Redactions

Henry Stimson didn’t go to Kyoto on his honeymoon

by Alex Wellerstein, published July 24th, 2023

The city of Kyoto was the only great city of Japan to be spared serious bombing during World War II, despite being among the top targets preferred for the atomic bomb, thanks to the unprecedented and extraordinary efforts by the Secretary of War, Henry L. Stimson, to protect it. I have written at length on this, and why I have come to think that the issue of Kyoto is actually the key to understanding quite a lot about Truman and the bomb, both prior to and after its use. Whenever the issue of Kyoto comes up in popular discussions, however, one other assertion always arises: that Stimson saved Kyoto because he spent his honeymoon there.

Stimson was not invited by Truman to attend the Potsdam Conference — his rivals, like Byrnes, appear to have gotten him excluded — but the “old man” showed up anyway, with this defiant look on his face. Truman would tell him that he was glad, as Stimson was Truman’s primary conduit of information about the Trinity test and the atomic bomb.

This is used for one of the very few deliberately humorous notes in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer (2023) film, which came out last week. I am in the process of writing a longer review of that, and will probably post something else on it here, but it has served as an instigator for me to push out a blog post I had been working on in draft form for several months about this question of the “honeymoon.” As the post title indicates, my conclusion, after spending some time looking into this, is that the honeymoon story is more probably than not a myth. Stimson did go to Kyoto at least twice in the 1920s, but neither trip could be reasonably characterized as a honeymoon, and explaining his actions on Kyoto in World War II as a result of a “honeymoon” is trivializing and misleading.


Nolan’s portrayal of Stimson is, well, not very charitable. Within the narrative construction of the film, Stimson exists to emphasize a growing theme of Oppenheimer becoming sidelined as a “mere” technical expert by the military and government officials. In the one meeting that Stimson appears (it is a fictionalized version of the May 31, 1945, meeting of the Interim Committee that Oppenheimer attended as a member of a Scientific Panel of consultants), Oppenheimer strains to get Stimson and others to see the atomic bomb as something worth taking seriously as a weapon and long-term problem. (This was the same meeting in which Oppenheimer reports on the Scientific Panel’s conclusions against a demonstration of the bomb.)

In the film, Stimson expresses some skepticism at the impressiveness of the bomb (Oppenheimer has to convince him otherwise), shoots down any suggestions about warning the Japanese ahead of it, impresses on the men there that the Japanese are intractably committed to war in the face of defeat, and then agrees that the atomic bomb might save American lives. He then, at the end, looks over a list of 12 possible targets, and without fanfare or opposition removes Kyoto from the list, smiling and saying it was an important cultural treasure to the Japanese, and incidentally, where he and his wife had their honeymoon. In both showings of the film, this gets a big laugh. We’ll come back to that laugh.

Stimson’s opening statement to the Interim Committee meeting on May 31, 1945.

The reality of Stimson, and that meeting, is a lot more complicated than that. One could unpack each of the various components of that meeting as depicted in the film (they are all wrong in some way), but I would just emphasize that Stimson was probably the most high-placed government official to see the atomic bomb in the kinds of terms Oppenheimer cared about. Stimson was the highest-ranked government official to closely follow the atomic bomb’s development, and cared deeply about it as a wartime weapon and as a long-term issue. (His interest in the atomic bomb was essentially the only reason he had not retired from his office.) He absolutely did not believe the Japanese were intractable (he was one of those advocating for a weakening of the terms of unconditional surrender, because he understood the Japanese need to protect their Emperor, even before the MAGIC decrypts showed concrete evidence of this as a sticking point), he absolutely did not frame the atomic bomb’s usage as something that would save American lives. To give a sense of Stimson’s mindset, here is how Stimson opened the May 31, 1945, Interim Committee meeting, according to the minutes:

The Secretary [Stimson] expressed the view, a view shared by General Marshall, that this project should not be considered simply in terms of military weapons, but as a new relationship of ·man to the universe. This discovery might be compared to the discoveries of the Copernican theory and of the laws of gravity, but far more important than these in its effect on the lives of men. While the advances in the field to date had been fostered by the needs of war, it was important to realize that the implications of the project went far beyond the needs of the present war. It must be controlled if possible to make it an assurance of future peace rather than a menace to civilization.

Could one imagine a sentiment more aligned with that of Oppenheimer’s? Anyway, I digress — but my point is to emphasize that the movie does Stimson dirty here, in turning him into a dummy stand-in representing “the powers that be” and how much their interests could diverge from Oppenheimer’s. In reality, Oppenheimer’s positions were pretty well-represented “at the top” for quite some time; making him into an “outsider” here, I think, obscures the reality quite a bit. There will be more on this in my actual review.


But let’s get back to the question of Kyoto and the alleged “honeymoon.” I don’t mention the “honeymoon” story in my own work, because I’ve never been able to substantiate it, despite trying. I am quite interested in the events that led to Kyoto being “spared” from the atomic bombing (and all other bombing) in World War II. I believe, and will be writing quite a bit more on this in my next book, that this incident has not been taken seriously enough by historians. For one thing, it was the only targeting decision that President Truman actually directly participated in, when he backed Stimson in removing it from the list. For another thing, the fact that Truman was involved at all was because Stimson was (correctly) afraid that the military (in the personage of Groves and his subordinates) would not recognize his authority as a civilian to make “operational” decisions of this sort. So it is an important moment in the question of civilian-military relations regarding nuclear weapons. And I believe there is other significance to the Kyoto incident that I have written on elsewhere, and will write on more in the future. The point I’m trying to make is that perhaps more than others, I have really wanted to get into the ins-and-outs of the Kyoto question, including Stimson’s motivations, for some time now. 

Target map of Kyoto, June 1945, with atomic bomb aiming point indicated, from General Groves’ files — a sign of how far along the plans were for Kyoto to be the first target of the atomic bomb. For more on the non-bombing of Kyoto, see my 2020 article.

I’ve come to the conclusion, after digging and digging, that the “honeymoon” story is false both in its strict sense (in the sense that Stimson did not “honeymoon” there, under any reasonable definition of “honeymoon”) and in its broader sense (attributing his actions on Kyoto during the war simply to that is misleading). I was suspicious of it early on, when I found that no serious sources actually asserted this apparently-verifiable fact, and because it has a “too clever by half” feeling to it. It feels like a “fact” that was a factor tailor-made for catchy headlines and click-bait news stories, the notion that an entire city and the million people who lived there were saved by the fortunate fact of a pleasant trip of a single man. Now, history often does have such coincidences and idiosyncrasies, to be sure. But you’ve got to be on the watch for fake ones, for half-rumors that get elevated to the status of full facts — especially when such “simple” explanations get used at the expense of interrogating more complex ones. 

None of the serious, scholarly accounts of the Kyoto incident mention that he took a honeymoon there. Stimson himself never claimed this in any of his published writings, from what I have been able to find. There are, as well, several biographies and even an autobiography of Stimson. Thanks to the essential service of the Internet Archive, perusing these quickly is a trivial task. Here are the ones I looked at, searching for any discussion of a honeymoon to anywhere, coming up with nothing

Now, not all of the above are as equal in rigor or quality as the others. (Of them, Morison, Hodgson, and Malloy are the ones which dive deepest into his early life.) And yet not one of the above authors has any indication towards the “honeymoon” story. Would not a single of the above authors found it an interesting thing to point out, had they come across any positive proof of it? And it is not that the above do not discuss the Kyoto incident — many of them do, although they do not take it as centrally important as I do. It is often discussed in terms of the apparent contradiction of Stimson’s “old values” (not bombing cities) with his advocacy of the atomic bomb use in general. If the Kyoto “honeymoon” story was true, surely that would inform such a discussion. In addition to the above, I also looked at scholarly articles in JSTOR, and it shows up in the work of no scholars of World War II history, either. 

