Once again as in looking at the origins of World I, it is essential to revisit Japan and consider some its history. Japan was an island empire ruled by an hereditary Emperor, Hirihito in the 1930s. It had no raw materials and imported all its oil either from the Middle East, Indonesia, or a combination of both. In 1917, President Wilson had authorized a note sent to Japan saying in part that "the Government of the United States recognizes that Japan has special interests in China." The major powers all supported an open door policy with respect to China; it allowed them to create small colonies on the periphery of cities in a country with the world's largest population. Shanghai was one of these colonies. Great Britain had leased Hong Kong from China for 100 years. The lease will terminate in 1997.

In the 1930s, China was a country in transition from being a feudal dynasty with warlords controlling its provinces to a semi-dictatorial leader, General Chiang Kai-Shek who had no control over the warring warlords. Mao Tse-tung was in North China awaiting further developments. They were not long in coming.The Japanese, in need of raw materials and greater living room for its expanding population, invaded Manchuria in 1931. Within a year, Japan ruled Manchuria and had renamed it Manchukuo. Despite international criticism, Japan conquered Jehol in 1933, placing its armed forces within reach of Beijing. In 1937, Japanese troops landed in China and occupied Nanking. Their cruelty to the Chinese civilians enraged the western world, and the Rape of Nanking went down as possibly the beginning of a Japanese attempt to expand its military presence further into China. Unabashed by further criticism, Japanese troops overran Hankow and Canton in 1938. In the same year, Japan's Prime Minister, Prince Konoye announced his country's objective.

In the field of industry, the basic principle of the Government will be laid in the increase of our nation's productive power under one comprehensive scheme covering Japan, Manchukuo, and China, and efforts are to be exerted towards supplying the articles needed for national defense, promoting all the more important industries and expanding our export trade.

Japan was an expansionist and for good reason; it had to import more raw materials like oil, tin, rubber, and iron to name a few. These existed in significant quantities in Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, and the Phillippines, then a territory of the United States. Japan also needed an export market for its finished products. The Japanese officials proclaimed a Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere of influence.

In fact, Japan was industrializing its economy rapidly and needed these raw materials. They had discovered that with rapid industrialization, Japan lost cropland overriding the rise in land productivity. Essentially, Japan had to have arable land to expand food production. And despite treaties reducing the size and configuration of naval warships, Japan found ways around these treaty limitations. As the United States later discovered, quite a few of Japan's carrier aircraft were models of the German ME109. A reasonable case may be made for the proposition that Japan anticipated a war it would start, probably under cover of diplomatic negotiations. Some of its military adventurism in China was merely a prelude to an expanded war. After all, the Japanese had learned from Germany, Italy, and Spain that its armed forces needed training under real conditions.

The Spanish Civil War in 1936 was an early example of the same principle. There, however, Germany shipped its aircraft and other weapons to General Francisco Franco. A revolt of the Spanish military put Franco in charge of Spain, opposed only by the Spanish Republicans. Roosevelt had tried an end run around America's Neutrality Act by shipping weapons to France for transfer to the Republicans. Italy, too, under Benito Mussolini, decided it needed land in Africa, so it chose Ethiopia and bombed its helpless unarmed civilians. King Haile Selassie appeared before the League of Nations which could do no more than protest helplessly while the carnage continued. The same atmosphere of helplessness kept the French from doing anyrthing constructive when Hitler's armed forces marched into the Rhineland in 1936, territory Germany had lost as a result of World War I.

All of this military strutting of the dictators like Japan's Hideki Tojo, Hitler, Franco, and Mussolini produced a reaction from President Roosevelt. On October 5, 1937 before a crowd of some 50,000 people at the dedication of Chicago's Outer Drive Bridge, a Public Work's Administration project, Roosevelt delivered his "Quarantine" address. The only paragraph in which the word "quarantine" appeared was only a little over two lines in the entire speech, even though the paragraph preceding had stated that "It seems to be unfortunately true that the epidemic of world lawlessness was spreading. When an epidemic of physical disease starts to spread, the community approves and joins in a quarantine of the patients in order to protect the health of the community against the spread of the disease."

Yet Roosevelt's prompted comment nationwide, most of it favorable, apparently easing the public perception of possible American involvement in war. An examination of the White House files now in the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library at Hyde Park reveals that the wires and letter the president received were overwhelmingly favorable. Clearly, Roosevelt meant Japan should be quarantined, and on the next day, the League of Nations adopted a motion censuring Japan.

The censure came far too late; leaders of the Western world, including Roosevelt and England's Baldwin should have known war was imminent. In Germany, the Nazis were clearly headed for war, and their persecution of the Jews became worse than ever. On November 10, 1938 the Nazi thugs went on a murderous spree of threats and vilification of Jews plus widespread damage to their shops and homes throughout Germany. Historians named it "Crystalnacht," the "Night of the Shattered Glass."

Nazi Germany had rearmed despite language in the Treaty of Versailles limiting rearmament. Less than a year later, Germany was at war with Poland. France and England, bound to defend Poland by treaty, declared war on Germany on September 3, 1939. War was the German goal. Hitler had said repeatedly that Germany needed Lebensraum -- more land for its population. In 1938, the Austrian Anschluss occurred, and it became part of Germany by force. Hitler was not content. He demanded the area of Czechoslovakia known as the Sudentenland, an area with a significant German population. Great Britain's Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, went to Munich and returned to London waving a paper signed by Hitler. "Peace in our time," announced Chamberlain to a cheering airport crowd. War followed this announcement within a few months.

Whether the Soviet Union actually anticipated Germany's plans seems uncertain. However, weeks before war began, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Hitler's Minister of Foreign Affairs signed a cynical agreement with Joseph Stalin in Moscow. This agreement allowed Stalin to partition Poland once again after its defeat by the Nazis, and it allowed Stalin to annex the Baltic states, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia.

Actually, for fifty years, the Soviet Union denied the existence of the secret Protocol allowing the annexation of the Baltic states. Soviet troops occupied all three of these countries beginning in 1940. Publicly, the agreement was described as the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact. Critics of this agreement argued that Stalin signed the agreement with Germany to buy time for the Soviet Union to modernize and expand its military against the anticipated attack against the Soviet Union by Germany. However, Allied intelligence was able to fix the date of the German attack, but Stalin didn't believe what he was told. As a result, Nazi forces were initially successful and advanced within striking distance of Moscow.

In the United States, President Roosevelt was determined to help Great Britain despite the Neutrality Act. The Selective Service Act of 1940 passed with only one vote to spare. There was a mood of isolationism in the country, so Roosevelt had to move carefully. Even his Lend-Lease deal came in for criticism. By it, the United States aquired the use of military bases like Bermuda and other possessions of Great Britain in the Caribbean Sea in exchange for lending Britain some old, surplus destroyers. The British Navy had to protect its convoys from attacks by German submarines.

