American History Revised (78 page)

This American president, described by his assistant defense secretary as “a simple man, prone to make up his mind quickly and decisively—a thorough American,” reveled in America’s military might and issued an “insistent note of unilateral responsibility” for the use of his superior force “as a sacred trust for the rest of the world.” In a well-publicized 1946 speech at an open outdoor site in New York City, packed with hundreds of anxious people, he reassured his fellow citizens that there would be absolutely no “compromises with evil.” Placing America’s security on its ability to wage a “preemptive military strike,” he increased the defense and espionage budget dramatically and permitted his FBI director to undertake whatever illegal wiretaps were deemed necessary to identify potential “security risks.”

One man, who had graced the cover of
Time
magazine as an “authentic contemporary hero” for his contributions to American security, expressed concerns about such aggressive measures. Asked “What instrument would you use to detect an atomic bomb hidden somewhere in a city?” Robert Oppenheimer sarcastically replied that it would take a screwdriver, to open each and every suitcase or crate coming into the U.S.—a clear impossibility. “It is clear to me that wars have changed,” he said, meaning that the advantage now rested with the stealthy aggressor, not the well-fortified powerful defender.

Such ideas did not go down well with Harry Truman and his military advisers, especially when Oppenheimer, “the father of the atom bomb,” questioned the logic of building an even bigger bomb, the hydrogen bomb, calling it a weapon of “mass genocide.” Said the president to Secretary of State Dean Acheson, “I don’t want to see that son of a bitch in this office ever
again!” Over the next seven years the FBI conducted a massive investigation amounting to some eight thousand pages of illegal wiretap and surveillance reports on Oppenheimer, but could find no “smoking gun.” For J. Edgar Hoover, this was a major embarrassment, and Hoover was not a man who tolerated being made a fool. Surveillance of Oppenheimer continued. In the meantime, by 1953 both the U.S. and the USSR had developed the hydrogen bomb.

That year, acting on a letter that he knew offered “little new evidence,” but fearful of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s charges that he was being “soft” on communism, President Eisenhower ordered Oppenheimer’s security clearance to be lifted—and
then
for a review to take place. Having failed several times already to get Oppenheimer declared a security risk, the director of the Atomic Energy Commission was now jubilant: “We’re going to get him this time.”

Oppenheimer’s friend Albert Einstein caught the mood well: “The German calamity of years ago repeats itself: People acquiesce without resistance and align themselves with the forces of evil.”

From the beginning it was obvious to Oppenheimer that he faced a kangaroo court. He was permitted to read the charges against him, but not to take the document out of the room or call a lawyer. He was given twenty-four hours to resign or face the wrath of the government. When he finally did meet with his lawyers, their deliberations were recorded by hidden FBI microphones. The court of review was not a civil court or a trial by jury, but an administrative hearing closed to the press or the public. By calling it an “inquiry” rather than a court, the government avoided having to comply with rules of due process—though everyone knew full well a trial was taking place. The three judges were hand-picked by the government prosecutor, and had access to all the prosecutor’s evidence before the hearing began. Oppenheimer’s lawyers were denied access to the government’s depositions and list of witnesses, whereas the government had full access to Oppenheimer’s, thanks to the FBI. No accusation of a specific crime was brought against Oppenheimer, just the vague possibility that he was “a threat to national security” for failing to advocate “the strongest offensive military posture for the United States.” (Ignored by the court was the fact that the United States had just completed the successful test of a new, second hydrogen bomb seven hundred times more powerful than the Hiroshima atom bomb—putting the U.S. far ahead of Russia. In the dark days of McCarthyism, however, this was not enough military “security.”)

Secretly kept informed of the progress of the hearing was President Eisenhower, who promptly burned the interim report lest he expose himself to possible impeachment for improper meddling in a judicial matter.

Despite such overwhelming government power, Oppenheimer almost pulled it out, losing by one vote, 2–1. Stripped of his security clearance, he never served his government again and lived out his days as director of the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton. In 1962, recognizing the injustice that had been done, President Kennedy invited Oppenheimer to a White House reception, and in 1963, following Kennedy’s initiative, President Lyndon Johnson awarded Oppenheimer the prestigious Enrico Fermi Prize for public service.

Actually, more than injustice was done. This was a betrayal of American security. In its zeal to convict Oppenheimer, the government applied two sets of standards for admitting evidence: witnesses for the defense were denied security clearance, whereas witnesses for the prosecution were granted full security clearance and could now say whatever they knew, even if it formerly had been secret. Observes the historian Priscilla McMillan, “Scientists all over the world pored over the transcript after it was published, and the official British historian Lorna Arnold wrote that the transcript of the Oppenheimer hearing helped British weaponeers invent an H-bomb of their own.” There is no written record of the Russian reaction, but obviously the Russians must have been astounded at their good luck. How could the Americans be so dumb? Not a shred of evidence was produced to show that Oppenheimer had given away any secrets to the Russians. But in an American court, the U.S. government was perfectly willing to do so if it would help secure a conviction against a political adversary.