The photo of Henry Stimson used for his 1917 passport application. Scanned by Ancestry.com.

Did Stimson have a honeymoon? Yes. But to where? That is somewhat unclear, but it doesn’t sound like Asia. Henry Lewis Stimson married Mabel Wellington White in New Haven, Connecticut, on July 6, 1893, after a long and difficult five-and-a-half-year courtship. The delayed marriage was in part to Stimson wanting to secure a solid career “position,” which by 1893 he had done: he had been, at the age of 25, made full partner in the law firm of the famous and prestigious Elihu Root, and his star would just continue to rise from them onward. Their wedding was of sufficiently high social class to carry a notice in both the New York Times and the New York Sun. The only indication that they took any kind of honeymoon that I have found comes from the Times‘ announcement, which mentions that: “The wedding tour of Mr. and Mrs. Stimson will last several weeks.”  

It is hard to get a firm sense of where Stimson may have gone in this period. This is several years before he began keeping a daily diary (he started in 1909, and it was originally not very verbose in any event). Morison says that “from 1893 through 1903 he went either to Canada or, more frequently, to the old stamping ground in the West.” He mentions trips to Europe, including a climbing of the Matterhorn in 1896, and hiking in Montana. He mentions no trips to Asia in this period, and no honeymoon. Again, one would think, especially given his later high involvement with the affairs of several Asian nations, that if there was such a trip, it would have been noticed and noted. Again, none of the above biographies of Stimson imply that he honeymooned in Asia, nor his autobiography.

The end of Stimson’s 1926 “Trip to Orient” diary, in which he mentions his arrival to Kyoto: “Kyoto at 6. [???] room a delicious dinner at Miyako Hotel. October 3rd. Beautiful day devoted to sightseeing.”

In the summer of 1926 — over thirty years after their wedding — Stimson and his wife (ages 59 and 60) engaged on what he called in his diary the “Trip to Orient.” They started out from New York City by train in late June, crossing through various parts of Canada in July, making various stops along the way to Vancouver. By July 10, they were at sea, crossing the Pacific on a ship. Over the course of July and August, he tracked his progress: Yokohama, Kobe, Shanghai (“very hot”), Nanking (“very hot”), and finally, on August 3, Manila. From here, most of his time was spent in the Philippines, either in meetings in Manila, or traveling to different cities for more meetings. 

This was not really a pleasure trip. Stimson treated it largely as a “fact-finding” mission regarding complicated diplomatic relations with regards to Asian nations and the United States, and had been invited by the Governor General of the Philippines, General Leonard Wood, a friend of Stimson’s. He documented this trip extensively, in over 80 pages of hand-written notes, mostly about conversations he had with people in the Philippines (including the rather dubious views about the “self-governing” potential of different races of man offered up by the Governor General — a reminder of the colonial and imperial nature of this endeavor). On the basis of his mission, in that impressively inexpert way of elite politics in the 1920s (apparently being rich and smart and connected with other rich and smart people was enough to make one a regional expert) was sufficient to later get him audiences with the President, would lead to Stimson becoming Governor General of the Philippines in two years, and Secretary of State after that. So it was quite an important trip for him.

In mid-September the Stimsons began the return trip, which was more leisurely and included stops in Hong Kong, Shanghai, Peking, Kobe, and Kyoto. In China and Japan, he visited temples, dined with Americans and locals. He describes many things he saw, in all of these cities, as “beautiful.” He arrived in Kyoto on October 6, and wrote that he had a “delicious dinner at Miyako Hotel.” The next day, October 3, he describes a “beautiful day devoted to sightseeing,” mentions a Buddhist monastery and temple “on high hill” (“Kiyumizu“), mentions going into Gion, and other things that are still fun to do there. Then the diary ends, which is both frustrating and remarkable, given that his time in Kyoto is what we care about, and that he documented pretty much every aspect of the trip in detail except Kyoto. Through other evidence, we know that on October 5, the Stimsons boarded a ship at Yokohama which arrived in San Francisco on October 20, so he could not have spent too much more time in Kyoto.

The brief mention of Kyoto in Stimson’s 1929 diary, and his stay (for a second time) at the Miyako Hotel.

Three years later, in March 1929, the Stimsons spent the night in Kyoto. This visit came when Stimson was returning to the United States having ended his position as Governor General of the Philippines, in order to be sworn in as Herbert Hoover’s Secretary of State. It was basically an overnight stay: according to his diary, they arrived around 6pm, went to their hotel, and were on a train to Tokyo by 8:15am. 

I would not call any of the above a “honeymoon” under even a broad definition of the term. Certainly Stimson did not appear to call it this in anything he ever said or wrote, which is really what matters. It is also not at all clear, from the above, that Kyoto was particularly “special” to Stimson in any particular way. His 1926 diary entry seems to reflect he had a nice time there. But it doesn’t contain anything that “cracks the code.” (“Sure would hate to see this city ever bombed!”) 

I am absolutely fine with suggesting that Stimson had a really nice time in Kyoto, and that he saw it as something wonderful, and that these resonances played a part in his later decision. It is a remarkable city — I visited it myself for several days in 2016, and one can see why it is regarded as an important cultural monument today, with its ancient temples, castles, streets, districts, and so on. (Some of this specialness is a little circular: Kyoto is one of the only major cities in Japan that has significant pre-war architecture and infrastructure because Stimson had it spared.) 

But let us posit that Stimson had a special attachment to it because of his trip(s) there. That is not, I don’t think, a totally satisfactory answer to why he went to such lengths to keep it off of the target list — nor, I would say, were his professed reasons, which related to avoiding the postwar animosity of the Japanese — but let us, for the sake of argument, accept that it played a role. This is still something different than saying that his took a “honeymoon” there. It is a rather significant trip (in 1926, anyway) that involved a lot more than sightseeing, and his acquaintance with Asia was not superficial. It was not some kind of kooky coincidence, and in any event, the reasons behind Stimson’s actions on Kyoto were more significant than just having a nice time with his wife.  


So where did the “honeymoon” story come from? I haven’t definitively traced the source, but it seems to come purely out of the world of journalism. If you search for “Stimson + Kyoto + honeymoon” in the ProQuest Historical Newspapers Archive (which is not comprehensive, but has many major newspapers in it), the first relevant entry is a bit of British journalism from 2002 (which describes it as his “second honeymoon,” an interesting qualifier). It appears in another British newspaper in 2006, and then “jumps the pond” to the Wall Street Journal in 2008. None of these stories attribute the statement to any source, or any expert, in particular.

A photo I took in the Gion district of Kyoto, 2017. 

Forgive me for implying that these are not what I would consider particularly strong cases of journalistic research. I have not found any invocations of this trope in any databases I have access to (which are considerable). All of which makes me suspect this is a very recent (~20 years old) myth, one propagated by journalists and the Internet into the realm of “fact.” If I had to guess, calling his 1926 trip a “second honeymoon” was a bit of inventive flourish used by a journalist that, because of its potency as an idea, became repeated and repeated until it took status as fact.

So why does this matter? Let’s get back to the Nolan film and that audience laugh I mentioned. Why laugh? Why is it funny, or interesting, to assert that Stimson scratched Kyoto off the list because he honeymooned there? Because it is discordant: one is talking about something of great historical importance and tremendous weightiness (the atomic bombings of Japan) being influenced by the idiosyncratic coincidence of an old man having fond memories of a city. It is deeply unexpected, because it pushes against the idea of the targeting of the Japanese cities as being part of a strictly rational, strategic process.