During his campaign against Wendell Wilkie in 1940, Roosevelt addressed Congress on May 16, 1940. "These are ominous days,"he said, "days whose swift and shocking developments force every neutral nation to look to its defenses in the light of new factors....No old defense is so strong that it requires no further strengthening and no attack is so unlikely or impossible that it may be ignored." However, America's armed forces were in a sad state of unpreparedness for modern warfare with its emphasis on aircraft and tanks. So Roosevelt, in a shrewd move, created the National Defense Advisory Commission. Its seven members were appointed by the president and drawn from the very industries that had denounced Roosevelt for what they claimed were his New Deal excesses. The new Commission was literally charged with converting the American economy from a peacetime to a wartime footing without actually being at war.

However, the frightening advance of Hitler's armies into France dramatized the plight in which England and France found themselves in June, 1940. In one of his first military mistakes, Hitler ordered a three-day pause, before allowing his victorious forces to proceed against British forces, cleaning them up at Dunkirk before entering Paris. The pause was long enough for a motley collection of boats, from yachts to corvettes and destroyers to rescue and deliver safely to British shores, some 350,000 men.

On this occasion, Winston Churchill, having replaced Neville Chamberlain as Prime Minister, addressed Parliament. "We shall not flag or fail," Churchill promised. "We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall in the seas and oceans....we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender, and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle until in God's good time, the new world, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old."

On June 10,1940 Benito Mussolini fearing he might not share in the spoils of the German victory, persuaded Italy to declare war on England and France. Fortuitously, Roosevelt was delivering an address to the University of Virginia one day later. In his speech, Roosevelt dropped any lingering notion that the United States was neutral. "On this tenth day of June," he told the students, "the hand that held the dagger has struck it into France's back."

Almost exactly a year later, Germany invaded Russia on June 22, 1940. This stunning event certainly signaled that Germany had postponed any thought of invading England. Hitler's generals had been concerned. A war on two fronts at the same was a military nightmare to them. Communists in the United States had to make a swift policy reversal. Instead of demanding that Roosevelt stop rearming England, its spokesmen switched sides in less than a day. According to Doris Kearns Goodwin, author of No Ordinary Time, "Michael Quill, left-leaning head of the Transport Workers of New York was delivering an angry speech denouncing the imperialist war, arguing that the American worker should have nothing to do with it. In the middle of his speech, he was handed a note informing him the Nazis had invaded the Soviet Union. Without missing a beat, Quill totally changed direction, arguing that 'we must all unite and fight for democracy." Others thought to be Communist-oriented changed their tune almost as quickly as Quill.

In July, 1940 Japan invaded French Indochina, and Roosevelt agreed to a policy of sanctions, including an embargo on oil from which high-octane aircraft fuel might be refined. General Hideki Tojo, who by this time, had replaced Prince Konoye as Prime Minister of Japan, indicated negotiations with the United States might be productive. He was willing to withdraw from Indochina, but not China. Tojo told his emissaries in Washington that they must be successful by the end of November, 1941. They were unsuccessful, so Japanese carrier aircraft treacherously attacked Pearl Harbour in the early hours of the day on December 7, 1941, while its emissaries were still discussing peace in Washington. For more details on Japan, see The Japanese Wartime Empire, 1931-1945 released by the Princeton University Press in June, 1996.

The next day, President Roosevelt asked Congress to approve his request that the United States and Japan were at war with each other. Congress approved immediately. Then, on December 11, 1941 Adolf Hitler, Chancellor of Germany's Third Reich declared war on the United States. World War II had begun, but with the greatest naval disaster in history at Pearl Harbour. Eight battleships were either sunk or seriously damaged along with three destroyers and light cruisers. Fortunately, all Navy carriers were at sea. However, most Army aircraft were destroyed on the ground. The Japanese followed up this victory with further action in the Far East. On December 10,1941 two formidable British battleships were sunk by Japanese aircraft. On December 25, British forces in Hong Kong surrendered to the Japanese. By January 2, 1942 Manila, the capital of the Phillippines, was occupied by Japanese troops, and American troops surrendered. General Douglas McArthur and the remaining American troops took refuge in the fortress of Corregidor from which General McArthur was evacuated by an American submarine.

In the immediate aftermath of Pearl Harbor, California particularly saw a growing hysteria directed against Japanese, many of them citizens of the United States. Many Californians anticipated an attack on the West Coast, and General John DeWitt added fuel to the fire by intemperate public comments, some of them false. Thus, on February 20, 1942 President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066. This order gave General DeWitt the authority he needed to exclude Japanese from just about any part of the West Coast. Francis Biddle, who was then Attorney General of the United States later noted that Roosevelt was not all that concerned with the constitutional implications of his action. The United States was at war with Japan, and the American military was in charge of what Roosevelt treated as a wartime measure. It didn't matter to him that most of those who were interned in relocation centers were American citizens.

Two years later, the Supreme Court upheld his action, but there were strong dissents. Korematsu v. United States, 323 U. S. 214 (1944). The majority of six held that exclusion of Japanese, including those who were American citizens, was within the war powers of Congress and the Executive. In his dissent, Justice Roberts noted there had been no individualized hearings providing any basis for shipping all Japanese to relocation centers, as had been the case with German and Italian detainees. Justice Jackson wrote that "the law which this prisoner is convicted of disregarding is not found in an act of Congress, but in a military order. Neither the Act of Congress nor the Executive Order of the President, nor both together, would afford a basis for this conviction. It rests on the orders of General DeWitt." In Hirabayashi v. United States, 320 U.S. 81 (1943), the Supreme Court also upheld a curfew directed against all those Japanese, whether citizens or not, to prevent espionage or sabotage. Some 110,000 Japanese had to spend at least four years in relocation camps far from home. About 70,000 of them were citizens of the United States. They lost their homes, their businesses and their liberty.

Very early in the war, Roosevelt became involved in racial conflict. By 1940, the population of Detroit had grown as whites migrated from farmlands in the South to the urban centers of the North where war plants had proliferated and jobs beckoned. Along with the white migrants, some 50,000 blacks moved to Detroit competing for the same jobs. Housing, in short supply with this population explosion became scarcer and overpriced. Clark Foreman, a Southerner, was an official of the Federal Works Agency. The FWA planned a 200-unit housing project designed for black defense workers. When news of this appeared in the Detroit press, white workers were infuriated. In Congress, an appropriation for the housing project was conditioned on white occupancy. Civil rights leaders reacted angrily, and matters got back on course. The Detroit Housing Commission selected black tenants. On February 28, 1942 the new tenants were scheduled to move in. When they appeared with the household goods, they were greeted by hundreds of white pickets armed with a variety of weapons. In the ensuing battle, many on both sides were wounded, and occupancy was postponed. Three months later, it took troops off the Michigan National Guard to protect the new tenants who moved in without incident. The Navy itself was segregated by race. However, with pressure from the White House, the Navy finally allowed black Americans to enlist in the Navy as gunners, radiomen and so forth without being assigned to their original positions as mess attendants, ie., waiters.

