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The episode that you're about to hear is a deep dive into America's Secretary of War during World War II and how he struggled to balance his own conscience and his military decisions.
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History This Week, May 30, 1945.
I'm Sally Helm.
9.20 a.m., an unusually crisp morning in Washington, D.C.
General Leslie Groves gets a message.
The Secretary of War wants to see him right away.
Groves probably has an inkling as to what this meeting is about.
Just two days before he had met with the so-called Target Committee, the people charged with deciding where the United States will drop the atomic bomb.
Which cities will be the targets?
For the past three years, General Groves has been in charge of the Manhattan Project, overseeing the scientists building the most powerful weapon that the world has ever seen.
Now, they're about to use it.
At the highest levels of government.
Everyone has agreed that they need to shock Japan into surrender.
There's basically no talk about not using the bomb.
The only question is exactly how.
And on that point, General Groves and the Secretary of War do not see eye to eye.
Groves arrives at the secretary's office.
Henry Stimson is 77 years old, and he looks like he belongs to a different century.
His vibe is more English professor on the edge of retirement than leader of a global war machine.
And yet he's served under five different presidents, helping to make some of the highest stakes decisions imaginable.
He has often been one of the world's arbiters of life and death.
But nothing compares to this.
When Stimson first learned about the A-bomb, he called it in his diary the dreadful and the diabolical bomb.
Stimson is the Secretary of War, but he's also a deeply religious man.
And now, he is trying to find a balance that may be impossible to find.
He wants to use the most destructive weapon in the history of the world without causing undue destruction.
He wants as close as he can get to a targeted military strike, one that will spare Japanese civilians.
He recently wrote a memo to President Truman saying as much quote, quote.
He doesn't want to squander it.
But by the time the Secretary of War writes that memo, Leslie Groves' target committee is already on a completely different track.
And now, they have chosen three Japanese cities as targets.
Cities full of civilians.
And they plan to drop the bombs right over the centers of those cities.
The bombs aren't totally accurate, and they don't want to miss.
They've picked as their targets Hiroshima, Nagata, and the cultural heart of Japan, Kyoto.
Henry Stimson doesn't know this yet, because Groves wants to keep it from him.
It's also possible that Stimson has been burying his head in the sand a bit, but today he seems ready to demand answers.
General Groves sits down in Stimson's office and the Secretary of War asks directly have you selected the target?
Groves tries to deflect.
He says the report isn't finished.
Actually, it's across the river in his office.
Stimson isn't buying it.
He points to the phone on his desk.
I have all day, he says.
Call your office and have them bring the report over.
So Groves picks up the phone.
And then the two men sit briefly in silence, waiting to make a decision about who will live, who will die and how exactly the United States will launch what is arguably a new era in human history.
Today, Henry Stimson and the diabolical thing he unleashed.
How did a man driven by religious morality become one of the founding fathers of the atomic age?
And after the bombs fell, how did he reckon with what he'd done?
In many ways, Henry Stimson is a man living past his era, a relic of a lost world.
He has short bangs parted precisely in the middle.
He wears old-fashioned suits buttoned all the way to the top.
He was born in 1867, just two years after the end of the Civil War, and he carries the stiff dignity of that century into the modern age.
The writer and journalist Evan Thomas wrote about Stimson in his book Road to Surrender.
Actually, Stimson comes up in three of his other 12 books, too.
He told us Stimson followed a classic WASP trajectory educated at Phillips Academy in Andover, then Yale and finally Harvard Law School.
The message they got at their schools was that, partly because they were privileged, the message was you need to serve your country and your community.
And most of the people going to those schools ignored that message and went off and made a lot of money.
But Stimson took up the call.
He spends his life in public service.
As a young man he works as a trust-busting prosecutor under Teddy Roosevelt, going after railroads and sugar refineries.
Then he serves as Secretary of War under President Taft.
He actually volunteers as an artillery officer on the front lines of World War I when he's 50 years old.
Then he is a diplomat for Calvin Coolidge, then Secretary of State for Herbert Hoover.
This is not a man who is shy about wielding power.
He once said that he preferred to use a big gun rather than a small gun and believed in striking hard.
He was a force guy, a power guy, a ruthless pragmatist in a lot of ways.
But he saw himself as a Christian gentleman.
And I think he cared about it.
He went to church.
I think he would have said to you that he believed in Christ. and wanted to live by Christ's maxims.
You can make fun of that, because here he is, Secretary of War.
There's dissonance there, obviously.
But he believed, and he prayed on it.
