Fear Itself (69 page)

One of President Truman’s very first requests to Congress, on December 19, 1945, was an appeal for legislation to create “A Department of National Defense” that, combining the Departments of War and the Navy, would “be charged with the full responsibility for armed national security.” He recalled how pathologies of division had hampered the war effort, and how it had been necessary not only to invent the Joint Chiefs of Staff but also to unify commands in the field. It thus was imperative, he urged, to “overcome permanently the present imperfections in our defense organization.” The answer, he suggested, was a unified Department of National Defense with a single civilian leader. This form of organization promised to integrate strategic plans, achieve economies of control and supply, and line up military policy with larger national security objectives. It also projected an integrated training program for new troops, a leaner and more effective relationship between the military and the scientific community, and a single structure of command for the rising number of U.S. bases overseas, including those that were involved in reconnaissance and counterintelligence.
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Both the army and the navy, however, wanted something else.
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The army’s Department of War promoted “the idea of a single chief of staff at the top of the military hierarchy with over-all military and administrative responsibility.”
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This position was not new. The army had been promoting unification of this kind as early as 1943, when Gen. George Marshall had advocated a program of full military integration under his leadership. The Department of the Navy resisted. Wishing to preserve its traditional prerogatives, it vigorously promoted an alternative plan, its leaders all too aware that these developments posed a fundamental threat to the preeminence of the navy, a position it had maintained since the beginning of the nineteenth century. As a result, Secretary Forrestal recruited Ferdinand Eberstadt, his Princeton classmate and a leading Wall Street banker, to design an alternative. Drawing on his wartime experiences as the head of the Army and Navy Munitions Board and as vice chairman of the War Productions Board, Eberstadt called for coordination between the Departments of War and the Navy, not their consolidation. He explicitly rejected the army’s ideas by arguing that a unified military command might overwhelm civilian governance, especially if it installed “a military personage or hierarchy whose control over the armed forces could dominate the civilian Secretaries.”
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Ultimately, this dispute was resolved more to the navy’s liking, despite President Truman’s tilt the other way in his Special Message to Congress of December 19, 1945. Though the National Security Act, which he signed on August 26, 1947, did create the Office of the Secretary of Defense, it also continued with the Joint Chiefs, allowed each service to have its own civilian secretary, and discarded the idea of a single supreme military commander.

Two other features of the 1947 National Security Act are noteworthy. First, the “National Security Organization” it brought into being rested on a much more extensive foundation than just the armed services. When Congress announced its purpose as that of providing “a comprehensive program for the future security of the United States,” its lawmaking conducted a broad effort, as a contemporary observed, to also “establish and arrange civilian agencies in the executive branch to deal with the government’s military security functions.”
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Second was the creation of the air force as a coequal branch, which reflected how sea power’s role in U.S. strategic planning had attenuated, with the military brass relying more and more on atomic weapons.

Eberstadt had insisted in 1945 not only that the army was wrong to seek to place the military under a single commander but also that a much broader national security state was required “in the light of our new world power and position, our new international commitments and risks.” To meet these tasks, he had envisioned a dense network of corporatist-style civil-military coordinating boards that would culminate in a national security council, a system not unlike that which had been convened by the NRA for the domestic economy in 1933 and by the wartime mobilization agencies with which he was intimately acquainted. Truman’s December 1945 message concurred with this aspect of Eberstadt’s recommendations. It strongly endorsed “a more comprehensive national security program,” which he hoped would include “a coordinated, government-wide intelligence system,” a new federal science agency to coordinate and sponsor research, and a mechanism that would be able to bring together all aspects of national security.