Race was still a factor in wartime production. The population of Mobile, Alabama had expanded rapidly after 1940, drawn by its shipyards. Many of the new arrivals brought racial predjudice with them, and an ugly incident was the result. Some skilled black welders were upgraded and assigned to work next to white welders working on ships for the defense effort. In the morning shift, one white worker shouted that "No nigger was going to join iron in these yards," and fighting was ignited. The Fair Employment Practices Commission (FEPC) restored a measure of peace by agreeing that black welders should be assigned to another shipway to work in a segregated area. While President Roosevelt had created the FEPC by Executive Order, it had no enforcement powers. On the next day, race riots broke out in Belle Isle, Michigan. By the time federal troops arrived on the scene -- Michigan's governor, Harry Kelly claimed he could control the situation with local police -- some twenty-five black Americans had been killed by whites, and nine whites died in the rioting. While predjudice would continue to deny black Americans the work they could perform for the war effort, the war itself continued.

Early in the war, the Navy had its reverses but also its successes, however small they were. On April 18, 1942 a squadron of sixteen B-25s were launched from the Hornet, a Navy carrier for a raid on Tokyo with General Doolittle in command. The twin-engine B-25s were not designed for use on carriers, but the 1100 foot flight deck was just enough for the takeoff run. These planes reached Tokyo during daylight hours, dropped their bombs and continued on to land in China. This mission was followed in June by the Battle of Midway, a turning point in the naval war.

Secret US Rendevous Task forces Fox and Sugar meet prior to the Battle of Midway.

The Japanese organized a taskforce of ten battleships, four carriers, and seventy destroyers to seize Midway. However, the Navy had broken the Japanese Purple Code and knew when to strike. On June 4, 1942 Admiral Chester Nimitz launched his strike against the enemy taskforce. In the battle, Navy carrier aircraft sunk all four carriers, one heavy cruiser, three battleships, and destroyed 372 Japanese aircraft.One American carrier, the USS Yorktown, was sunk by the Japanese.

Japanese Crusier Mogami The Mogami just before it sunk after being hit by US Navy Carrier bombers

USS Yorktown The USS Yorktown taking a direct hit from Japanese bombers.

Action on land involved the Marines. They landed in Guadalcanal in early 1942 and took heavy casualties. In the meantime, the Army with air cover from the Navy landed in North Africa in November, 1942 to begin the offensive matching General George Patton's armour against that of the German Desert Fox, Marshall Erwin Rommel. A combination of American, British, and Canadian troops defeated the Germans in North Africa, and the next move of the Allied Forces would be to Italy and beyond.

On June 4, 1944 the combined forces of all the allies invaded Normandy in the first cross-channel invasion since William the Conqueror invaded England successfully in 1066. Joseph Stalin got the Second Front he so desperately needed to save the Soviet Union from the Nazi hordes that invaded Russia beginning on June 22, 1941. Arromanches, in France's Normandy was one of the coastal cities where the Allied Forces landed in 1944, not far from Omaha Beach. Its museum is a treasure of memorabilia of D-Day, June 4, 1944. The Allied armed forces began their march across Europe to Berlin on this day which was celebrated in 1995.

D-Day View a gif animation of "the first out" on D-Day. (1.2Mb)

Before the war ended, however, President Roosevelt, Prime Minister of Great Britain and Generalissimo Joseph Stalin of the Soviet Union met in Yalta from February 4 to February 11, 1945. The three discussed and agreed on several subjects that were to have awkward domestic political consequences for the United States in the postwar period, principally because the Soviet Union simply ignored some provisions of the Yalta Agreement. Article II stated in part that:

The establishment of order in Europe and the rebuilding of national economic life must be achieved by processes which will enable the liberated peoples to destroy the last vestiges of naziism and fascism and to create democratic institutions of their own choice. This is a principle of the Atlantic Charter -- the right of all people to choose the form of government under which they will live -- the restoration of sovereign rights and self-government to those peoples who have been forcibly deprived of them by the aggressor nations.

Stalin insisted on including language that, by his interpretation, allowed Moscow to effectively dominate Poland in the immediate postwar period. Unfortunately, nothing was done to prevent the perpetuation of Soviet rule in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Rumania. By 1989, when all these countries got their freedom, historians uniformly agreed it was a mistake to allow the imposition on these countries of a Communist rule. Directed by Stalin, the Soviet Red Army imposed a goverment in each of the eastern Europe states inconsistent with the establishment of democratic institutions. Stalin also got language directing that Japan's Kurile Islands "be handed over to the Soviet Union." At Yalta, the Soviet Union expressed a readiness to use its armed forces to liberate China from "the Japanese yoke." Some Americans present at Yalta suggested at the time that Roosevelt was in poor health and should not have taken such a tiring trip to the Crimea for the Yalta Conference. They were probably correct. Roosevelt died two months after his return from Yalta.

In the Pacific, the Marines and Army with air cover from the Navy moved from Eniwetok to the Mariannas and the Phillippines in 1944 and then from Guam and Tinian to Iwo Jima and Okinawa. From these islands, the Air Force began launching B-29 bombers against Japan itself in early 1945, and the end was in sight. In Europe, the Allied Forces entered Paris in August, 1944 and then took the surrender of Germany on May 9, 1945. On August 6, 1945 Air Force B-29s dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima and the second on Nagasaki three days later. Japan surrendered on August 14, 1945, and the war was over for some 19 million servicemen from seven nations united against Germany, Italy, and Japan. The casualties were enormous on all sides.

The Atomic Bomb The Atomic bomb is dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima, August 6, 1945.

Hiroshima Devastation after the atomic bombing

The Chief of Staff for the entire war effort in Europe was General Dwight D. Eisenhower. Roosevelt could not have spared General George C. Marshall, Chief of Staff of the Army. Marshall had the confidence of Congress, something Roosevelt did not enjoy. The president, for example, vetoed the Smith-Connally Act that would have made a strike against war production illegal and subject to severe penalties. In less than a day, Congress voted successfully to override the veto by the two-thirds vote constitutionally required to do so. At the time, coal miners were being paid less than a living wage for doing dangerous work underground. The coal miners finally settled for portal-to-portal pay increase. This insured a pay increase the moment they went underground after arriving at the pit head.