And so here’s the rub, for me: the removal of Kyoto was due to the idiosyncratic sensibilities of a single person (however inscrutable), and the targeting process was less strictly rational and strategic as most people think. But it was not quite as arbitrary and capricious as “Kyoto was spared because of a honeymoon” would imply, and the trivializing of the sparing of Kyoto obscures the actually weighty issues regarding authority (who decides the targets of an atomic bomb?) and Truman’s actual role in the bombings (far less than people think). There’s an interesting and important story here, and treating it for a laugh is, well, annoying to me, to say the least. But more to the point, we should stop repeating the honeymoon myth. If I were giving an alternative framing for journalists (and others) to use, it would be this: “For reasons both personal and strategic, Stimson fought to remove Kyoto from the target list, and to keep it off the list after the military repeatedly tried to put it back on.” That gives Stimson a bit more credit, for one thing, and also invites further interest, rather than closing the door with a too-clever-by-half explanation.

Meditations

Deconstructing “The Doomsday Machine” – Part 1: The Question of Memory

by Alex Wellerstein, published June 16th, 2023

When I learned several months ago that Daniel Ellsberg had pancreatic cancer, and was opting not to treat it, I was not quite sure what I ought to do. I consider it a great honor that I got to spend several days with Ellsberg, a few years back, and was periodically in touch with him since then. I’d like to think he was something of a friend, though I never knew him deeply or for that long of a time.

After thinking on it for several days, and feeling conflicted, and talking about it with a friend whose life experience exceeds mine by almost five decades, I opted not to reach out to him when I heard the news — I figured he had a lot more on his plate as it was, that he would be wanting to spend his final days with his family, close friends, and his final attempts at advocacy, and I couldn’t think of anything I would tell him that wouldn’t feel either maudlin or better said by others. Whatever one thinks of him, he is a world-historical figure, and I’m honored just to have met him.

Daniel Ellsberg holding forth at a dinner that was part of a 2018 workshop at the Stevens Institute of Technology on “The President and the Bomb” that was sponsored by the Ploughshares Fund. Dan was supposed to speak for 20 minutes or so but instead spoke for about 2 hours… but it all pretty interesting, if a bit taxing!

But I also felt like I ought to do something, just to commemorate him. I had hoped to maybe do that something while he was still alive, but I knew he was on a tight clock, and my own life didn’t really give me a lot of free time last spring. So what I resolved to do was to go over his final book, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner (Bloomsbury, 2017), in some very close detail, and write something about it.

I had gone over his book when it first came out, in part in preparation for talking to him about it (which I did at some length in 2018), but I had always wanted to really, truly dig into it, and to write something about it. Discussions I had with other scholars, and observations about what was and wasn’t said about the book on Twitter, in conferences, etc., made me feel that the book and its arguments had not really been taken all that seriously by serious students of nuclear history, international relations, or nuclear policy. I had long wanted to write an essay about the book, with the hope of both potentially stimulating more serious academic interest in it — because I do believe it deserves to be taken seriously, even if it (like all books, and especially memoirs, of which it mainly is) need not be taken uncritically — and also applying the lens of someone who has had the time and luxury to try and seriously study many of the events and issues that the book engages with and, in some places, makes rather radical arguments about. 

My hope was that perhaps I would be able to write this essay while Dan was still alive, and get his feedback on it, or perhaps have him answer any lingering questions I had. That obviously did not happen: I finished my deep read of his book today, June 16, 2023, a few hours before I saw his obituary in The Washington Post. (Deep sigh.)

One might think that I might feel regret at being too slow (and I knew, of course, that this was a possibility), but for whatever reason, this feels right and appropriate. It would have been nice to ask him questions, and get his responses to my thoughts, but I also would have felt guilty about burdening him with potentially something else to do in his final days, and possibly be faced with the awkwardness of disagreement, perceived critique, and, of course, the painful (to me) difficulty of talking about death and legacy. 

For me, I think this is fine. I don’t think Dan would have minded this turn of events, though I am sure he might have enjoyed it if I had written the essay some time back, too. I think he’d be happy that I was spurred into action, one way or the other. So I am using Dan’s very recent death as the stimulus to write finally write all of this up, about an hour or so after I learned of his death. What I am going to do, over the next week or so, is write a series of posts on Dan Ellsberg and The Doomsday Machine. This is the first of an unknown number — I’m winging it, and this is going to be written with a hot pen. Rest in Peace, Dan. Thank you.

The Question of Memory

The introduction to The Doomsday Machine lays out a description of the overall context of the book: that Ellsberg had really identified nuclear war planning as the truly dangerous “secret” that the US and global public needed to know about, and that it was the issue that radicalized the one-time RAND Corporation analyst into becoming a whistle-blower. The Pentagon Papers were just going to be the “first taste” of his activities, something important and topical and immediate, and would be followed up with more leaks. Due to a combination of circumstances, this didn’t happen. The documents he had cached about nuclear war plans were irrevocably lost in the wake of the Pentagon Papers (his brother hid them a little too well, and they now are likely buried under a housing development), and life took him in other directions. 

I did get a chance to ask Ellsberg in person why he had waited almost 50 years to write this book, if it was really the true message. To be sure, it’s not like Ellsberg didn’t get involved with nuclear weapons activism in the intervening time, and he did talk about some of the things in the book prior to it (some of its novelty was, I suspect, part of the publicity pitch for the book), but still, it is a long time to sit on something. I didn’t really find his answer all that compelling: he said he had found that publishers weren’t that interested in books about nuclear weapons. That’s a little hard to believe, given how many books have been published on the topic since the 1970s, and one would think the nuclear war fears of the 1980s would have been more than adequate to convince some publishers that the guy behind the Pentagon Papers could sell a few books. And yes, he did lose the documents he intended to leak — but so what? He had kept (he told me) extensive notes from the 1970s on these topics (these notes are what he based a lot of the book on), his memory for these things (even in his 80s, when I met him) seems almost eidetic, and even just as a “memoir” it seems like it would have an audience.

I admit that Dan’s book cover was one of the examples I gave to my press for guidance on the aesthetics for the cover of my own book: dark, cool, no mushroom clouds or over-the-top SECRET stamps.

I suspect the real reason is a little more complicated, aside from the fact that clearly he had decided to live his life a bit after the attempts by the Nixon administration to put him in prison for the rest of his life. He clearly believed that his nuclear secrets were far more dangerous to his own freedom than the Pentagon Papers had been — and he was probably right about that. Despite his longstanding advocacy for the importance of whistleblowers, I got the sense when meeting him that he had decided to prioritize his family a bit more once he was truly free (one thing he said in person that stuck with me was that he pointed out that the divorce rate for whistleblowers was extremely high, and he was incredibly happy and grateful than he was still with his wife), and while the kind of activism he did after Pentagon Papers case did lead to him getting arrested a few times as a protester, it was not the sort of thing that would lead to him living out his days in a Supermax. I suspect he felt that publishing a book that mostly described events over 50 years after the fact (most of the book is about the 1950s and 1960s) was a lot safer than publishing it when many of the people in it were still alive and somewhat influential, and that prosecuting an octogenarian for espionage would be less likely. And the context of the Trump administration spurred him to dive back into this topic, just as it spurred the publishers and audiences of people who suddenly rediscovered nuclear threats. 