With the exception of the suggestion of an instrument to guide American science, which would have to wait until Congress created the National Science Foundation in 1950, the National Security Act fashioned these organizations. Most notable were the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Council (NSC), which continue to persist alongside the Department of Defense and the Department of State as the main “modern mechanisms of the national security state.”
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They were complemented by the National Security Resources Board (NSRB), to plan for civilian, industrial, and military mobilization in times of war; the Munitions Board, to coordinate the production and procurement of weapons; and the Research and Development Board, to maintain standards, rectify gaps, and oversee shifts of emphasis.
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When the OSS had been launched in 1942, Gen. William J. “Wild Bill” Donovan, its charismatic director, pronounced that “in a global and totalitarian war, intelligence must be global and totalitarian.”
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This credo lived on after the war when the navy, still smarting from the absence of proper intelligence warnings before Pearl Harbor, took the lead to push for a postwar organization that, as Adm. Samuel Robinson, who had served as the navy’s production chief during the war, declared, should have a freedom of action based on lump sum appropriations that “would not be subject to accounting.”
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Three principal alternatives presented themselves. One was simply to keep the OSS going, as Donovan was proposing. Another was to expand the FBI, which was conducting covert intelligence activities in Latin America, and whose budget had soared from $6 million in 1938 to $45 million in 1945.
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Yet another was to lodge these functions in the Department of State, as Secretary Byrnes was suggesting. President Truman thought the first two smacked of a gestapo, and he worried that the State Department would prove inadequate to the task. At the start of 1946, he created the Central Intelligence Group (CIG) by executive order on January 22, to be led by Adm. Sidney Souers. The organization swiftly grew from a small staff of eighty at its founding to more than eighteen hundred by the time the CIA itself was brought into being by Congress in 1947.
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What this complex of organizations lacked was democratic legitimacy and an end to institutional uncertainty, achievements it could secure, its leaders and supporters understood, only if it were sanctioned by an act of Congress.
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But even here secrecy prevailed. When the House and Senate considered whether to include a permanent intelligence agency in the National Security Act, it conducted hearings in camera and invited Allen Dulles, then a lawyer in private practice who had been OSS station chief in Berlin, then Bern, after World War II, and later directed the agency from 1953 to 1961, to lead an ad hoc seminar for a select group of members on how to obtain better foreign information and gain the ability to conduct secret operations overseas. He explained behind the closed doors of Room 1501 of the Longworth House Office Building that the “prime objectives today . . . are scientific—in the field of atomic energy, guided missiles, supersonic aircraft, and the like,” as well as “political and social.” Noting the “conflicting ideologies as democracy faces communism,” not just in Russia but across Europe, Latin America, and Asia, Dulles declared that analytically parsed information based on systematic probes was essential to national security, and he called on Congress to create a CIA that would be “directed by a relatively small but elite corps of men with a passion for anonymity.”
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With the establishment of the agency by Section 102 of the National Security Act, the CIA began to act. Its most notable early covert operations, directed by James Angleton, the counterintelligence expert who had served in the wartime OSS, were mounted in Italy, where Angleton had lived as a teenager. There, a Communist Party, the second-largest in the world, loomed as the potential victor in elections scheduled for April 1948. By subsidizing the Christian Democrats of the center-right, by deploying the American Federation of Labor to disburse assistance to non-Communist unions, and by influencing Italian opinion by planting false publications, the CIA enjoyed its first covert success when the Communists were defeated. It would hardly be the last time that the CIA would fail to recognize the sovereignty of borders. A new era had triumphantly begun.

The next month, the new National Security Council issued a directive, NSC 10/2, that formally set up an operations branch within the CIA. “Taking cognizance of the vicious covert activities of the USSR,” it wrote, this unit, acting “in the interests of world peace and U.S. national security,” was charged to undertake “propaganda; economic warfare; preventive direct action, including sabotage, anti-sabotage, demolition, and evacuation measures; subversion against hostile states, including assistance to underground resistance movements, guerillas and refugee liberation groups, and support of indigenous anti-communist elements in threatened countries of the free world,” all of which had to be activities for which “the U.S. Government can plausibly disclaim any responsibility.”
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Unlike the CIA, the National Security Council was hardly a secret organization, but its mandate to coordinate foreign and military policies in the White House reduced the scope of congressional authority. The 1947 Act specified that its members, in addition to the president as the presiding officer, must include the secretaries of state and defense, the civilian secretaries of the army, navy, and air force, and the directors of the National Security Resources Board and the CIA. Congress, by contrast, was tellingly not represented. Cut off from participation in this policymaking body, the legislature had to watch at a remove as the NSC’s importance grew appreciably after the explosion of the first Soviet atomic bomb in August 1949 and the commencement of hostilities on the Korean peninsula the following summer.
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In this, as in other areas of national security, members of Congress had actively consented to a reduction in its exercise of traditional, democratic controls; through these new structures, power was shifting from the legislature to the executive branch. Nuclear fear was fueling lasting changes to the American state.

12
Armed and Loyal

N
OT SURPRISINGLY, THESE IMMENSE
institutional innovations, so fundamental in their transformation of U.S. foreign policy, experienced growing pains. It fell to the Eighty-first Congress, the one elected when President Truman accomplished a surprising reelection in November 1948, to make adjustments, and to the Eighty-second Congress to grapple with the new Soviet bomb and the Korean War. Not only were Democrats back in control thanks to a remarkable gain in 1948 of 75 seats in the House and 9 in the Senate—achieved concurrently with the surprising reelection of Truman, who had campaigned against the “do-nothing” Republican Congress—but southern members composed the majority of this majority. Of the 263 Democrats elected to the House, 140, or 53 percent, represented southern districts (alongside 8 Republicans).
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In the Senate, where there were no southern Republicans, fully 63 percent, 34 of the 54 Democrats, were southern.