Throughout his career, Stimson tries to balance his far-reaching powers with his ideals as a Christian gentleman.
He calls for an international ban on the submarine.
He says it's too deceptive and violates alike the laws of war and the dictates of humanity.
Early on around 1929, he reportedly says about the prospect of spying on adversaries by intercepting their communications.
Gentlemen, do not read each other's mail.
The idea that he can balance the demands of Christian morality with the demands of war might always have been a fantasy.
But Stimson does genuinely believe he can do it, and he genuinely tries.
As the 1940s dawn though, he will be drawn into something that will force these buried tensions to the surface.
November 1941.
Henry Stimson is 74 years old and working for a fifth president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
He wasn't an obvious choice for the job.
Politically, Stimson and Roosevelt are not aligned.
Stimson was against the New Deal.
Evan Thomas said in today's terms, he would be a right-of-center moderate Republican.
Roosevelt chose him in part to balance his cabinet ideologically.
He thinks that will help him convince Congress to support the measures that will be necessary to prepare the country for war.
And on November 6th, about a month before Pearl Harbor, Henry Stimson learns what one of those measures might be.
He gets an unexpected visit from the director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, Dr Vannevar Bush.
He writes in his diary, Vannevar Bush came in to convey to me an extremely secret statement.
It begins with a brief science lesson.
There's this new thing, nuclear energy that could be turned into a bomb that could destroy whole cities.
Stimson may look like a man out of the Victorian era, but he's a quick study.
He immediately begins to grasp the implications.
That very day, he describes the atomic bomb in his diary as a most terrible thing.
Stimson is kind of horrified by this.
He would later call it a Frankenstein monster.
But in his diary he calls it the terrible, the awful, and has all sorts of euphemisms because it is terrible and awful.
But it may also be the key to winning World War II.
And Stimson is practical enough to know that.
So the Christian gentleman is now one of the few people in the world who is in the loop as the United States begins to secretly build the bomb.
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June 1943.
The U.S. is fighting the war on two fronts, in Europe and the Pacific.
And in the shadows, the Manhattan Project is gaining momentum.
The government is building massive industrial complexes across the country.
Henry Stimson, of course, knows about this whole secret project to build what is known as the S-1.
And part of his job is making sure that other people don't know about it, even Congress.
But it's hard to spend billions of dollars without people noticing.
And soon, Congress starts asking questions.
Especially Missouri Senator Harry S. Truman.
He sees all the spending, a lot of secret spending.
I mean hundreds of millions of dollars of secret spending.
Truman leads the aptly named Truman Committee, investigating profiteering and waste in government.
And on June 17th, he calls Stimson.
Initially, I think Stimson is skeptical about Truman.
Truman, after all, is a... in some ways a product of a Kansas City machine.
I mean, he's not some high-minded Yale man.
Stipson is, he's a snob in some ways and kind of looks down on Truman.
Truman asks Stimson, where are these millions of dollars going?
We have a transcript of this phone call.
Stimson says, I am one of a group of two or three men in the whole world who know about it.
It's part of a very important secret development.
Truman.
Well, all right then.
Stimson.
And Truman cuts him off.
I herewith see the situation, Mr. Secretary, and you won't have to say another word to me.
That's all I want to hear.
Harry Truman doesn't have to worry about this.
For now.
That is still Henry Stimson's job.
And, of course, Stimson is also managing a global war that, for someone born in 1867, is getting out of hand.
As Secretary of War, it's Stimson's job to bring this terrible force to bear.
And he's a tough guy.
He wants maximum force.
But he is also worried that in this world war, this global war, we're not just killing soldiers, we're killing civilians.
To Stimson, civilian deaths are a moral crisis.
And to mitigate them, he is willing to embrace new technology.
In this case, precision bombing.
There's something called the Norden bombsight, essentially an analog computer that is supposed to give Allied bombers incredible accuracy, meaning they should be able to avoid civilian deaths by bombing just military targets.
But this isn't the reality.
We kept missing for one thing.
But really with the crude technology that we have in 1944 1945, we kind of have to bomb cities to have an impact.
We just don't.
It's not like today, where you have smart weapons and smart bombs and you know you can put a bomb through a window.
They couldn't do it.
This is the early days of strategic bombing.
Bombing runs never went exactly as planned.
Weather made flying unpredictable.
The newly discovered jet stream blew payloads off target.
The British had realized early on that precision bombing didn't really work.
So they went all in on area bombing.
They're also partially driven by revenge.
The Germans are bombing their cities and they want to retaliate.
The Americans meanwhile, continued to cling to the words precision bombing, but area bombing is what they're effectively doing.