In 1944, Roosevelt was reelected to an unprecedented fourth term with some 53.4 percent of the popular vote and 432 electoral votes. His opponent was Thomas E. Dewey who got the highest percentage of the popular vote of any Republican candidate since 1932.

On April 12, 1945 Roosevelt died of a stroke in Warm Springs, Georgia, and Harry Truman became President of the United States. Roosevelt was mourned by a saddened nation and buried at Hyde Park, his ancestral home in upstate New York. During the war, Roosevelt had never once mentioned to his Vice President Harry Truman , the Manhattan Project and what it was working on. Actually, the idea appeared in 1939 in a letter from Einstein to Roosevelt. In it, he outlined the theoretical possibilities of nuclear fission. The scientists -- one of them was Edward Teller -- agreed on the theoretical potential, and General Leslie Grove was named head of the Manhattan Project which throughout the war was classified at a level higher than Top Secret. So between April 12, 1945 and Truman's trip to Potsdam in July, Truman had to be told the details of the atomic bomb about to be tested in New Mexico. The actual test of the atomic bomb, code-named Trinity-occurred in New Mexico on July 17, 1945. William Lawrence was one of those present on this historic occasion.. In his book, Ground Zero, Lawrence wrote:

And just at that instant there arose from the bowels of the earth a light not of this world, the light of many suns in one. It was a sunrise such as the world has never seen, a great green super-sun climbing in a fraction of a second to a height of more than eight thousand feet, rising ever higher until it touched the clouds, lighting up earth and sky all around with a dazzling luminosity...With the flash came a delayed roll of mighty thunder heard, just as the flash was seen, for hundreds of miles...

President Truman was in Potsdam at the time of the successful test, so he could not have known then of the bomb's destructive power. At the time, Truman, Churchill and Stalin, met in Potsdam to consider how best Japan might be defeated and what terms should be imposed on Japan thereafter.The Potsdam Declaration was the joint effort of all three, and it got the concurrence of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek. It called for Japan's unconditional surrender. On his return to Washington, some sixty-nine scientists sent a petition to the president. Dated July 17, 1945 it was signed by Leo Szilard and 69 co-signers, its text was retrieved from the Internet Home Page of Leo Szilard. The third paragraph of the petition read as follows:

The war has to be brought speedily to a successful conclusion and attacks by atomic bombs may very well be an effective method of warfare. We feel, however, that such attacks on Japan could not be justified, at least not unless the terms which will be imposed after the war on Japan were made public in detail and Japan were given an opportunity to surrender....The development of atomic power will provide the nations with new means of destruction. The atomic bomb at our disposal represent only the first step in this direction, and there is almost no limit to the destructive power which will become available in the course of their future development. Thus a nation which sets the precedent of using these newly liberated forces of nature for purposes of destruction may have to bear the responsibility which is involved.

However, there was a Source Note attached to the Szilard petition. It listed the names of those signing it. The text had this observation: "It is reasonable to conclude that the lists were prepared and used for the purpose of administrative retaliation against the petition signers."

History does not disclose whether President Truman actually read this petition drafted by Szilard, a physicist engaged in developing the atomic bomb together with Enrico Fermi and J. Robert Oppenheimer. Gar Alperovitz's book, The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb: And the Architecture of an American Myth does not mention Szilard's petition. However, Lifton and Mitchell who collaborated on the 1995 book, Hiroshima: Fifty Years of Denial note the Szilard Petition was intercepted by General Leslie Grove and never reached President Truman.

Lifton and Mitchell argue convincingly that the decision to use the atomic bomb was wrong at the time. Harry Truman clearly made a decision to use the bomb as the Air Force did on August 6, 1945. His decision was made on the basis of all the evidence available to him at that time. Truman's Secretary of State, James Byrnes supported use of the bomb against Japan. Its successful use, he claimed would give him a stronger position in dealing with Stalin. Even some of the high-ranking military commanders under Truman -- Admiral Nimitz and General Marshall opposed use of the bomb. President Truman never saw this letter. Evidently, it was rerouted by General Leslie Groves, head of the Manhattan Project.

In 1995, the Smithsonian Institute found itself in the middle of a nasty dispute over an exhibition marking the 50th anniversary of the flight of the Enola Gay. It was the B-29 that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. The Smithsonian could have presented all sides of the issue whether the United States should have used the bomb at all. Instead, its approach was one-sided and infuriated historians. With federal funding threatened, the Smithsonian took the simple route and offered only the traditional, unquestioning explanation of the decision to use the bomb. At the time the original exhibition was toned down, Speaker Newt Gingrich applauded. "Political correctness," he said at a press conference, "may be ok in some faculty lounge, but the Smithsonian is a treasure that belongs to the American people and it should not become a plaything for left-wing ideologues." It seems odd that a former history teacher would criticize hearing all sides of the decision to use the bomb as left-wing ideology. Gingrich is not the only revisionist of history. Had the B-29 been shown without any comment at all other than words of honor, they would obscure its importance and even insult the memory of American troops who, without the use of the bomb, might have perished in an invasion of Japan. The American Legion and the Air Force Association demanded only words of honor, and history was revised.

There was virtually no evidence of the lethal radioactive particles released by explosion of the uranium core when it went into critical mass and exploded. This evidence of deadly radioactive fallout only surfaced months after use of the second bomb over Nagasaki; the Bikini test site and later, the Nevada Test Site. However, most of such evidence, not of the destructive power of the bomb, but its lethal fallout was suppressed by the government. For years, this coverup continued and now in 1995, many books disclosing its nature and extent are being published. It is a fact that every government administration up to at least 1974, including Truman's, lied about the fatal consequences of the indiscriminate release of radioactivity. Some of those around Truman were anxious to shorten the war to prevent the Soviet Union from declaring war on Japan. At Yalta, Stalin agreed to assist China by deploying its armed forces against Japan. Fifty years after Yalta, Russia had not withdrawn its troops from the Kurile Islands it was allowed to seize by the Yalta Agreement.

Upon his return from Potsdam, Truman soon travelled to San Franciso for the meeting of the United Nations whose leaders or the designees were about to sign the United Nations Charter. In 1995, some 180 countries gathered in San Francisco to celebrate the 50th Anniversary of the United Nations.

Most Americans know there is a United Nations. It is in fact a treaty ratified by the Senate, two-thirds concurring. Congress also enacted a United Nations Participation Act, thus incorporating the Charter into the supreme law of the United States. Two of its many articles are worth noting. Article 2 (4) appears below:

4. All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the purposes of the United Nations.

Article 51 provides as follows:

Nothing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defense if an armed attack occurs against a member of the United Nations, until the Security Council has taken measures necessary to maintain international peace and security. Measures taken by Members in the exercise of this right of self-defense shall be immediately reported to the Security Council and shall not in any way affect the authority and responsibility of the Security Council under the present Charter to take at any time such action as it deems necessary in order to maintain or restore international peace and security.