I would also note that the book as published could not have been published a whole lot earlier than it did, because it is not just a memoir. It is really an odd hybrid of memoir, historical narrative (which occasionally dips into the memoir, but is often quite independent from Ellsberg’s lived experiences), and moral appeal. The historical narrative parts clearly required a lot of research on Ellsberg’s part over the years, and even the memoir sections derive a lot of their utility from the fact that he was able to compare his perception of things with what we now know about them — for example, he readily admits that the Cuban Missile Crisis as he experienced and perceived it was entirely different from what was later revealed (in the 1990s and later) to have happened. So it would have been a much more limited book if he had published it in the 1970s or 1980s, although its proximity to the events of the memoir would have been closer.

How much should we trust Ellsberg’s memory? This is a question I’ve seen pitched by scholars informally. A historian will instinctively reply: not much. Memory is fickle, and constantly revised for both self and others. It doesn’t mean you can’t listen to memory, but you want to corroborate as much as possible. The fact that nearly everyone else mentioned in Ellsberg’s book is dead makes it very hard to get any easy corroboration, and the fact that many of the events and documents are still highly classified doesn’t help, either.

That being said, I did find it very useful to learn that he had made extensive notes on these matters in the 1970s, so the bulk of a lot of this narrative is not actually +50 years old distant from the events in question, but more like 10-20 years distant. That is still some time, of course. He also did have some documents from this topic squirreled away — when I visited his home in 2018 with Avner Cohen, we were both impressed by the cavernous library, document hoard (including the aforementioned notes), and workspace he had underneath his home. He did release some of those documents on his website promoting the book, some of which are technically “leaks” in that he released un-redacted versions from his personal files (but they are not nearly as “spicy” as the ones he wanted to release). 

Ellberg’s under-the-house library and document collection in his home, circa 2018.

As noted already, I did get to spend some time talking with Ellsberg in person, both socially (several lunches and dinners), in a workshop setting, and at his home for a very long interview I conducted with Avner Cohen in 2018. I was, to say the least, very impressed by him. To contextualize that, let me say that I am not inherently impressed by people seeming to “know their subject well”: as someone who writes and teaches and gives a lot of talks, I know how easy it is, after awhile, to seem like you always have “all the facts at hand.” People are frequently impressed with how good they think my memory must be, but I know that a) I forget things (or details, or get things wrong) all the time when I don’t re-check them, b) I don’t think I have a much better memory than anyone else (and for some things, like numbers, my memory is probably worse than average, because my brain just can’t seem to “hold” numbers very well), and c) anything you spend a lot of time explaining to other people, and in effect engaging with on a sustained and detailed basis, will get really tightly “encoded” in your brain without you really trying. As I like to put it, almost everyone has a great memory regarding the things they do every day, and in my line of work, that means historical details. 

So with that as a preamble, I will say: I was impressed in particular by Dan’s ability for recall. He appeared to have a level of recall much better than average. I don’t think he was faking it, or hallucinating details, or just knew things because he engaged with them on a daily basis. He seemed to be able to accurately recall exact dates, exact subject lines on memos, exact wording. He seemed to do so effortlessly and earnestly — he didn’t seem like it was trying to impress me or others, this was just how he got his point across. I have talked with people who have known him longer than I have who reported that this was always the impression of Dan, this superhuman quickness of memory and thoroughness, and that his ability in his 80s was not nearly as good as it used to be, but was still superhuman.

So I actually rate Ellsberg’s ability to recall his memories of experiences, documents, etc., pretty high. That does not mean his memories are accurate —  an important distinction. But I believe that the book earnestly and probably with high-fidelity reports things as Ellsberg experienced them. Its recollections need to be subjected to scrutiny and, I would like to hope, become the basis of efforts at corroboration, especially for the most controversial and perhaps most important sections. But they should not be dismissed outright, however fantastical or (at times) self-centered they might appear. I think, frankly, this is what Dan would want: there is nothing about him, or his book, that makes me think that he wants us to accept his narrative on his authority alone. Indeed, as I’ll get to, his entire stated goal of the book — which I believe him on — is that it ought to generate extensive efforts to look into the truth of these matters. 

Next time: Looking at Ellsberg’s claims about the delegated authority under Eisenhower and Kennedy

Meditations

Oppenheimer: Vacated but not Vindicated

by Alex Wellerstein, published December 21st, 2022

One of the sleeper news items of last week was that the Department of Energy officially vacated the Atomic Energy Commission decision that stripped J. Robert Oppenheimer of his security clearance in 1954. It did come as a surprise to me. I knew that there was a campaign to overturn Oppenheimer’s clearance loss — I had been asked to give representatives from the American Institute of Physics a background talk about it, in order to help them determine whether to take a stance on it — and also knew that there had been previous, unsuccessful efforts in this respect.

“Beyond loyalty, the harsh requirements of security.” TIME magazine’s June 1954 cover after Oppenheimer’s clearance was stripped.

I didn’t really expect the DOE to do anything about it, though, because there would be no real practical consequence or obvious “gain” for them to do so, and I could imagine several plausible reasons why they wouldn’t want to do it, regardless of their opinion about Oppenheimer and the case. To the first point, the pro-Oppenheimer lobby is pretty small these days; this is not a pressing issue for the American public, or even American scientists. The case is nearly 70 years old, and Oppenheimer himself has been dead for over 50 years; anyone who was aware of it while it happened is quite old (this includes my good friend and colleague Ed Friedman, who tried to organize a protest in favor of Oppenheimer while an undergraduate at MIT in 1954, and was told by his professors that he ought to keep his head down if he didn’t want to run into political trouble), and while Oppenheimer is a subject of many biographies (some quite excellent) and some films, popular interest in him doesn’t seem to generally translate into the argument for his (symbolic) restitution. The people who seemed most invested in this appear to me to be Oppenheimer biographers, who are more tied to Oppenheimer’s legacy emotionally and perhaps financially than your average voter. So why do this? “Righting wrongs” is a nice thing to say, though when it has no practical consequence, it tends not to be a governmental priority. Perhaps it is just meant to be some good PR for the DOE, an agency whose mission is surprisingly unknown to the public (and as such makes it the target of small-government conservatives). Perhaps it is meant to coincide in some way with the upcoming Oppenheimer movie by Christopher Nolan. Perhaps it is some internal bureaucratic move — someone angling for something down the line. Perhaps it just came across the right desk at the right time with the right person. I have no inside story here. (If someone does have an inside story, and wants to share, get in touch.)

Why might they not have done this? For one thing, government agencies tend not to second-guess their previous decisions, even if it was a different agency (the DOE is not the AEC, but it is its successor agency; it has been over a decade since I was inside the DOE’s Germantown headquarters, but when I was there, they still had a massive rendering of the AEC seal over the entrance desk). For another, second-guessing security clearance decisions seems even more fraught with problems. Do they really want to create a precedent for reviewing past security decisions? And how would they split the difference on exonerating Oppenheimer, while not necessarily tying their hands in the future when it came to disqualifying people for clearances? And while the Oppenheimer affair is not a hot political topic anymore, attacks that the DOE is “lax” on the subject of nuclear secrecy and security are a perennial political feature of Washington, and garner big (if ignorant) headlines. So why stick your neck out?

This is why I didn’t really think the DOE would bother — on the balance, it seemed more risky than not, and my experience is that in such situations, the bureaucrats go with the “safe” choice, which is to kick it down the road to a successor. But they did it anyway! So I was, again, surprised. The way they tried to avoid the potential problems I brought up is interesting, though it somewhat constrains the impact of the order. Essentially, the conclusion by the DOE is that the AEC’s decision against Oppenheimer could be vacated because the AEC did not, at several points, follow its own guidelines and procedures. In this, they are 100% correct that the AEC did not follow its own rules; if anything, the DOE statement understates the level of perfidy involved by people like Lewis Strauss, who broke not only AEC rules but probably the law in his attempt to punish Oppenheimer. The entire hearing was deliberately and decisively unfair, and prejudged from the start by many involved. 