These strikes do destroy military and industrial targets, but they do also kill civilians.
The allied leaders making these decisions feel that this is the only way.
They want to bomb civilians, not because they're bloodthirsty. but because nothing else works.
But they know that Henry Stimson doesn't want to do this.
So they keep him in the dark.
Actually, more than that.
His trusted advisors show him carefully curated photos showing European targets destroyed, while churches and cultural icons remain unscathed.
They call the precision bombing marvelous and miraculous.
But they can't keep the bomb silent for long.
In February of 1945, British and American bombers create a firestorm in the city of Dresden in Germany and kill a lot of civilians.
The firebombing of Dresden kills upwards of 35,000 people.
And incredibly, Stimson is kept in the dark, at least in part.
He is Secretary of War, but he's not making battlefield decisions.
He finds out about the full extent of the destruction of Dresden three weeks later, reading an article in the New York Times.
He writes in his diary that night, the bombing was terrible and probably unnecessary.
He demands an investigation, but it's a futile gesture.
The momentum of the war and his own men have already bulldozed right over his moral qualms.
Well, a month later, the U.S.
Air Force in Japan now firebombs Tokyo.
Just a few weeks after Dresden, Major Curtis LeMay orders a wing of B-29 bombers to head to Tokyo.
At night.
He isn't going to bother discerning between civilian and military targets.
And the B-29s are carrying a new weapon.
Napalm.
LeMay knows that Tokyo is filled with small industrial factories, but also with buildings made primarily of wood and paper.
Especially houses.
It's his strategy.
Japanese neighborhoods will burn so violently that the fires will spread to military and industrial targets.
Tokyo attempts to mobilize citizen fire brigades, but their efforts are completely overwhelmed.
Sixteen square miles of the city burn. kills 100,000 people in one night.
That's the greatest carnage in the history of warfare.
Henry Stimson is, once again, surprised.
Evan Thomas said that's in part because he's busy and distracted making so many life and death decisions.
Now, remember, there's a war on.
Simpson's doing a million things.
He's not just focused on this.
He's got a lot of issues that he's dealing with.
But again, it's also because people are keeping him in the dark.
His own deputies don't want him to think too hard about civilian bombing, because they know he's a Christian gentleman and he might recoil from it and stop him from doing it.
Evan Thomas did tell us it's possible that at some level, Henry Stimson didn't want to know.
But it's hard to be sure.
He saw himself as a Christian gentleman yes, but he was also relentless in his pursuit of the enemy.
And by April of 1945, the war looks all but won in Europe.
But in the Pacific, despite the incredibly destructive bombing of Tokyo, there's no end in sight.
And meanwhile, the Manhattan Project is nearing its conclusion.
They're close to testing the bomb.
Stimson's anxiety is growing. in the spring of 1945.
He's worried about what's going to happen after we drop the bomb.
What's the world going to look like when everybody has nuclear weapons, or when the United States does and maybe its enemies do?
Oh my gosh, then what?
Then, in the midst of all this, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt dies.
Suddenly, Roosevelt is gone and Stimson feels a little exposed, I think.
And the man who steps into office is the senator who'd been poking around about military secrets, Harry Truman.
Truman had since left the Senate and become Roosevelt's VP.
And amazingly, he still wasn't told about the bomb, the S-1.
Suddenly...
It's Henry Stimson who brings Truman into the tent and tells him we're building this bomb that Stimson had tried to keep him away from when he was a nosy senator.
Now, Truman is in charge of decisions about the bomb.
At least, kind of.
General Leslie Groves, who's in charge of day-to-day operations of the Manhattan Project, describes Truman at this time as a little boy on a toboggan careening downhill.
There's a lot of momentum behind the Manhattan Project.
Truman has some power to alter the course here, but so does Stimson, and so does General Leslie Groves, who is around this time finalizing his target list for the bombs.
I've described Stimson as chairman of the board.
The president of the company is General Leslie Groves.
And sometimes the chairman of the board doesn't know exactly what the president of the company is doing.
Groves wants to keep it that way.
But on May 30th he gets that call from Stimson who demands to know which cities are we planning to target.
Groves tries to stall with all that business about the target list being across the river.
He says, shouldn't General Marshall be the one to approve this?
But Stimson isn't having it.
He says, nobody's going to tell me what to do on this.
On this matter, I am the kingpin.
So Groves reveals his plans.
The top of Groves' target list is Kyoto, the ancient capital of Japan.
Cultural, beautiful place.
Snipset has been there himself as a diplomat and doesn't want to bother.
