III. A Revisionist Look at America in the Cold War

As Gore Vidal depicts it in The Golden Age, the Cold War was started by the United States, by a Truman administration determined to show Joe Stalin who was boss of the postwar world. When Vidal researched the Cold War, he could, once again, have found much intellectual ammunition in the work of Harry Elmer Barnes. The conventional historical account of the origins of the Cold War places much emphasis on the warlike and imperialistic intentions of the Soviet Union, to which the United States was forced, reluctantly, to respond. Barnes would have none of this. In 1953, in his essay "How Nineteen Eighty-four Trends Threaten American Peace, Freedom, and Prosperity," he wrote that

the Russia which is now portrayed as about to spring at the world and devour it is the same Russia that Roosevelt, Harry Hopkins, and other administration leaders presented to the American public as our most potent and suitable ally in the global struggle to suppress totalitarianism, assure democracy, promote liberty, and make peace secure throughout the world. There is very little today in Russian policy, domestic or foreign, which any informed person did not know about back in 1941. In fact, nothing which Russia has done since 1945 has been as aggressive and brutal as the invasion of Poland in the autumn of 1939, the later mass murders of Polish officers in the Katyn Forest in 1940, or the mass murders and deportations of Baltic peoples during the war.

Barnes considered the likelihood of the Soviet Union making war against the United States to be extremely remote. "Even leading Russophobes like Eugene Lyons," he wrote, "frankly admit that there is every reason to expect that Russia will not start a war." Moreover, he pointed out, when General Alfred M. Gruenther, General Eisenhower's chief of staff, testified before the House Foreign Affairs Committee on March 25, 1952, he too "conceded that he did not believe the Russians will start a war, now or at any time."²²⁸

But if it was not Soviet agression that launched the Cold War, what did launch it? "Barnes concluded that it was initiated by Truman and Churchill, largely for domestic politicial reasons, and since then has been used by each of the various governments to cement its rule over its subjects."²²⁹ What Barnes seems to have regarded as the first official act of the Cold War, Truman's decision to drop the newly developed atomic bomb on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, is depicted in conventional accounts of American history as primarily a military decision—an attempt to force Japanese surrender without the necessity of an invasion of the islands and a prolonged land war on Japanese soil, with its attendant American casualties, possibly numbering in the millions. Again, Barnes would have none of this. In May 1958, he published an article in National Review called "Hiroshima: Assault on a Beaten Foe," in which he pointed to

the highly significant MacArthur memorandum to F.D.R. of January 20, 1945. This forty-page memorandum explicitly set forth the terms of an authentic Japanese peace offer which were virtually identical with the final surrender terms that we accepted from the Japanese seven months later—at the cost of countless needlessly expended lives, Japanese and American alike.

In the same article, "Barnes also disclosed, for the first time, the personal testimony of Herbert Hoover that President Truman, by early May, 1945, informed him that he knew of the extensive Japanese peace offers and admitted then that further fighting with the Japanese was really unnecessary." Barnes concluded "that the major reason for dropping the bomb[...] was a sabre-rattling gesture to the Russians against whom we were already preparing the Cold War."²³⁰

A very similar view of the Cold War had already been articulated by this time by William Appleman Williams. In 1952, in his first book, American-Russian Relations, 1781-1947,

[c]ontradicting the prevailing notion that the Cold War had come about through the actions of an aggressive and expansionist Soviet Union, Williams argued that the United States itself bore the primary responsibility. Even before Pearl Harbor, he wrote, American policymakers had committed themselves to achieving a postwar world dominated by an alliance between Great Britain and the United States. By attempting to force upon Russia this Anglo-American world order without regard to her minimum security needs, American leaders forced an essentially conservative Soviet Union into acting unilaterally in her own defense.

Among the methods Williams claimed American leaders had used in pressuring the Soviets was "brandishing atomic weapons."²³¹

Williams's student, Gar Alperovitz, who earned his B.S. in History at the University of Wisconsin in 1959, took his old teacher's argument and ran with it, devoting two entire books to presenting the relevant details and working out their implications. The first of these books, Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam, the Use of the Atomic Bomb and the American Confrontation with Soviet Power, was published in 1965; the second, The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb and the Architecture of anAmerican Myth, appeared thirty years later, in 1995. According to Robert James Maddox, Atomic Diplomacy

is devoted to showing that from the time Harry S. Truman assumed the presidency he undertook to reverse Franklin D. Roosevelt's policy of cooperation with the Soviet Union, thereby precipitating the Cold War. In direct violation of wartime agreements, some explicit and some understood, Truman sought to construct an American-dominated world order (particularly in Eastern Europe and the Far East) at the end of World War II. When economic coercion failed to achieve this goal, Alperovitz claimed, Truman bided his time until the United States acquired the atomic bomb, with which he meant to cow the Russians into submission. The use of nuclear weapons against an already defeated Japan, according to this view, amounted to a diplomatic rather than a military act. The evidence "strongly suggests," he wrote, that the bombs were used primarily to demonstrate to the Russians the enormous power America would have in its possession during subsequent negotiations. As a lesser factor, he cited the wish to end the war quickly before they [the Soviets] could establish a strong position in the Far East.²³²

To quote Alperovitz himself, from one of his Cold War Essays (1970), "the over-riding reason for the use of the bomb was that (implicitly or explicitly) it was judged necessary to strengthen the United States's hand against Russia." Commenting in the same essay on Herbert Feis's then newly published book, The Atomic Bomb and the End of World War II (1966), Alperovitz stresses the author's establishment credentials—"special consultant to three Secretaries of War," "comes close to being our official diplomatic historian"—and judges the volume under consideration, predictably, as the work of a man perhaps overly interested in "avoiding serious criticism of the eminent officials he has known." He comments further:

One [...] would also like to believe that the sole motive of the eminent men he knew was to save lives. It is not pleasant to think that they were so fascinated by their new "master card" of diplomacy that they scarcely considered the moral implications of their act when they used it. That, however, is precisely what the evidence available strongly suggests.²³³