This is a very “safe” way to overturn the judgment: basically overturning it on a technicality. What they have not really done is vindicate Oppenheimer. The statement is very positive towards Oppenheimer, and points out the lack of evidence that he ever did anything disloyal to the United States. But the AEC decision against Oppenheimer was based on the idea that he had “fundamental defects” to his character — notably his lying to security officers — and because his “associations” with Communist and Communist-adjacent people (i.e., most of his friends, students, and family) “extended far beyond the tolerable limits of prudence and self-restraint.” The DOE doesn’t really go against these things, except to point out that his issue with “associations” was already well-known and looked-over in the past. What they aren’t saying is, “the entire case against Oppenheimer was flawed, the charges against him were bunk, he was done totally wrong.” What they are saying is, “the AEC didn’t follow its own rules.” 

J. Robert Oppenheimer, from the Emilio Segrè Visual Archives.

Which sort of implies, to me, that the DOE is tacitly saying that if the AEC had followed its own procedures (which probably still would have led them, in my view, to revoke his clearance), then the Oppenheimer affair would be fine. I’m not saying they are really saying this, of course. As indicated above, I get it: focusing on procedure gives them an easy “out” of this past decision. If they actually said that the concerns about his “character” were totally inappropriate, they’d be implying that it is OK to lie to security officers. If they said his “associations” were fine, they’d be implying that having half of your entire social network be made up of people who were members of prohibited organizations is fine. These are not precedents they want to, or can, set. 

This gets at a very tricky aspect of the Oppenheimer affair. The motivation for the whole thing was entirely a sham. There were no real concerns that Oppenheimer was a danger to the country or a spy. It was pure political character assassination. This is easy to document. And the proceedings were completely stacked against Oppenheimer — and would have been even if the AEC had followed its own rules, because there isn’t the same presumption of innocence in a security clearance hearing as there is a court of law, and because of the very nature of the thing, Oppenheimer didn’t have access to all of the evidence (because his clearance was suspended, he didn’t have access to classified evidence against him). So the whole thing was both unnecessary and unfair, in my view. 

But. Once you ask the question, Did J. Robert Oppenheimer comport himself according to the standards for a nuclear security clearance in 1954?, it is, in my opinion, very hard to answer “yes.” This is not a referendum on his contributions as a scientist or advisor, or even a referendum on his personality. It is, perhaps, a referendum on the security standards of the time — one can argue they were overly strict and driven more by a hysterical fear of losing “the secret” than practical security. But Oppenheimer’s actions in the 1930s and 1940s definitely did not set him up for a favorable evaluation in the 1950s.

He did have a lot of Communist and near-Communist “associations.” This is just the truth of the matter. His brother, his wife, his sister-in-law, his ex-girlfriend, his students, his colleagues… there’s a lot of Red and Pink in that list! There are really good historical and contextual explanations for that, and the timing matters (Great Depression, etc.). It doesn’t actually mean Oppenheimer was a Communist — though he did probably have closer connections to the Communist Party of the United States than he ever admitted, even if he doesn’t appear to have ever been a card-carrying member — and definitely doesn’t mean he was a spy. But it’s hard to imagine someone in the middle of McCarthyism looking at all that and saying, “this is fine.” This is more of an indictment of McCarthyism than Oppenheimer, to be sure. But even today it would be hard to imagine a director of Los Alamos having that many “associations” with people in radical groups of any political stripe. If it came out tomorrow that the director of a weapons laboratory had family and friends connected to the Proud Boys, for example, there would be some legitimate cause for concern!

And he did exhibit really questionable judgment from the perspective of security. And not just by the standards of the 1950s! He admitted lying to security officers repeatedly about the Chevalier affair. When asked why he did this, Oppenheimer offered up nothing more than, “because I was an idiot.” That is not a strong defense! (The real answer likely was: “Because I was trying to protect my brother.” Which is still a bad answer, but at least a relatable and plausible one.) He admitted to having had an affair with Jean Tatlock, his ill-fated, Communist-adjacent ex-girlfriend, while running Los Alamos. When asked whether this was “consistent with good security,” Oppenheimer tried to argue that it was, because he didn’t really believe Tatlock was a Communist. This is not a good answer! This is not “consistent with good security”! (Again, one might probe a better answer: Tatlock was troubled, and Oppenheimer was trying to help an old friend, and that’s still not great judgment — one can’t imagine Oppenheimer’s wife found it adequate — but it doesn’t look as bad as his actual testimony makes it look.) Again, it is hard to imagine thinking “this is fine.”

Two frames from a 1961 photo session with Oppenheimer by Ulli Steltzer. “He was shy of the camera and I never got more than 12 shots. It is hard to say which expression is most typical.” More on this image, here.

The best one can do with both of these issues (which is what Henry DeWolf Smyth did in his dissenting opinion on the security clearance case) is say that Oppenheimer was flawed-but-human, and that ultimately he doesn’t represent a security risk. Which was clearly a thinkable opinion at the time (Smyth, for one, thought it), but one can readily see why it was the minority view. Ultimately all of this comes down to how serious you think the standards of security ought to be. If you believe that nuclear secrecy and security is paramount, then you want a high bar. If you believe the “system itself is nothing to worship,” as Smyth puts it, and regard it as a “means to an end,” then you might have been willing to let it slide, especially since Oppenheimer’s clearance was about to expire anyway. But even then, one can see the precedent-setting aspects as problematic. Does one really want to say that it is acceptable to lie to security personnel, for example, or that to object to Oppenheimer on those grounds is just anti-Communist hysteria?

This is what I mean by saying this is “tricky.” I don’t worship the security system, obviously. I don’t think the Oppenheimer affair was anything less than a sham. But I also am not sure that Oppenheimer “deserved” a clearance, just because he put in good service for the country. I think once you start to evaluate Oppenheimer’s worst behavior by the standards of the 1950s — and frankly, even by the standards of today — it is pretty hard to find it acceptable. I’m well aware that this is not the perspective of most Oppenheimer biographers and certainly not his popular fans; I make this as a historian who isn’t completely willing to dismiss the fears of the 1950s as “hysteria” and who is not generally a fan of seeing historical figures as either perfect heroes of treacherous villains.

So the Department of Energy vacated the Oppenheimer decision, but didn’t quite vindicate it. This is what I meant when I told William Broad that I didn’t think this went quite as far as the real pro-Oppenheimer people might want — it doesn’t say, for example, that Oppenheimer deserved a clearance on his merits, or because the charges against him were all bunk. It gives it to him on the basis of procedure. Which is important, and totally defensible. But a bit shy of total vindication — for reasons, again, that I can totally understand. Would Oppenheimer have been satisfied with this? I doubt it. He would have wanted more of a positive statement about his loyalty than this offers up.

I’m ultimately fine with the DOE’s action. It doesn’t have any practical impact that I can see. But it does go a bit of a way to right a historical wronging, and the Oppenheimer affair was ultimately a wronging. Oppenheimer didn’t deserve it, even if he was imperfect. And even if righting historical wrongs doesn’t do much directly, it does imply that we are capable, as a people and a society and a government, of reevaluating ourselves and our past and coming to terms with errors and injustices. The vacating of the AEC decision in the Oppenheimer affair is, ultimately, less important for what it does for the DOE or Oppenheimer than what it does, and perhaps says, about us. 

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Did the Japanese offer to surrender before Hiroshima? (Part 2)

by Alex Wellerstein, published May 6th, 2022

This is second post of a two part series on this topic.
Click here for part one.

