communism into a kind of hysteria, making it almost impossible for politicians to be reasonable about Communism and still get re-elected.
While Acheson found it necessary to make things clearer than the truth, he was not a cynic. He believed the U.S. had to arm to face down the Soviets, that the Kremlin understood only “situations of strength.” Still, propaganda can be insidious. It can convince even the propagandists, if they repeat the rhetoric often enough. When Truman asked Acheson, Lovett, Nitze, and Averell Harriman to update NSC-68 for the incoming Eisenhower Administration at the end of 1952, the group made only one significant change. Mindful of the Korean War, they argued that the U.S. should put more emphasis on stopping Communism in the Middle East, Africa, and Southeast Asia.
NSC-68 was flawed in another respect. Not only did it put too much emphasis on Soviet capability, and too little on the Kremlin’s intentions, it overestimated Soviet strength. As Nitze later acknowledged, of the 175 Soviet divisions cited in NSC-68, only a third were at full strength. One-third were undermanned and one-third were “cadres,” or ill-equipped militia. Nitze blamed poor intelligence.
In fact, the U.S. had consistently overestimated Soviet forces after the war. In 1948, it was widely believed that the Red Army numbered between four and five million men. It now appears that the Soviet forces did not exceed three million, and most of the troops were engaged in occupation duties. The British and Americans had between them about 2.5 million soldiers and the atomic bomb as well. The Soviets would have had difficulty mounting an invasion because in 1946 they had torn up most of the railroad track between Germany and Russia; with 20 million war dead, they wanted no more invasions from the west.
Frightened by the Western Alliance, the Soviets began to rebuild their forces after 1948 and to develop their own nuclear weapons. Clearly, by 1950 the U.S. needed to modernize its nuclear arsenal and expand conventional forces to back up its vast commitments. But it seems just as clear that NSC-68 greatly exaggerated Soviet superiority. Henry Kissinger, though generally approving of Acheson’s strategy of containment, asserts that “it was based on a flawed premise; that we were weaker than the Soviets and had to build from positions of strength. In fact, we were stronger than they were.”
It is one of the final ironies of NSC-68 that it did not work—at least right away. It failed to “bludgeon the mass mind of top government” sufficiently to make its members want to spend $50 billion more on defense. Some were properly shocked by the statistics on the Soviet arms buildup and American vulnerability. When Charles Murphy, who had replaced Clark Clifford as Truman’s aide handling national security matters, took the document home one night in April, “what I read scared me so much that I didn’t go into the office at all. I sat at home and read this memo over and over wondering what in the world to do about it.” Others were less impressed. Senator Walter George, a power on the Finance Committee, was given a peek and shrugged. “I see the logic, but. . .”
Truman came around only slowly and grudgingly. In January, eyeing the “Buck Stops Here” sign on his desk, he mused with Gordon Arneson, a PPS staffer, about how many “bucks” he had stopped. “The Truman Doctrine, good. Greece and Turkey, good. Berlin airlift, right again. Marshall Plan, a ten strike.” Overall a pretty good batting average. But he wondered aloud whether his decision to reduce the defense budget was so wise. True, it worked politically with the voters and Congress. But considering the shaky state of the world and the uncooperative Russians, was it prudent? He sighed.
When it came to acting on NSC-68, Truman equivocated. He endorsed it in principle in late April but called for a study of the cost; in other words, he begged the all-important question. As late as June he told Arthur Krock of The New York Times that he still wanted to hold down the defense budget. Once again, Acheson and the State Department warriors needed a crisis to shake the listless body politic. As Acheson later remarked, “Korea saved us.”