When the English jurist Edmund Burke called patriotism “the last refuge of a scoundrel,” he meant that patriotism often was misused by ruthless men to mask their own personal agendas. If a luminary like Robert Oppenheimer couldn’t stand up to it, who can?

1957
When George W. Bush was eleven years old, the U.S. embarked on a massive two-year search for weapons of mass destruction. Every intelligence tool was employed, with no luck. Nonetheless, the issue became a critical issue in the forthcoming presidential election, until afterward the Pentagon sheepishly admitted the whole episode had been much ado about nothing: the weapons were nonexistent. The new president of the United States, John F. Kennedy, ordered a study done to make sure such a foul-up would never occur again. In 1963 the completed study arrived on the desk of the assistant secretary of defense, Paul Nitze. Its title: “But Where Did the Missile Gap Go?”

It would seem, judging from events when GW did become president, that no one in his administration had ever heard of it, much less read it. Had they done so,
they might have empathized with the pressure of an unknown threat and how easy it is to overreact and see only the facts that support one’s beliefs and assumptions. It is like the district attorney who twists the facts to convict a man he absolutely and unequivocably knows is guilty—or does he? Even the brilliant Dean Acheson, Harry Truman’s secretary of state, admitted in his memoirs that in pushing for a massive U.S. arms buildup against what he saw as a grave Soviet threat, he had sometimes erred in trying to make his points “clearer than truth.”

The Soviets’ launch of the
Sputnik
satellite in October 1957 came as a stunning shock to America: how could this possibly happen? Any notion of U.S. technological superiority vanished overnight. Adding to Americans’ shock and loss of pride was the taunting of the Russian premier. Unable to restrain himself, Khrushchev gloated that the USSR was building missiles “like sausages.”

All over Washington, fingers pointed at each other, placing blame. For more than a year the U.S. had U-2 spy-plane flights flying over Russia trying to assess Russian missile capabilities, but the flights were top-secret, and anyway, the information coming in from the flights was slow and cumbersome, and did not cover the wide expanse of Siberia. In the absence of hard and complete information, and in a climate of fear, a turf war erupted between the CIA and the Air Force, with the Air Force taking the pessimistic view. The Air Force claimed there could be hundreds of Soviet ICBMs, whereas the CIA argued there were no more than a dozen.

Eventually the dispute was leaked to the press, where John F. Kennedy made it a major campaign issue, charging the Eisenhower administration with failing to protect the nation’s security. After JFK took office, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara undertook further study and concluded the CIA had been right after all: there had never been any missile gap, and whatever missile gap existed had always been in favor of the United States. Instead of two hundred missiles, it turned out that Russia had only four. (The U.S. had 1,000.) To admit that a major issue that helped make JFK president had all been a mirage was most embarrassing. Reminisced McNamara many years later, “It led, the next day, to Senator Dirksen, the Republican minority leader of the Senate, charging the election had been a fraud and asking it be re-run! It was a terrible situation!”

At the end of 1962, after the resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis, JFK, meeting with several of his advisers, started reflecting on the infamous missile gap that had made him president. It must have been an awkward moment, to say the least, but he plunged ahead. “There was created a myth in this country that did great harm,” he said. “It was created by, I would say, emotionally guided but nonetheless patriotic individuals in the Pentagon.” Admitting himself as “one of those who put that
myth around—a patriotic and misguided man,” he ordered: “I want some research … dig up the record….Otherwise what it looks like is we, some of us, distorted the facts and created a myth of the gap that didn’t exist.”

Talking about the officials who had created the missile-gap myth, Kennedy said, “There are still people of that kind in the Pentagon. I wouldn’t give them any foundation for creating another myth.”

Forty years later, of course, it happened.

1959
This Republican president had ordered a top-secret raid on the opposition to glean valuable information. The raid was highly illegal, but the potential rewards outweighed the risks—or so he thought.

When the raiding force got arrested, the president, “seeing the darkening clouds of an enormous election-year scandal forming,” went into high-octane denial. Petrified of the growing press inquiries, he ordered his staffers to cover up and issue a new statement replacing the cover story, and to stick with it, no matter what.

“Once set in motion, however, the lie would soon gain a life of its own and no one would be able to control it,” wrote espionage expert James Bamford. The president’s employees stood up in front of the television cameras and told “lie after lie for the better part of an hour.”

When a tape recording of the actual events turned up, flatly proving the president of the United States had lied, the president faced the worrisome prospect of impeachment. He was so depressed he told his loyal secretary, “I would like to resign.” But he did not. After a good night’s sleep, he instructed his staff that they must continue to hide his personal involvement in the ill-fated project. Cabinet officers, he instructed further, should hide their knowledge of his involvement even while under oath. “No information should be divulged,” he said. In front of a Senate investigating committee, the president’s closest adviser stonewalled and told the senators right off, “I don’t discuss what the president says to me or I say to the president.”

Eisenhower survived. The raid was not the raid on the Democratic Party headquarters in 1972, but the U-2 spy flights over Russia, exposed by Khrushchev.