Foreign policy and the decision to use the atomic bomb were certainly not the only problems President Truman inherited. Racial upheavals were perhaps one of his major domestic problems. And during the war, women by the thousands worked in the defense plants, turning out everything from aircraft to tanks and ships plus a great deal in most other products. "Rosie the Riveter" became a symbol of all those women who worked to win the war. When the war finally ended , servicemen returning home would want their old jobs back, and women would have to return to the kitchen, or so it was thought by many. Since food was rationed (as was fuel for cars), there had to be price controls to limit inflation. With the protean ingenuity of speculators, a thriving black market existed in rationed goods. On occasion, families might legitimately trade their sugar coupons for those required to buy meat.

Servicemen whose education had been postponed wanted to go back to school. In anticipation of this, Congress enacted the GI Bill of Rights. This measure financed the education of an estimated 3 million servicemen after the war. Furthermore, the economy had to be converted to peacetime production, but with the advent of nuclear weapons, the Manhattan Project remained in operation. So did the facilities at Alamagordo, New Mexico and the Livermore, California Lab. New industries dedicated to the production of nuclear weapons were built at Savannah, Georgia, Hanford, Oregon, and Denver, Colorado. Their operations, always a closely guarded secret, began polluting the atmosphere with radioactive and toxic particle discharge. By 1995, the safe disposal of radioactive waste had become an enormously expensive undertaking. The waste itself would have a half life of over ten thousand years.

The war crimes trials began in Nuremberg, Germany on November 20, 1945. Twenty-one surviving leaders of Nazi Germany were about to enter a court invented for the purpose of judging them. Telford Taylor's book, The Anatomy of the Nuremberg Trials: A Personal Memoir, describes these trials of Joachim von Ribbentrop, Julius Streicher, Hjalmar Schacht, Rudolph Hess, Herman Göring, Albert Speer, Admiral Eric Doenitz, Field Marshall Wilhelm Keitel and other war criminals. Taylor was a prosecutor at these trials which took place against a mise en scäne of horror at a level never before seen in the civilized world, the Holocaust. Some six million Jews were killed in death camps a few of which like Dachau, were built before World War II even began. It was at the Wannsee Conference inJanuary, 1942 that Hitler and his colleagues agreed on the Final Solution, extermination of German Jews.

In her book, Albert Speer: His Battle for the Truth, Gita Sereny quoted one of the Wannsee participants. He described the killing process as "assembly line murder." And testimony at the Nuremberg trials showed beyond any reasonable doubt that those on trial knew what was going on. This is complicity in genocide, and its German rationale for engaging in genocide was taken from the archives of the Spanish Inquisition. Netanyahu analyzed them in scholarly detail in his recent book, Origins of the Spanish Inquisition.

The Department of State in the Truman Administration had its scholars who contributed to the immediate postwar atmosphere with respect to a new policy toward the Soviet Union. A young Princeton graduate, George Kennan was in Moscow in 1946 as a State Department officer. Based on a series of wires he sent to Washington in 1946, the State Department adopted the new policy known as containment of Communism. "The USSR," he wrote, "still lives in antagonistic capitalist encirclement with which there can be no permanent peaceful coexistence." Kennan thought the problem could be solved. Following the end of World War II, the Soviet Union was militarily weaker and their repressive system was not necessarily stable. For the forseeable future, the Communists would have to be contained. Kennan continued:

Soviet power, unlike that of Hitlerite Germany, is neither schematic nor adventuristic. It does not work by fixed plans. It does not take unnecessary risks. Impervious to the logic of reason, it is highly sensitive to the logic of force. For this reason it can easily withdraw -- and usually does -- when strong resistance is encountered at any point. Thus, if the adversary has sufficient force and makes clear his readiness to use it, he rarely has to do so.

In the years since this wire was sent to Washington, Kennan has said more than once -- he is the author of twenty-six books -- that he was writing less about military containment than of political containment, but Washington officials did not see it that way in 1946. For those who wish to pursue Kennan further, he has written a new book published in 1996, At a Century's Ending: Reflections 1982-1995. It is a collection of his best thoughts; the State Department had found its intellectual moorings. Winston Churchill appeared in the United States as a guest, his Tory party having been defeated at the election polls less than a year after the war. His famous "Sinews of Peace" speech delivered on March 5, 1946, at Fulton, Missouri further fortified the ideologues at the State Department already primed by George Kennan. Here was a man who had negotiated with Joseph Stalin and led the West to victory in World War II. "I do not believe that Soviet Russia desires war," he said. "What they do desire is the fruits of war and the indefinite expansion of their power and doctrines." In a key paragraph of his speech, he said that

From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitols of the ancient states of central and eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest, Belgrade, and Sofia, all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in the Soviet sphere and all are subject in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and increasing measure of control from Moscow.

In the immediate aftermath of World War II, Stalin announced to a war-weary Soviet public that at least five new Five-Year programs would be required before the nation could get back on its economic feet. Some 23 million Russians had died during the war, and Soviet industry had not even begun to convert to peacetime production. Stalin addressed the nation from a rather unlikely podium, the theater of the Bolshoi Ballet. There would be no relief from the grinding toil of the war years.

Our [Communist] Party intends to organize a powerful new upsurge of the national economy which would enable us, for instance, to raise the level of our industry threefold, as compared with the prewar level; only under such conditions can we regard our country as guaranteed against any eventualities. That will require perhaps three new Five Year Plans, perhaps more.

The Soviet Union had lost 30 percent of its national wealth during the war, and 25 million people were still homeless. These figures suggest that Churchill was right when he told the audience at Fulton, Missouri that he did not believe that "Soviet Russia desired war," even though the Soviet armed forces were both intact and victorious. Still in 1947, President Truman had to deal with what seemed to be a Communist-inspired insurgency in Greece. This country had been occupied by Nazis until the British displaced them. During the occupation, peasants and farmers worked together in the Greek resistance led by people who were possibly Communists themselves. Truman took the position that an armed insurgency that threatened Greek stability also threatened lines of communications between the United States and its Middle East oil supply. So on March 12, 1947 Truman addressed a joint session of Congress. He offered economic aid to Greece and Turkey, both in desperate need of funds to rebuild war-shattered economies. Truman said in part that

The very existence of the Greek state is today threatened by the terrorist activities of several thousand armed men, led by Communists, who defy the government's authority at a number of points, particularly along the northern boundaries...Meanwhile the Greek government is unable to cope with the situation. The Greek army is small and poorly equipped....No government is perfect. One of the chief virtues of a democracy, however, is that its defects are always visible and under democratic processes can be pointed out and corrected. The Greek government is not perfect. Nevertheless, it represents eighty-five percent of the members of the Greek Parliament who were chosen in an election last year. Foreign observers, including 692 Americans, considered this election to be a fair expression of the views of the Greek people.