As this new majority considered how to fine-tune and further fashion the national security state, veteran southern representatives dominated the relevant committees. In the Senate, Armed Services, chaired by Millard Tydings, included seven Democrats; all but one, the most junior, were from the South. Their number included such key figures as Richard Russell, Lyndon Johnson, and Estes Kefauver. Four of the five most senior persons on Foreign Relations, led by Tom Connally, also were southern; a fifth southerner, the most junior, J. William Fulbright of Arkansas, was destined to be its chair from 1959 to 1974. Carl Vinson’s Armed Services Committee in the House similarly was composed disproportionately of a senior southern cohort, eight of the most experienced ten. While Foreign Affairs, split between southern and nonsouthern members, was led by a New York Democrat, the next two in line were southern. Un-American Activities, about to enter its soon-to-be notorious heyday, was led by Georgia’s John Wood; only one of its five committee Democrats was selected from the nonsouthern cohort.

Southern domination within the Democratic majority reached a peak in the Eighty-second Congress, elected in 1950. A Republican gain of five Senate seats, including one in the Southern border state of Maryland, left the Democrats with a teetering majority of 49–47. With this result, fully 67 percent of the party’s senators came from below the Mason-Dixon Line. Likewise, the southern contingent grew as a proportion of the Democratic majority, to 58 percent of the party’s seats.
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Moreover, the South’s hold on key committees was maintained and, in some cases, strengthened. It acted like nothing short of a legislative vise. Richard Russell chaired Armed Services in the Senate, thus placing the South’s strongest leader in charge. In the House, Foreign Affairs was led by a southern member, John Kee of West Virginia, for the first time. There now also existed a Joint House and Senate Committee on Defense Production, chaired by Senator Burnet Maybank of South Carolina. Every Democrat, six of its ten members, was southern.

What is so striking is how the further ascension of southern Democrats strengthened the constellation of Washington’s national security organizations. On their watch, Congress furnished the executive branch with enhanced capacities to coordinate military and diplomatic strategies, systematic intelligence, covert action, and tight relationships with large firms and leaders in science and technology. These decisions made permanent the planning and corporatist instruments similar to those employed during the New Deal’s radical first period at home and during the recent global war. But there was a distinct fillip. This national security state was sealed off from the procedures and private interests that Congress was creating at the same time as a result of southern insistence. By contrast, central state planning and concentrated power were becoming hallmarks of the national security state, hand in hand with the rigorous policing of the loyalty of individuals and organizations.

I.

C
ONGRESS REINFORCED
the powers of the CIA and fashioned a full Department of Defense in 1949. In launching its various activities, the CIA had found itself hampered by the ill-specified terms in the 1947 legislation. Its director, Rear Adm. Roscoe Hillenkoetter, went to Capitol Hill in February 1949 to brief Chairman Vinson about what he believed to be imperative requirements for the CIA. Vinson soon convened another set of secret hearings, declaring that “when you are in the spy business you can’t go shouting about it from the house tops.” His Armed Service Committee produced the legislation that became the Central Intelligence Act of 1949, a law that passed by voice votes in both chambers on May 27 without any open debate.