And he says to...
General Groves, off the list.
We're not going to do that.
Stimson is appalled.
He immediately responds, I don't want Kyoto bombed.
Kyoto is the cultural center of Japan.
That's partially why Groves wants to bomb it, and why Stimson doesn't.
He feels that it's clearly not a military target.
And there are geopolitical considerations.
It's already becoming clear that after the war, the U.S. and Russia will be in competition.
They may be allies now, but that's not going to last.
Stimson thinks that bombing Kyoto would be so unforgivable that Japan would fall right into Russian hands.
He's so steamed up he actually disallows the entire target list.
Not Kyoto.
Not Niigata.
And not Hiroshima.
The next day, May 31st, at 10 am Stimson presides over a gathering of something called the Interim Committee.
It's a high-level group that's advising the president on the use of the atomic bomb.
It includes Secretary of State James Burns Generals, Marshall and Groves and the lead scientist of the project, J Robert Oppenheimer.
Stimson chose the banal-sounding name because he knows that eventually everyone's going to find out all about this.
And he wants to signal that Congress will get a say in these matters eventually.
This top-secret group is just for the interim.
Stimson has jotted down some notes in preparation for this meeting, and they show that he understands the epic stakes of this decision.
We don't think it mere new weapon, he writes.
Revolutionary discovery of relation of man to universe may destroy or perfect international civilization forever.
Frankenstein or means for world peace?
Stimson is already concerned about what will come to be called arms control.
What are we going to do after the war is over to control this thing?
Should we share the secret of the bomb with the Russians?
But there's also the more immediate question of where to drop the so-called S-1.
All the men already know how Stimson feels.
Civilians should not be targeted.
There's discussion about whether they should just demonstrate the bomb for the Japanese, drop it on some empty island.
Oppenheimer says that won't work.
A firecracker won't do anything to get them to surrender.
They ask him how many people would be killed if they do drop it over a city.
They'd never set off an atom bomb before, so they don't know how many people it's going to kill really.
And his estimate is 20,000.
They will kill 20,000 people.
Well, you know, that's a lot of people, but it's not as many as 100,000 they killed in Tokyo.
Oppenheimer's estimate will turn out to be very, very low.
He's underestimating his own creation.
But that's what he tells them.
And in the end, the men settle on some kind of decision.
They put together a kind of mushy bureaucratic.
The target will be a military site surrounded by workers' homes.
A military site surrounded by workers' homes.
That's the way they frame it to themselves.
And for Stimson, it's good enough.
And he backs off.
He mostly goes along with.
You know, let's threaten the Japanese with their annihilation and then let's drop the bomb.
Stimson does prevail on the question of Kyoto.
Groves tries two more times to put it on the list and Stimson finally persuades Truman to remove it once and for all.
But Hiroshima will be bombed.
It's known as a military city by the Japanese, so the decision makers can tell themselves it's a military target, even though many civilians will die.
In the end, They also mark the city of Nagasaki for the A-bomb.
Both are cities that have been relatively less affected by conventional bombs.
They're more or less intact.
So the power of the atomic blast will be brutally clear.
August 6, 1945.
Back at his Long Island estate, Stimson gets a phone call from General Marshall at 7.45 a.m.
The operation against Hiroshima is complete.
His journal that night is unusually brief and clinical.
A very rainy day, but in the morning I got the news that the S-1 operation was successful.
Two days later, he's scheduled to brief President Truman on the bombing.
He wakes up at 5 a.m. with a pain gripping his chest.
Now maybe it's a coincidence, but I doubt it.
Henry Stimson has a heart attack.
Henry Stimson has just had a heart attack.
It may have been the five years of waging a world war, but it's a relatively minor heart attack and the Secretary of War has a duty to perform.
He gets dressed and goes to meet the President.
In the Oval Office, Stimson opens a folder and spreads the photos across Truman's desk.
What does Hiroshima look like?
It looks like the inside of an ashtray.
It's four square miles of ash.
They show a city that is 60% obliterated.
60 to 80000 people die instantly triple or quadruple Oppenheimer's estimate in that meeting in May.
By the end of 1945, that number will rise as high as 140,000.
Truman is shocked.
He starts worrying about women and children.
He had not been before they dropped the bar.
But when he sees the results now, he is worried about women and children and he wants to take control back.
Evan Thomas writes in his book that when he looked closely at this period, he found that quote.
It was bureaucratic momentum.
Harry Truman might have been able to stop it.
He's the decider.
On August 10th, after a second bomb erases Nagasaki a mission Truman wasn't even aware was in the air, the president finally pulls the brake.