Thus, Congress agreed to support the Greek government with significant economic aid together with limited military support. What was done represented the Truman Doctrine, the first response to the need to restore democracy to countries occupied by an enemy during the war. Turkey also got some foreign aid, but this aid was probably a mistake even then. In 1974, bitter warfare broke out between Greek Cypriotes and Turkish troops that invaded Cyprus. The European Commission on Human Rights investigated the Greek allegations of torture and other violations of human rights and came down hard against Turkey for those violations in a long opinion.

Harry Truman succeeded to the presidency on April 12, 1945. Since then he had had a full dinner plate of problems. Potsdam, the decision to use the atomic bomb against Japan, the development of a long range foreign policy -- containment -- for a State Department under Dean Acheson and the Truman Doctrine were just the first course. He had an upcoming election in 1948, the Marshall Plan involving economic aid to Europe devastated by war and in need of reconstruction, and the decision to proceed with development of the nuclear bomb and a delivery system capable of using them. Also, it was necessary to decide on the framework of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).

During World War II, much of Europe was devastated by military forces on land and from the air. Dresden, Germany, for example, was firebombed almost out of existence by British bombers. So were other German cities. After American troops landed in Normandy on June 4, 1944 French villages suffered greatly. Philosophically, the French shrugged it all off with Gallic humor. "One can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs." However, entire industrial plants, rail delivery systems, and transportation hubs had been completely destroyed or damaged beyond repair. In Great Britain, food rationing continued for about five years after Germany's surrender, and the country needed repair after extensive damage from German bombs. Coventry, a British industrial city, had been almost wiped out. London itself had been seriously damaged, not only by bombs, but also by the V-1 and V-2 rockets launched by the Germans late in the war. So, in a speech at Harvard University, General George Marshall suggested what has since been referred to as the Marshall Plan of massive economic aid for those European countries requesting assistance in their reconstruction efforts.

Initially, the Marshall Plan was humanitarian in that it supplied the farm implements, seeds and fertilizer that allowed French and German farmers to use their land more efficiently to grow food for local consumption. Each country receiving aid was requested to develop its own list of priorities, whether for industrial recoverey or agricultural self-sufficiency. American companies almost always filled the orders approved by Marshall Plan administrators in London and Washington. So, from an initially humanitarian role, economic aid shifted to industrial reconstruction. Actually, entire plants were occasionally shipped to Europe and re-assembled where they were to be used, e.g., an oil refinery. The list of European countries receiving this aid was not long. The Soviet Union told the central European countries like Hungary and Czechoslovkia they could not participate in Marshall Plan economic aid. There is little doubt that the Marshall Plan set the stage for substantial funds of corporate direct investment in Europe.Today, the Agency for International Development (AID) is the successor agency for funnelling funds to over eighty different countries as the president proposes and Congress approves.

The first postwar crisis confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union occurred in Berlin on June 23, 1948. The Soviet Military Administration issued an order to close all rail traffic using a narrow zone about thirty miles long. The western zones with a population of 2.5 million people relied on rail traffic for all the coal and food brought into Berlin. General Lucuis Clay, in command of the American zone described the Soviet action as "one of the most ruthless efforts in modern times to use mass starvation for political coercion." Truman authorized an around-the-clock airlift of supplies known as the Berlin Airlift. Finally, the Russians relented. However, this confrontation over a minor currency reform measure was the first confrontation of the Cold War.

Truman succeeded to the presidency when Franklin Roosevelt died April 12, 1945. In 1948, Truman faced election as president. His Republican opponent was Thomas E. Dewey, formerly Governor of New York and relentless prosecutor of criminals as District Attorney for the City of New York. There was no television, only radio, but there was the railroad which Truman used on his whistle stop tour of the United States. Dewey had lost to Roosevelt in the 1944 election, and he was foreordained to lose to Truman four years later. Some 49 million voters went to the polls. Truman got 49.6 percent of the popular vote and 303 votes in the Electoral College to Dewey's 189 votes. Strom Thurmond ran as a States Rights candidate, and Henry Wallace ran as a Progressive Party candidate. Neither got more than token votes.

In 1948, President Truman, almost alone in the Western world on the issue of Palestine, took a firm step in supporting Israel's statehood over bitter Arab protests. After World War I, the League of Nations established Great Britain as the Mandatory for Palestine, once part of the Ottoman Empire. In 1947, the British announced the termination of its mandate for Palestine. The United Nations, after considering various options, adopted Resolution 181 (II) partititioning Palestine into two states, one Jewish and the other an Arab state. The Jews accepted this partition, but the Arab world was adamantly opposed to it. On May 15, 1948 Egypt, Jordan and Syria attacked the nascent state of Israel in its War of Independence. The war ended in 1949 with Jordan in unlawful possession of the West Bank. On April 15, 1950 Jordan announced it was annexing the West Bank as an extension of its Hashemite Kingdom, an act in violation of international law. This was only one of the factors creating the foundation for continuing support of Israel by the United States.

In 1949, President Truman had two major policy problems. One was China, renamed the Peoples' Republic of China, and the other was the decision to approve production of the nuclear bomb. Mao Tse-tung was now the ruler of all China except for Taiwan; the Chinese in Beijing consider Taiwan a province of theirs that will soon return home. Chou En-lai was Premier in 1960 when Edgar Snow visited China in that year after a long absence. Since 1949, Chiang Kai-shek had taken his gold out of China and used it to rule Taiwan. Members of the Kuomintang had left China with Chiang.

In his book, The Other Side of the River: Red China Today, Snow described his visit with soldiers, peasants, workers, intellectuals, students, composers, teachers, doctors, lawyers, actors, and journalists. His Chinese was sufficiently fluent to get along without an interpreter, but no foreigner was permitted to travel in China without an Intourist guide who often doubled as an interpreter. His book was published by Random House in 1961, long after Mao had become ruler of all China. Snow wrote one entire chapter on the subject of "Why China Went Red." This chapter began with a quote from Dean Acheson, who was Secretary of State during the civil war in China. Dated July 30, 1949 Acheson said: "The unfortunate but inescapable fact is that the ominous result of the civil war in China was beyond the control of the government of the United States. Nothing that this country did or could have done within the reasonable limits of its capabilities could have changed that result; nothing that was left undone by this country has contributed to it. It was the product of internal Chinese forces, which this country tried to influence, but could not." Edgar Snow agreed with Acheson and wrote in Chapter 9:

Contrary to opinion held in America, the Kuomintang never posed a clear moral alternative to the Communists but competed with them purely on the basis of an efficient use of force. For educated youths joining the Communists it was simply a matter of practical judgment whether their method was the only one which would provide a personal solution as well as quickly close the appalling industrial and scientific gaps between China and the advanced nations of the world. Those who became convinced of this in the early days made a discovery which confounded all previous Marxist theory. They discovered that they could bring the proletarian revolution to power without urban or proletarian insurrections.