Did the Japanese offer to surrender before the atomic bombs were dropped in August 1945? In my first post earlier this week, I gave what we might call the standard diplomatic history answer: no, they didn’t. There were “peace feelers” to the Soviet Union from an important minority of the Japanese government, which is quite interesting and complicates the overly-simple picture of Japanese fanaticism that is often told about their refusal to surrender, but they don’t constitute, in any meaningful sense, a real offer to surrender. And they were certainly not an offer of unconditional surrender.

But what if that wasn’t the whole story? What if the Japanese did offer up a full, binding terms of surrender to the US directly, and those terms were exactly what the US ended up settling on with Japan after the war? 

General MacArthur and Emperor Hirohito at Allied General Headquarters — a picture deliberately mean to contrast the diminutive Emperor with the American general. Photograph by Gaetano Faillace, via Wikimedia Commons.

I bring this up because my attention was not long ago directed to an article that came out recently in the (respectable) Asia-Pacific Journal that makes the argument that Japan was indeed ready to surrender. Most of it is very much the “standard revisionist” take on the end of the war, with a strong reliance on the postwar critiques of the atomic bomb by high-ranking military figures and a discussion of internal debates about whether unconditional surrender was a good idea or not. Overall I didn’t find it to contain much new, and the argument is still not compelling.  

But one part stuck out to me as something I wasn’t familiar with from the normal diplomatic historical literature, in a footnote:

Walter Trohan, a reporter for the Chicago Tribune, reported that two days before President Roosevelt left for the Yalta conference with Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin in early February 1945, he was shown a forty-page memorandum drafted by General MacArthur outlining a Japanese offer for surrender almost identical with the terms later concluded by President Truman. Trohan related that he was given a copy of this communication by Admiral William Leahy who swore him to secrecy with the pledge not to release the story until the war was over. Trohan honored his pledge and reported his story in the Chicago Tribune and the Washington Times-Herald on August 19, 1945.

Now that is very interesting! But is it true? Because if so, this would be a very different situation than the MAGIC intercepts — a real, detailed offer (40 pages!) for surrender, well before the atomic bomb was ready to use (and before the Soviets had committed to entering into the war!), that Roosevelt had rejected (more grist for the “what did Roosevelt think about nuclear weapons” mill)! One would assume that if this was the case, one would read about it in the many, many, many serious books that have been written on the end of World War II, including by people who have spent a lot of time in both the US and Japanese archives, like Hasegawa, or the hardcore revisionists, who would surely have leapt at such a thing… and yet, from what I can tell, that isn’t the case. The Trohan memorandum (as I’ll call it for brevity) isn’t in Hasegawa, or Alperovitz, or… really anybody serious. So I thought, “what’s up with that?”  

Portrait of Walter Trohan, reporter for the Chicago Tribune, in 1964. From the Harry S. Truman Library and Museum.

So I looked at the linked-to source, an article for the History News Network, where it went into a little more detail:

Walter Trohan, a reporter for the Chicago Tribune with impeccable credentials for integrity and accuracy, reported that two days before President Roosevelt left for the Yalta conference with Churchill and Stalin in early February 1945, he was shown a forty-page memorandum drafted by General MacArthur outlining a Japanese offer for surrender almost identical with the terms subsequently concluded by his successor, President Truman. The single difference was the Japanese insistence on retention of the emperor, which was not acceptable to the American strategists at the time, though it was ultimately allowed in the final peace terms. Trohan relates that he was given a copy of this communication by Admiral Leahy who swore him to secrecy with the pledge not to release the story until the war was over. Trohan honored his pledge and reported his story in the Chicago Tribune and the Washington Times-Herald on August 19, 1945. According to historian Anthony Kubek, Roosevelt, in the presence of witnesses, read the memorandum and dismissed it with a curt “MacArthur is our greatest general and our poorest politician.”

Specifically, the terms of the Japanese peace offers of late January 1945 were as follows:

  • Full surrender of the Japanese forces, air, land and sea, at home and in all occupied countries.
  • Surrender of all arms and ammunition.
  • Agreement of the Japanese to occupation of their homeland and island possessions.
  • Relinquishment of Manchuria, Korea and Formosa.
  • Regulation of Japanese industry.
  • Surrender of designated war criminals for trial.
  • Release of all prisoners.

Other than retention of the emperor these terms were identical to the final surrender terms. Harry Elmer Barnes, in his essay “Hiroshima: Assault on a Beaten Foe,” published in the May 10, 1958 issue of the National Review, tells the same story. Barnes said that the Trohan article was never challenged by the White House or the State Department, and says that after MacArthur returned from Korea in 1951, his neighbor in the Waldorf Towers, former President Hoover, took the Trohan article to General MacArthur and the latter confirmed its accuracy in every detail. The Trohan story was ignored by other news media and almost immediately dropped off the public radar.

So that’s kind of interesting, but also raises some serious concerns. First, the Eisenhower-era National Review is not where I would anchor a modern historical claim. Maybe there is something of truth in their pages, but I would be very careful to support any claims like this with a less-partisan, better-cited source, and one that perhaps enjoyed access to the wealth of research resources now available to us about this topic.

Harry Elmer Barnes, left, and Anthony Kubek, right.

Second, the historians cited to back this up are, to say the least, problematic. Harry Elmer Barnes, for example, according to his Wikipedia entry, came out as a Holocaust denier in his later career (which is to say, only a few years after the National Review article). Even if one wants to make the argument that this particular article is not Holocaust denial, and is before he did that… it’s still a big oof, as the kids say. 

As for “historian Anthony Kubek,” he was virulently anti-Communist, anti-Roosevelt, and anti-Truman, who, late in his career, gave at least one talk at an Institute for Historical Review conference and published an article in their journal that railed against the Morgenthau Plan as a Communist plot. The IHR is infamous for being primarily a forum for Holocaust denial. He doesn’t seem to have been an explicit Holocaust denier himself, from what I could tell, but his anti-Communism seems to have been of the sort that seems to have found easy company with anti-Semitic bigots.

So the confluence of “respected historians” who are supposedly backing this story up is… not so good. If anything, their endorsement makes this claim even more suspicious, and says much about the “kinds of circles” this claim is deployed within: far-right critiques of Roosevelt and Truman. Which is a kind of atomic bombing critique that is not very common today, as the politics of the bombings have shifted quite a bit over the years. The irony is not lost on me that the people who are deploying the Trohan allegation today are from the other end of the political spectrum!

(I would just like to note that it is not my goal here to heap scorn on the authors of the quoted pieces, so I have not engaged them by name or anything like that. From what I can tell they seem to be well-intentioned, but they are not well-known names in the fields of diplomatic history or atomic history. I suspect they fell into these claims somewhat unaware of their trickiness or the types of people who originated and supported them.)

Trying to corroborate any aspect of this story sent me down a rabbit hole. What I found was that where this story shows up, in almost identical language to the above, are various “revisionist” accounts. As one might expect from the above, these start as being right-wing revisionist accounts, but switch into left-wing revisionist accounts at some point. None of the places I have seen the Trohan story deployed in this fashion try to actually corroborate it with more evidence, which is a sign of something.

One doesn’t find the Trohan story or the alleged “offer” in it in more careful, academic histories of the end of the war. Even “revisionist” ones. It isn’t even refuted; it’s just not mentioned. There is no sign of the purported 40-page memorandum in the archives, in oral histories, in telegrams, nothing. At least, none that I could find through footnotes, finding aids, and other means at my easy disposal. I sent a draft of this post to a few scholars I respected in this field, and they hadn’t heard of any of this before. It seems relegated only to “fringe” sources. There is only one discussion of this issue in serious historical writing that I could find, which I will discuss in a moment, and it is essentially devoted to contextualizing how the story of the “Trohan memorandum,” as I will call it for brevity, became a talking point of the fringe-right in the 1940s and 1950s.