He orders that no more atomic bombs be dropped without his express authority.
This is an important moment, the president taking control of a weapon of war.
It sets a precedent of presidential control over nuclear weapons that lasts to this day.
Henry Stimson's last day in office is September 21, 1945.
It's his 78th birthday.
The war has been won.
After the atomic bombs, the Japanese did surrender.
On his final day, Stimson stands before the president's cabinet to deliver a plea for international arms control.
The outlines of the Cold War are clear.
I don't think the term has been used yet, but you can feel it coming.
He argues that the only way to prevent a desperate arms race is to share the atomic secret with the Soviet Union.
He returns to a maxim he learned long ago.
The only way to make a man trustworthy, he says, is to trust him.
And the surest way to make him untrustworthy is to distrust him and show your distrust.
December 1946.
Henry Stimson is 79 years old.
He's struggling to recover from another bigger heart attack that nearly killed him just a month after he left Washington.
But here at his Long Island estate, the past is catching up to him.
During the war, the American public had largely accepted the atomic bomb as a necessary end to a global nightmare.
But a year later, the mood is shifting.
John Hersey of The New Yorker writes a piece about Hiroshima.
It's horrific.
It's ghastly.
And millions of Americans read this.
And they're starting to be, you know, what have we done here?
And did we really need to drop those bombs?
Stimson decides to set the record straight as he sees it.
He's probably not the only author.
General Groves likely contributed.
But he gets the byline in an article that appears in Harper's Weekly.
The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb by Henry Stimson.
Basically the line is we dropped the bomb because the Japanese weren't going to surrender without it.
A regular invasion of Japan would have cost a million soldiers, and we just couldn't stand that.
So we dropped the bomb, and that was the right thing to do.
You may not have heard of this article, but it's the root of many debates around the use of the atomic bomb today.
This article has been controversial ever since.
There's a whole school of scholarship that says, really, we didn't need to drop the bombs.
Japan was ready to surrender.
That article's wrong.
Stimson's wrong.
That's one side of the argument.
Evan Thomas is on the other.
I don't believe that.
I think the record now shows that we did need to drop the bombs that Japan was not going to surrender.
The Japanese military elite was not ready to surrender.
They wanted to fight to the bitter, bitter end.
The head of the Japanese military, General Inami, After we've dropped two bombs after Nagasaki, tells the Supreme War Council let them drop 100 bombs.
Wouldn't it be beautiful if Japan was to perish like a cherry blossom?
So the bomb, by killing 200,000 people, we saved millions of people.
That's horrible math, but that's true math.
You could argue that Henry Stimson's life, especially during World War II, is one giant contradiction.
He's this Christian gentleman prosecuting a war, the biggest in world history.
And that, Thomas says, is actually a millennia-old puzzle.
God has been used to justify a lot of killing, not just in the Christian tradition, but Jewish Muslim, you name it.
A lot of killing is done in the name of your God.
So it's confusing that way.
Now, God is also preaching at the same time, don't kill.
It's the greatest, it's a commandment, you know, thou shalt not.
And so it's thoroughly confusing to me and I've read a lot of history that so often religion is perverted in the name of you.
Know you kill in the name of your God, but at the same time God is telling you not to kill.
This is an eternal dilemma that I don't think we're ever going to reconcile.
Stimson himself believed that religion was the only way to put the terrible thing back in the bottle, to avert the apocalyptic track of the atomic age.
He wants to have a Christian revival in the United States.
He's worried about... This is very much like our own struggles with AI right now.
He's worried about science.
Where is science going to take us?
Is science going to outrun human natures?
Is human nature capable of controlling science?
We're going to have this unbelievable weapon.
Are human beings capable of controlling that?
Henry Stimson didn't know.
He dies in 1950 at age 83.
Years later, to honor him, the United States Navy christens the USS Henry Stimson.
Fittingly, confusingly, it is a nuclear-powered submarine.
History This Week is a Backpocket Studios production in partnership with The History Channel.
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Special thanks to our guest Evan Thomas, journalist and New York Times bestselling author of Road to Surrender.
Three Men and the Countdown to the End of World War II.
This episode was produced by Danny Vagnoni, Ben Dickstein, and me, Sally Helm.
Our sound designer is Tyler Morrissette.
For Back Pocket Studios, our executive producer is Ben Dickstein.
From the History Channel, our executive producers are Eli Lehrer and Liv Fidler.
Don't forget to follow, rate and review History This Week, wherever you get your podcasts, and we'll see you next week.