Unfortunately, what happens in China affects policies developed in Washington. Up until 1949, for example, the United States supported Chiang, arming his forces for use aginst Japan during World War II. This war was a joint effort, with Mao's forces also fighting Japan within China. In 1949, however, the United States rather than accept Beijing's invitation to recognize the new Communist reality in China, chose to continue its support of Chiang on Taiwan. Domestic political considerations within the United States would probably have prevented any other policy. California's Senator, William Knowland, a Republican, was a major spokesman of the Chinese lobby in Washington.

President Truman and Congress also had to deal with the Soviet threat to the West in Europe. So the North Atlantic Treaty was negotiated, primarily with Great Britain and France with an American initiative. It was ratified by the Senate in 1949, and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was born. 3 The Federal Republic of Germany was a member of NATO but by terms of the NATO treaty, could not use its own arms except in an armed attack against it by the Soviet Union. In Article 5 of the treaty, it was provided that

"an armed attack against one or more of them [its parties] in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all, and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defense recognized by Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations, will assist the party or parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually, and in concert with the other parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area."

Over time, the United States maintained the lion's share of NATO troops in Europe and at a huge cost essentially as a defense of Germany against an armed attack by the Soviet Union. The formation of NATO appears to have been motivated less by an expectation that Stalin's forces might attack Western Europe than by fear of a neutralist European third force, a short cut to suicide.Without American troops in Germany, Russia's Red Army could occcupy Western Europe. Policy planners in Washington, including Dean Acheson and perhaps George Kennan wanted to be certain that American power would be projected to reflect the new policy of containment of Communism. The Soviet Union responded to NATO by organizing the Warsaw Pact forces, principally East Germany, Poland and the forces of central European nations all armed by the Soviet Union.

The immediate postwar period was dominated by an anti-Communist atmosphere. Members of Congress, being politicians, sensed that the voters feared Communism then, as much as they fear crime today. During World War II, the Soviet Union had plenty of agents spying for them, and Stalin, at Potsdam, knew all about the two atomic bombs to be dropped on Japan. His spies had gathered enough information from a few Americans to make fairly accurate parts for the use of the Russians working along parallel lines in Moscow. On August 29, 1949 the Soviet Union tested its own atomic bomb in Kazakhstan. On August 12, 1953 its scientists tested the first Russian thermonuclear weapon. Klaus Fuchs, himself a highly experienced nuclear physicist, performed one last act of espionage at Los Alamos. On June 13, 1946 he reviewed all the archives on thermonuclear weapons design. These were then passed on to Moscow. Fuchs and a few Americans did incalculable damage. They made it possible for the Soviet Union to produce its own nuclear weapons within a time span shortened by as much as two years. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were convicted and executed for their part in this espionage. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Petitioners v. United States, 346 U.S. 273 (1953).They were both indicted for conspiring to commit espionage in wartime in violation of the Espionage Act of 1917. A jury found them guilty and they were sentenced to death. Upon appeal, the verdict was affirmed at 195 F2nd 583 (2nd Cir. 1952), and a petition for rehearing was denied. In its per curiam opinion. the Supreme Court also held that the Atomic Energy Act of 1946 operated with retrospective effect.

Anti-Communist hysteria reached levels previously unimaginable in 1950. In that year, Congress enacted the Internal Security Act over President Truman's veto. Known as the McCarran Act after Nevada's Senator Pat McCarran, the statute ordered Communists to register with the attorney general; the Subversive Activities Control Board was created to administer the registration process. After eleven years of litigation, the Supreme Court finally upheld the registration provisions of the Act. Communist Party v. Subversive Activities Control Board, 367 U.S. 1 (1961). Chief Justice Warren, Justices Black, Douglas, and Brennan dissented. On the same day, the Court affirmed the conviction of Junius Scales for being a member of the Communist Party with knowledge of its purpose. Scales v. United States, 367 U.S. 203 (1961). Scales was convicted under a provision of the Smith Act. A provision of the Smith Act made it a crime "for any person knowingly to combine, conspire, or agree with any other person to perform any act which would substantially contribute to the establishment within the United States of a totalitarian dictatorship...the direction or control of which is to be vested in, or exercised by or under the domination or control of, any foreign government, foreign organization or foreign individual..."

The same four justices dissented in Scales. Section 2 of the McCarran Act recited legislative findings based on evidence adduced before several Congressional committees. The first of these was: "There exists a world Communist movement which in its origins, its development and its present practices, is a world-wide revolutionary movement whose purpose it is, by treachery, deceit, infiltration into other groups (governmental and otherwise, espionage, sabotage, terrorism, and by any other means deemed necessary, to establish a Communist totalitarian dictatorship in the countries throughout the world through the medium of a world-wide Communist organization."

The objectives attributed to the Soviet Union as stated in this finding were almost completely impossible. As George Kennan wrote in 1989, "After the success of the Marshall Plan in 1948, there could no longer be any question of dangerous communist penetration in the [Western Europe] region. Both sides, furthermore, soon began to learn to live, after a fashion, with the nuclear weapon, at least in the sense that they came to recognize that this was a suicidal weapon that must never be used -- that any attempt to use it would lead only to a disaster in which all concepts of victory or defeat would become meaningless." In enacting subversive control laws, Congress was using the politics of fear for domestic political purposes.

While extracting this text from the act itself required access to a law library, the general public was treated to radio and newspaper reports of this overheated rhetoric on an almost daily basis. Attempts to penalize membership in the Communist Party were not limited to Congress. Konigsberg v. State Bar of California, 366 U.S. 36 (1961). However, before all this anti-Communist hysteria, civil liberties fared well. On June 17, 1957, the Supreme Court overturned the contempt citation of a man who had refused to answer some some questions put to him by the House UnAmerican Acticities Committee (HUAC); Watkins v. United States, 354 U.S. 178 (1957). In Sweezy v. New Hampshire, 354 U.S. 235 (1957), the court imposed constitutional constraints on investigations conducted by state legislatures; in Service v. Dulles, 354 U.S. 363 (1957) the court ordered the reinstatement of an alleged security risk; and in Yates v. United States, 354 U.S. 298 (1957), the court reversed the convictions of California Communist leaders.