This does not mean that the “Trohan memorandum” might not be buried in some archival basement somewhere — it’s totally possible, there are lots of “lost files” out there. But one would think that something like this would have been discovered by an archivist or historian at some point, and made some deal of, given that it would play a big role in how we thought about the end of World War II, the atomic bombings, Roosevelt, and Yalta. None of these are exactly “unexamined” subjects. If anything, they have been pored over to a fault by scholars, and the importance of such a document would be obvious to anyone who stumbled across it. Which is for me pretty strong evidence that it isn’t in the archives.

The headline of the Trohan article in the Chicago Tribune, August 19, 1945.

Of course, I could easily look up the only cited source for this information: the front-page article by Chicago Tribune reporter Walter Trohan. It is basically similar to what is reported above, but has some additional details which are interesting. I am putting the entire thing (retyped by myself from the original) into a footnote here, because it would pretty long to just insert into the post directly.
There are a few things gained from the original article that are missing from its use in “revisionist” accounts. The most important in my mind is that in Trohan’s article, there is an explanation as to why Roosevelt would have rejected the alleged offer at the time: it wasn’t meant to be an official offer from the Japanese Supreme War Council; rather, it was from some kind of “peace party” minority of it. And as such there were fears that if the US pursued this, it would lead to a coup against said “peace party” (and the Emperor) by the dominant militarists. Which is pretty interesting, because it is not so far from what actually happened, of course, when Japan did offer a conditional surrender on August 10th, 1945, and suffered an attempted coup by junior officers. (The US refused the offer then, and the Japanese offered unconditional surrender on August 14th.)

Anyway, all sources of this claim go back to Trohan and Trohan alone. There are some other claims in other, later sources (also unsubstantiated) that the source of this information to Trohan was Admiral Leahy, and that, many years later, Herbert Hoover confronted MacArthur on this article, and that MacArthur said it was essentially accurate (and this claim, again, is hard to substantiate).


The only source I have seen that contextualizes all of the above is Marc Gallichio’s Unconditional: The Japanese Surrender in World War II (Oxford University Press, 2020). He spends part of chapter 6 discussing how the Trohan article was received (not it origins, which seem mysterious), and how it became pulled into the anti-Truman, anti-Communist, right-wing maw of the late 1940s and early 1950s that essentially saw Communist infiltration of the US as being behind the “loss” of China, the Korean War, and so on. He does a great job of showing how the Trohan memo became a sort of talking point of the anti-Communist Right, including Senate Republicans who were instead lionizing MacArthur (at the expense of Truman). The Trohan memo was just one of many “threads” in a growing conservative conspiracist argument that included, but was not limited to, the argument that the atomic bombs were not needed, and that Roosevelt had deliberately prolonged the war in order to allow the Soviet Union to enter into it. 

Gallichio dismisses any reality of the Trohan memo pretty quickly:

The idea that, in January 1945, the emperor authorized his representatives to tell MacArthur that he was willing to have the Americans occupy Japan, liberate Taiwan and Korea, surrender war criminals for trial, regulate Japanese industry, and abandon all prerogatives of the throne was patently ridiculous. Not surprisingly, Trohan’s fantastic story received little attention when it was published amid the celebration of the war’s end. Republication in the Senate hearings gave it second life. In the crisis atmosphere of the Korean War, it quickly became an article of faith among conspiratorially minded critics of Roosevelt. According to this story, by failing to act on MacArthur’s recommendation and adhering stubbornly to unconditional surrender, Roosevelt had prolonged the war and opened northeast Asia to Soviet penetration. No evidence of MacArthur’s supposed report was ever found. That only confirmed critics’ worst fears about the lengths Roosevelt’s men would go to serve the Kremlin’s ends. The story survived for decades as part of the indictment against FDR.

I find this pretty compelling, on the whole. It doesn’t tell us where the story of the Trohan memo originated, of course. I think it suspiciously similar to the MAGIC intercept story (discussed in part 1 of this blog post), albeit transposed in time and with many details changed. So it could be a garbled version of the situation at Potsdam, with different people involved. That seems not entirely impossible to me, though it would be a big error on the part of Trohan, and involve him either deliberately fabricating some aspects (e.g., when he learned about it, the 40-page memoranda, etc.), or being duped by someone deliberately spreading misinformation to him. It could also be confused in other ways. For example, the 40-page memoranda might have been an offer prepared by some planners in the US to present to the Japanese (there were Americans working on “conditional” surrender possibilities before and at the Potsdam Conference, which Truman rejected), but the authorship got scrambled.

Another possibility is that it is entirely fabricated. This strikes me as not impossible — journalists do, sometimes, fabricate entire stories out of nothing, and there is something slightly too neat about this account. It might not have been fabricated by Trohan, of course; it could have been fabricated by someone feeding information to Trohan in some way. Remember how the Trohan story was used and understood in the 1940s and 1950s: as an attack on the necessity of the use of the atomic bombs. So it is possible that one of the people who had knowledge of MAGIC, and wanted to argue that the bombs weren’t necessary (Leahy? MacArthur? Eisenhower? Grew?) was behind a disinformation campaign. Stranger things have happened! Given the importance of MacArthur in this story, and his own well-established narcissism and conflicts with Truman, it is not entirely out of hand to wonder if he was himself the fabricator here.

The other option, of course, is that it is real or partially real — maybe there was some kind of “early peace-feeler,” in late January/early February 1945. This doesn’t strike me as at all impossible, either; again, we know the Japanese were interested in such “feelers” a few months later, so why not a bit earlier? The main argument against this is again, that there seems to be zero corroborating evidence of this being the case from either the US or Japanese sides. Which is pretty striking. Separately, from what we know, the “peace party” was not at all organized-enough to do this kind of thing in early 1945. The timeline is wrong, from what we know of what was going on in Japan at the time. I am inclined to go along with Gallichio in calling the sum of this “ridiculous” given the context of what was going on in Japan at the time.

One of the things that Gallichio does well in his chapter about this is show how this idea steadily regulated itself to the fringes of even conservative thought, so that we end up with the “chief spokesmen” of this argument being people who can only find audiences with places like the IHR. The politics of Hiroshima in the 1940s and early 1950s are not quite the politics they would become: it would instead become an article of faith of conservatism that the bombings were justified and necessary. That’s a story for another time, but it is what makes the very odd movement of this story from the far-right fringe to an anti-Hiroshima argument from the left very interesting. It’s kind of easy to see how this happened — an anti-Hiroshima argument is an anti-Hiroshima argument — but I think people on the left would be far more suspicious about using some of this evidence if they realized who had first developed it, why they had done so, and how it got deployed later.

“Japanese Foreign Minister Mamoru Shigemitsu signs the Instrument of Surrender on behalf of the Japanese Government, on board USS Missouri (BB-63), 2 September 1945. Lieutentant General Richard K. Sutherland, U.S. Army, watches from the opposite side of the table. Foreign Ministry representative Toshikazu Kase is assisting Mr. Shigemitsu. Photograph from the Army Signal Corps Collection in the U.S. National Archives.” Via Wikimedia Commons.

Anyway, I thought this made for an interesting little historical quandary. I try to keep an open mind on these things, though I (obviously) lean much more towards the “it didn’t exist” options than the idea that it did exist. It just doesn’t add up, and the burden of proof is going to be on those who assert it is real, because so much evidence points against it.

