...Eisenhower’s self-presentation was in keeping with the postwar statements of several other top military officials—a tinge of regret, a sense of skepticism about whether the bomb was necessary, or whether it even played the role in ending the war that people said it did. The U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey of 1946, for instance, concluded that “Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.” Admiral William Leahy, in his memoirs, called the bomb “barbarous” and said that it provided “no material assistance in our war against Japan,” since the Japanese were “already defeated and ready to surrender.”
These critiques can seem shocking today, because they upset our understanding of how Hiroshima and Nagasaki map onto modern politics. We assume that Republicans, especially those in the military, are retrospectively pro-bomb, and that liberals see the attacks as something between a mistake and a war crime. But this interpretation removes the critiques from their historical context. Many commanders in both the European and Pacific theatres resented that the bomb got credit for ending the war. They saw their own strategic efforts, including the ruinous firebombing of at least sixty-seven Japanese cities, led by General Curtis LeMay, as being overshadowed by a scientific “gadget.” They feared that nuclear weapons would become an excuse to cut funding for conventional armed forces: if the bomb maintained the peace, who needed generals? (Their fears proved not entirely unfounded—Truman’s second Secretary of Defense, Louis A. Johnson, did try to slash military budgets—but they eventually learned to love the bomb.) When these leaders proposed that the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were unnecessary, they meant that they were unnecessary because Japan had already been bombed to dust. It was not a peacenik argument.
As President, Eisenhower remained mute on Hiroshima. He oversaw a rapid expansion of the U.S. nuclear arsenal, which grew from around twelve hundred warheads when he took office, in 1953, to more than twenty-two thousand when he left, in 1961—from the equivalent of five thousand Hiroshima bombs to the equivalent of more than a million at its height. Eisenhower, in other words, is an unlikely hero for opponents of nuclear weapons. After he left the Presidency, however, he made more critical statements on the bombings. In “Mandate for Change,” published in 1963, he wrote that, during the alleged meeting with Stimson, he had “been conscious of a feeling of depression,” and claimed that he had told the Secretary of War that “the dropping of the bomb was completely unnecessary.” In an interview with Newsweek from later that year, Eisenhower stated bluntly that “the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing.”
Whether or not Eisenhower’s views jibe with the documentary evidence from the time, what is most curious is how inexpressible these same views would be for American politicians—much less Presidents—today. The politics of the present are defined far more by the events of the late Cold War and its aftermath than by the arguments of the nineteen-forties. In 1995, a group of veterans of the Second World War objected sharply, and effectively, to a planned exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution centered around the restored fuselage of the plane that dropped the Hiroshima bomb, the Enola Gay. Much of the original text of the exhibit dealt with the suffering of the Japanese, and on historical arguments that the exhibit’s detractors termed “revisionist.” (Eisenhower’s quotes about the bombing were among those they objected to.) The exhibit went forward, but in a considerably neutered state, focussing on the mechanics of the plane and carefully avoiding discussions of the human consequences. The controversy was less a debate about actual history than an extension of the mid-nineteen-nineties culture war into the nostalgic memories of the Greatest Generation. And the consequence was a polarization of opinion. Either you were for the bombings, or you were a revisionist: there was no middle ground. Not surprisingly, politicians have tended to play it safe.
Today, the polarization, at least among historians, seems to have abated considerably. There are still those who take strong views on whether the bombs should have been dropped, but the narratives themselves diverge less. Veterans no longer play as much of a role in the discussion: they are too few in number, and very elderly. It remains to be seen whether distance from the living past will open up a path to public consensus, or cause us to veer even further between the extremes of support and condemnation.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/what-presidents-talk-about-when-they-talk-about-hiroshima
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