On March 25, 1947 President Truman brought his Cold War home to America. He signed Executive Order 9835 launching the Federal Employees Loyalty Program, the most sweeping loyalty inquiry in the nation's history. According to Red Scare, some 26,000 persons were referred to loyalty boards for investigation, and nearly 13,000 interrogatories and letters of charge were issued, often on the basis of flimsy and hearsay evidence. In 1953, President Eisenhower revoking one executive order and issuing Executive Order 10450 establishing a new and expanded loyalty program. Both allowed the Attorney General to list all organizations he considered subversive. There was no appeal from his decision, nor was any pre-listing required. In Peters v Hobby, 349 U.S. 331 (1955), Peters was the victim of a so-called post audit undertaken by the loyalty review board. He sued Secretary Oveta Culp Hobby for a declaratory judgment that his removal on loyalty grounds was invalid. The Supreme Court agreed the post audit hearing was invalid. In his concurring opinion, Justice Black thought "the order and others like it embody a broad, far-reaching espionage program over federal employees." Justice Black considered the entire program as an unlawful delegation of power by the executive. Despite the hysteria generated by the late and unlamented Senator Joseph McCarthy (Rep. Wisc.), the Supreme Court acted rationally in Peters v. Hobby, 349 U.S. 331 (1955). It reinstated federal employees discharged under the loyaly-security program.

In Cole v. Young, 351 U.S. 536 (1956), the court overturned the conviction of a Communist leader for violation of a state sedition law. Lest this dark period in history be forgotten, here's what the Red Scare generated according to Griffin Fariello's Red Scare: Memories of the American Inquisition:

State and federal investigators grilled suspected citizens on the reading habits, voting patterns, and church attendance. Support of racial equality became evidence of subversive leaning. Heretical literature was banned from public and school libraries; some communities even held book burnings. Hollywood scoured its films for the subversive taint. Neighbors informed on neighbors, students on their teachers. Readers of 'questionable' works hid their leftists tomes or buried them in the back yard. Seven war-era concentration camps were dusted off, and lists prepared for the radicals to fill them.

Joseph McCarthy began his reign of political terror in 1950. Elected to the Senate in 1946, McCarthy was something of a non-entity until February, 1950. It was at a political rally in Wheeling, West Virginia that he stumbled on his cause. According to the local newspaper, the Wheeling Intelligencer he told people present at the rally that "I have here in my hand a list of 205 people who were known to the Secretary of State [George Marshall] as being members of the Communist Party and who, nevertheless, are still working and shaping policy of the State Department."

But McCarthy got it wrong. Soviet spies like Kim Philby told Moscow what Washington was doing. Philby and three colleagues at Cambridge University were recruited by Moscow in the mid-1930s and collectively did more damage to both British and American interests than any other spies, including Klaus Fuchs and Aldrich Ames. In fact, Philby served as MI6's chief liaison with the Central Intelligence Agency. It was not until 1963 that Philby, evidently tipped off by a colleague, fled Beirut, Lebanon for Moscow, only steps ahead of a CIA hit team. This closed the door on the Soviet Union's most successful penetration ever of Western intelligence at the very highest levels of government. McCarthy never knew of this penetration and blamed State Department personnel indiscriminately for the CIA's negligence. A confluence of events made McCarthy's timing propitious. Klaus Fuchs was arrested as a Soviet spy. Alger Hiss was tried and convicted of perjury, and Judith Coplon was arrested and charged with espionage. The Hiss case launched an obscure California member of the House, Richard Nixon, on a political career that led him to the White House in 1968. Nixon was President Eisenhower's Vice President from 1952 to 1960. China went its own way in 1949 after Chiang fled to Taiwan. McCarthy never offered convincing evidence of these outrageous charges, but they were none the less unsettling to people familiar with loyalty programs and subversive activity. His shrill denunciations dominated public life for the next five years, and neither he nor his Senate committee, the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the Senate Committee on Government Operations ever produced a bona fide Communist or even turned any charges to the Department of Justice for prosecution. Finally, the Senate Army hearings were his undoing. He was censured by the Senate and died unmourned two years later. He did leave one indelible definition behind. This one appears on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary.

Mc•Car•thy•ism n.1. the practice of making accusations of disloyalty, esp. of pro-Communist activity, in many instances unsupported by proof or based on slight, doubtful, or irrelevant evidence. 2. the practice of making unfair allegations or using unfair investigative techniques, esp. in order to restrict dissent or political criticism. [1950, Amer.; after J. R.McCarthy; see -ISM]

While President Truman was in office, he became heavily committed to establishing the rule of law in international affairs. Korea, occupied by Japan for thirty-five years, was liberated after World War II and divided into North Korea ruled by a Communist dictatorship. South Korea was created south of the 38th parallel. It was ruled by that arch-conservative Syngman Rhee. There had been threats and counter-threats between the two Koreas, and on June 25, 1950 the North Korean army moved across the 38th parrallel to invade South Korea in violation of Article 2 (4) of the United Nations Charter. Truman appealed to the Security Council and it effectively converted American armed forces in the region to UN forces authorized to conduct a police action to restore the status quo. General Douglas MacArthur was placed in charge of this UN action, but he didn't completely follow orders. After pushing the North Korean forces north of the 38th parrallel, MacArthur went further pursuing them all the way to the Yalu River and provoking Chinese armed forces to act in self-defense. Finally, an armistice was signed, and the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) was established at the 38th parrallel. But that didn't happen until 1953, when Dwight Eisenhower was elected president.

However, Harry Truman was still president when the United Steelworkers of America announced it would go out on strike, all mediation efforts having failed. Truman saw the threat of a national steel strike as denying essential weapons to American forces in Korea. Accordingly, Truman issued Executive Order 10340 authorizing his Secretary of Commerce to seize and operate the steel mills as government operations. The Supreme Court rejected this completely. Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer, as Secretary of Commerce, 343 U.S. 579 (1952). Writing for the Court, Justice Black said: "The President's power, if any, to issue the order must stem either from an act of Congress or from the Constitution itself. There is no statute that expressly authorizes the President to take possession of property as he did here. Nor is there any act of Congress to which our attention has been directed from which such a power can fairly be implied." The order was declared invalid by a unanimous court with four separate concurring opinions.

In 1952, President Truman decided he would not seek reelection as president, so the Democrats nominated Adlai Stevenson, once the Governor of Illinois as its candidate. In Chicago, amidst internecine battles between the forces of conservative Senator Robert Taft of Ohio and the pro-Eisenhower forces, the Republicans nominated Dwight Eisenhower, the hero of the crusade in Europe against Nazi Germany. In November, 1952 some 61.5 million voters went to the polls. Eisenhower got 55.1 percent of the popular vote and 442 electoral votes. Stevenson got only 89 electoral votes with 44.4 percent of the popular vote.

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All contents © 1996 William M. Brinton
All photographs © Archive Photos, New York
All film © Archive Film, New York