Circling back to our original question of whether the Japanese made an offer of surrender prior to the atomic bombings, it is very interesting to note that even if the Trohan article was 100% true, the memorandum it describes still wouldn’t constitute a real “offer to surrender” as most people understand it, because it wasn’t an official offer, and it did not represent the view of the Supreme War Council. All it would be was a more direct and concrete “peace feeler” than what would come later. It would be important to understanding the historical events, to be sure, but it wouldn’t actually change the overall conclusion.

In the end, the answer to the question motivating this series of posts — did the Japanese offer to surrender prior to Hiroshima? — remains a qualified no. There were elements of the Japanese high command that were looking for a diplomatic way out of the war, to be sure, and that does challenge the all-too-common narrative of the “fanatical Japanese” who left Truman et al. “with no choice” other than to use the atomic bombs. But it is not as easy as saying that the US deliberately foreswore credible surrender offers.

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Did the Japanese offer to surrender before Hiroshima? (Part 1)

by Alex Wellerstein, published May 2nd, 2022

This is part one of a series of two posts on this topic.
Click here for part two.

One of the most common invocations made in the service of “the atomic bombs weren’t necessary” argument is that the Japanese offered to surrender well before Hiroshima, and that this was ignored by the United States because they wanted to drop the bombs anyway (for various other asserted reasons). It’s one of those things that has a grain of truth to it, but without a heaping of context and interpretation is misleading by itself. 

Photograph of the Suzuki cabinet, June 1945

The Suzuki Cabinet, who held the fate of Japan in their hands in the summer of 1945. Photograph is from June 9, 1945. Prime Minister Kantaro Suzuki is front and center. Of note, second to Suzuki’s left, looking downward and glum, is Navy Minister Mitsumasa Yonai, one of the only members of the “peace party” actually on the cabinet. Contrast his expression with that of War Minister Korechika Anami (back row, two behind Yonai), who was, until very close to the end, one of the most die-hard supporters of a continued war. Photograph from Wikimedia Commons, somewhat touched up. A captioned overlay is here.

That there were “peace feelers” put out by some highly-placed Japanese in mid-1945 is well-known and well-documented. Specifically, there were several attempts to see whether the (then still-neutral) Soviet Union would be willing to serve as a mediator for a negotiated peace between the US and Japan. This story is the heart of Tsuyoshi Hasegawa’s justly influential Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan (2005), and he goes over, in great detail, how these approaches worked (one in Japan, with the Soviet ambassador there, another in Moscow, with the Japanese ambassador there). Hasegawa’s argument isn’t about Japan being ready to surrender, though; he uses this account to show how dependent Japan’s ideas about the war’s possible ends were on a neutral Soviet Union.

The distance between these “peace feelers” and an “offer” or even “readiness” to surrender is quite large. Japan was being governed at this point by a Supreme War Council, which was dominated by militarists who had no interest in peace. The “peace party” behind these feelers was a small minority of officials who were keeping their efforts secret from the rest of the Council, because they clearly feared they would be squashed otherwise. The “peace party” did appear to have the interest — and sometimes even the favor — of the Emperor, which is important and interesting, though the Emperor, as Hasegawa outlines in detail, was not as powerful as is sometimes assumed. The overall feeling that one takes away from Hasegawa’s book is that all of these “feelers” were very much “off the books,” as in they were exploratory gestures made by a group that was waiting for an opportunity that might tilt the balance of power their way, and certainly not some kind of formal, official, or binding plan made by the Japanese government.

Furthermore, the surrender that the “peace party” was contemplating was still miles away from the “unconditional surrender” demanded by the United States. There were conditions involved: mainly the preservation of the status and safety of the Emperor and the Imperial House, which they regarded as identical to the preservation of the Japanese nation. But as Hasegawa points out, they were so unclear on what they were looking for, that there was contemplation of other things they might ask for as well, liking getting to keep some of their conquered territories. Again, this was not a real plan so much as the feelers necessary for forming a possible future plan, and so we should not be surprised that it was pretty vague.

General MacArthur and Emperor Hirohito at Allied General Headquarters — a picture deliberately mean to contrast the 5’5″ Emperor with the six-foot American general. Photograph by Gaetano Faillace, via Wikimedia Commons.

One can argue, and people who argue against the necessity of the bombings do, that since the United States ultimately agreed to preserve the Emperor and Imperial House, that the US could have accepted such a condition earlier on if it had wanted to shorten the war. But this is not very compelling: it is a different thing to decide, after a war, that you are willing to cut your former enemy a break, versus cutting them that break while they are still your sworn enemy. The counter-argument, which even as someone who is not a die-hard “unconditional surrender was necessary” person I find somewhat compelling, is that if the US had modified its already-stated demands at that point, that it might have ultimately led to the Japanese making more demands, as part of the classic “give them an inch and they’ll ask for a foot” scenario. In any event, I doubt the Japanese would have been willing to accept the specific condition that the US ultimately ended up imposing during the occupation: that the Emperor had to publicly renounce his divinity. That’s a big “ask” to contemplate prior to surrender.

Anyway, whatever one thinks about the requirement of unconditional surrender and whether it prolonged the war — and it has been argued over since the 1940s — we can all agree, I think, that what the Japanese were unofficially “offering” was not what the US was demanding. And it is important to note that this was never actually offered to the US anyway: the Japanese were probing Soviet willingness to support them as a neutral party for a negotiated peace. So it was all a prelude to a negotiation of an offer. As it was, the Soviets weren’t interested (they were eager to declare war against Japan and seize promised territory as a consequence), and just strung them along. So the entire thing never got off the ground.

Cover sheet for a “MAGIC” intercept summary of cracked Japanese communications, classified ULTRA TOP SECRET, which was looked at during the Potsdam Conference in July 1945. From the National Security Archive.

The US was aware of these efforts by the Japanese, because it had cracked the Japanese diplomatic codes (the MAGIC intercepts), but it was never a formal “offer” for them to accept or reject. The general interpretation of the intercepts at the time was that Japan might be on the road to surrender, and they perceived there was a sympathetic “peace party” in their high command, but that Japan was ultimately not yet ready to accept unconditional surrender. Which I don’t think is really wrong, though of course one could debate about what one could do with that information.

At this point, I feel I should emphasize, that I don’t think the use of the atomic bombs the way they were used (two bombs on two cities in three days) was the only possible way to achieve the aims of the United States in World War II, or even that the goal of “unconditional surrender” was unambiguously the best thing to pursue. (See my article on the possible alternatives, for example, as to other possibilities that were on the table at the time.) I am saying, rather, that I think the argument offered up by those who would use the MAGIC intercept situation as an argument that the Japanese were “ready to surrender” prior to Hiroshima is not very compelling. It wasn’t an offer, it wasn’t unconditional surrender, and it wasn’t something the majority ruling the Japanese government had even approved or would support. It’s an important historical event that is crucial to understanding the end of the war (as Hasegawa makes quite clear), and one that complicates the “they all fanatics willing to fight to the death” argument that is used to justify using the atomic bombs, but it wasn’t anything like a surrender offer. I don’t have any problem with people making sound arguments either for or against the use of the atomic bombs — there are strong arguments on both sides — but they shouldn’t be based on myths. Unfortunately, many arguments in the popular sphere are.


OK, but what if the above wasn’t the whole story? What if the Japanese did offer up a full, binding terms of surrender to the US directly, and those terms were exactly what the US ended up settling on with Japan after the war? I’m not sure that would change all of my analysis above (you would still have the issue of whether the US ought to have accepted the postwar terms before it was the postwar), but it would certainly complicate the situation! There has been an account of Japan doing just that, which has circulated for over 70 years. In part 2 of this series, I’ll be exploring that — the case of the enigmatic “Trohan memoranda.” The ultimate conclusion  spoilers! — is that it is likely bunk, but there’s a story in the telling…

Click here for part two of this series.