This legislation conferred almost limitless powers.
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It freed the CIA from ordinary procedures of many kinds, including the need to release its spending patterns or reveal its fiscal practices. CIA funds could be left unvouchered, and its administrative procedures, including its “organization, functions, officials, titles, salaries, or numbers of personnel employed,” could remain undisclosed. This was the model that had been utilized for the Manhattan Project. In February 1944, Vannevar Bush and Secretary of War Henry Stimson had visited with the House Speaker, Sam Rayburn of Texas, to request an appropriation of $1.6 billion to build an atomic bomb without, as the Republican minority leader, Joe Martin, recalled, “a trace of evidence to show how it was spent.”
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Further, the new law allowed the CIA to bypass immigration rules and quotas in order to bring up to one hundred “essential aliens” to the United States each year. The first person to be admitted under this provision, a harbinger of future practices, was Mykola Lebed, a Ukrainian who had allied his paramilitary force with the invading Nazis and who had made his partisans available for anti-Soviet actions after they returned. Though “the Justice Department determined that he was a war criminal who had slaughtered Ukrainians, Poles, and Jews,” its effort to deport him was halted when “Allen Dulles wrote to the federal immigration commissioner to insist that Lebed was ‘of inestimable value to this Agency.’”
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With activities like these, the CIA became complicit in cooperating with the “ratlines,” especially the one directed by a Croatian Franciscan priest, Father Krunoslav Draganovi
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, which furthered the model of recruitment that the OSS had used in Operation Paperclip to bring thousands of ex-Nazis to North and South America, including many scientists and military experts.
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This year also witnessed the passage of the Defense Reorganization Act. The Office of the Secretary of Defense fashioned two years earlier had not been a cabinet department, and it was quickly shown to possess insufficient clarity or authority with which to navigate among the military’s competing interests and perspectives. Initiated in the House Armed Services Committee by Chairman Vinson and a fellow southern Democrat, Alabama’s Overton Brooks, and ratified by President Truman on August 10, 1949, the reorganization legislation converted “the National Military Establishment” that had been created in 1947, the president explained, “into a new executive Department of Defense,” which “gives the Secretary of Defense, under the direction of the President, direction, authority, and control over the Department of Defense.”
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By providing for a single cabinet officer secretary as well as a chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to coordinate all the branches of the military, this law brought into being the structure that has persisted ever since. The Defense Department possessed no small dominion. During the 1949 fiscal year, this department commanded more than one-third of the peacetime federal budget, $15 billion of the $43 billion total, despite a wide-ranging consensus that it was desirable to rein in military spending.
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At the core of this burgeoning enterprise was the newly established independent air force that the National Security Act had detached from the army. Within the air force, lay the most significant new institution of all—the Strategic Air Command (SAC), which was responsible for the delivery of atomic weapons. Led, after 1948, by Gen. Curtis LeMay, a larger-than-life leader who would run for vice president on George Wallace’s racist American Independent Party ticket in 1968, it had a distinctive structure of command within operational war planning. Unlike any other subordinate unit, it maintained a direct reporting relationship with the Joint Chiefs, for whom it prepared its own annual war plans, detailing how it would strike the Soviet Union.
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SAC compensated for the postwar decline in conventional U.S. forces. “Our military picture,” Robert Lee Sikes, a Florida Democrat, informed the House in July 1947, shortly before the act passed, “is a sad spectacle compared to that magnificent fighting machine we had at the close of the war.”
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To be sure, his detailed assessment of military decline left out how, even after mass demobilization, the country still possessed an army and navy five times the size of the mid-1930s military, a force that was able to take on occupation duties in Germany and Japan successfully and place troops in distant military bases. After the devastation of the war, moreover, no other power could begin to equal the economic wealth and manufacturing capacity of the United States, or its extensive functioning oil reserves and productive farms. Nor, at the moment, had any other state yet demonstrated a comparable ability to build ever more advanced aircraft or manufacture a formidable arsenal of atomic weapons.

As America’s postwar shield and sword, “the bomb was the heart of the matter.”
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“Now, after World War II,” the editorial page of the
Los Angeles Times
observed in March 1947, “we have almost demobilized our Army. We have virtually deactivated our Air Forces. Our Navy is partly wrapped up. But we have the atomic bomb.” From this, it took comfort. “What eminence would we have in world affairs of the moment,” it asked, “if we did not have the atomic bomb?”
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President Truman agreed. After the passage of the Atomic Energy Act, he institutionalized atomic weapons as a separate and primary part of the country’s arsenal, thus putting into action the strategist Bernard Brodie’s advice, dating from 1946, which had warned that “the force delegated to the retaliatory attack with atomic bombs will have to be maintained in rather sharp isolation from the national community. Its functions must not be compromised by the slightest demands for relief of struck areas.”
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Before Truman approved research and development for a hydrogen bomb in January 1950, he authorized the accelerated rapid expansion of the atomic stockpile. When the Atomic Energy Act became law, the United States possessed nine atomic bombs. Under the management of the AEC, the country mobilized its industrial strength to build new reactors and mass-production plants. By the time the National Security Act was signed in August 1947, the arsenal had grown to twenty-nine. A year later, there were fifty-five bombs. By the start of July 1949, shortly after the first Soviet bomb, SAC could call on 240 that were ready for use. The following twelve months, taking the country to the start of the Korean War, witnessed a huge leap in numbers as the stockpile grew to 686. There also were technical gains. Each of the new bombs possessed a capacity for destruction that was considerably higher than that of Little Boy or Fat Man. By November 1952, when the United States had 1,000 atomic bombs, and the Soviet Union some 250, the largest was yielding five hundred kilotons, fully twenty-five times the explosive force that had wiped out Nagasaki.
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As this run-up was starting, and as SAC was taking shape as a potent “cocked weapon,” the term General LeMay used to describe its purpose, the air force chief of staff, Gen. Hoyt Vandenberg, asked Bernard Brodie to comment on the target lists that had been prepared for a potential air offensive against the Soviet Union. Brodie fashioned his response by noting how the “admittedly temporary” American monopoly “makes possible
for the first time
decisive military action between the two great centers of power.” He counseled that a policy of maintaining clear superiority should be pursued even after the end to America’s exclusive possession, for “the fact remains that the atomic bomb is today our
only
means for throwing substantial power immediately against the Soviet Union in the event of flagrant Soviet aggression.” As to targeting, Brodie recommended that in light of the bulky character of existing bombs, and the lack of sufficient numbers to take out fully the Soviet Union’s widely dispersed military targets, the atomic arsenal should take aim exclusively at urban centers.
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