Drafting the Speech that Would Initiate Operation Candor: the National Security Council Meeting of July 22, 1953, I
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Candor: openness of mind, impartiality, frankness, freedom from reserve or disguise, from Latin candor, brightness, radiance, from candere to shine. “Candle” has the same root. www.etymonline.com, accessed September 9, 2024
I believe that until we have looked this tiger in the eye, we shall be in the worst of all possible dangers, which is that we may back into him. J. Robert Oppenheimer
President Eisenhower had chosen C. D. Jackson, a former executive for Time-Life corporation, to be his special advisor for Psychological Strategy. Jackson had also been made chair of the Psychological Strategy Board. The PSB had been formed in 1951, during the Korean War, in the Truman Administration, partly anyway because some of our soldiers were declaring they wanted to change sides.
It was thought that the Communists in Korea must be using “psychological strategy” to get our soldiers to do that. We thought we should get this kind of thing going too, I guess.
In May 1953, during the first year of the Eisenhower administration, Eisenhower’s National Security Council and Eisenhower himself had approved the idea of an Operation Candor that had been suggested to them by Robert Oppenheimer and Vannevar Bush. This operation would not be about psychological strategy. The idea here was to inform the American people about the realities of the nuclear arms race.
Jackson had been directed then to prepare the speech that Eisenhower might give—sooner rather than later, Eisenhower had said— to initiate Operation Candor. The Psychological Strategies Board would lay out the further stages and steps of the operation, with the help of a non-governmental group called the Advertising Council.
Here it was already July, a couple of months after Ike had directed Jackson to prepare the speech and a week after Project Solarium had released its findings. Eisenhower had found the drafts Jackson had given him so far unsatisfactory. They either told too much or too little, he said, and were uniformly dull. They were also too “gloomy,” he said. All they “contained was mortal Soviet attack followed by mortal U.S. counterattack—in other words, bang-bang, no hope, no way out at the end.” He didn’t want to “scare the country to death,” he said. He wanted a message of “hope.”
Was this a defect in the drafts of the speech or a feature of the situation? If the latter, wouldn’t a speech in an Operation Candor be defective if it didn’t say so?
Before a meeting with the National Security Council on July 22, 1953—still in the first year of his presidency—Eisenhower was given another draft. (Documentary History of the Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidency. Draft of speech on atomic energy: Doc 11). It started like this.
I believe, therefore, and many able men of both parties and diverse experience have advised me, that the time has now come for plain speaking about our atomic strength and potential in relation to that of the Soviet Union; about the effects of atomic weapons and the means of using them; and about what we must do to protect ourselves.
Oppenheimer was, of course, among the “able men of both parties and diverse experience” who had advised Ike that the time had come for “plain speaking about our atomic strength and potential…in relation to…the Soviet Union,” about “the effects of atomic weapons and the means of using them,” and about “what we must do to protect ourselves.” Oppenheimer had been, in fact, who had brought the idea of Operation Candor to Eisenhower.
At the beginning of July, President Eisenhower had chosen Lewis Strauss to be chair of the Atomic Energy Commission. The AEC was in charge of everything to do with atomic energy. Strauss was a political supporter of Eisenhower. He’d given a lot of money to Eisenhower’s presidential campaign.
Strauss had made it clear all along that he opposed an Operation Candor. He said it suggested the government hadn’t been candid before this, which of course it did suggest and which the government hadn’t been. He also opposed it, probably, because Oppenheimer was its sponsor. He disliked Oppenheimer. Everybody knew that.
In this draft, notice, C. D. Jackson hadn’t written that the time had come for “candor.” He’d said the time had come for “plain speaking.” “Plain speaking” is not the same thing as candor, of course. To say the problem had been a lack of “plain-speaking” suggests that maybe not enough has been done to make the dimensions of the problem clear to the uninitiated, that is, to us. It makes the problem that needs to be addressed something other than our authorities having withheld information and maybe even their not facing up to the difficulty of the issue.
That new terminology was probably an accommodation of Strauss.
I’m not sure what Ike thought about the language in the current draft but I’d say it didn’t get at what Operation Candor was supposed to be about. Yes, “plain speaking” was going to be called for but not first of all about “our atomic strength and potential in relation to that of the Soviet Union.” The point Oppenheimer had made in his recently published essay on “Atomic Weapons and American Policy” was that
looking ten years ahead, it is likely to be small comfort that the Soviet Union is four years behind us. . . . The very least we can conclude is that our twenty-thousandth bomb, useful as it may be in filling the vast munitions pipelines of a great war, will not in any deep strategic sense offset their two-thousandth.
The new draft made it sound like our goal should be simply to have more “strength”—meaning more nuclear weapons—than they did. That was very different from what Oppenheimer had said. In fact, Oppenheimer seemed to be saying that past a certain point—the two-thousandth nuclear weapon, let’s say—more “strength” would be pointless, no matter how much “stronger” that might seem to make us seem to be, on paper, than the Soviet Union.
Was this a point Ike recognized but found “too gloomy”? Gloomy or not, was it true, something candor would require us to acknowledge?
As to the question of “what we must do to protect ourselves,” what about what the Scientific Advisory Panel for the Interim Committee had said all the way back in August 1945—that there’s nothing any of us can do to protect ourselves militarily from atomic weapons?
In his recent essay in Foreign Affairs, “Atomic Weapons and American Policy,” Oppenheimer had made this point again, though a little more gently. He’d said that when it came to defense we could no doubt do a little better than we were doing at the moment, and maybe put off the time when any meaningful defense would be impossible, but that’s as far as he was willing to go. Meaningful defense would someday be impossible. The defensive measures being worked on now, he said,
will mean that the time when the Soviet Union can be confident of destroying the productive power of America will be somewhat further off-very much further off than if we did nothing.
We could put it off, but not prevent it.
Our defensive measures would also help keep up the spirits of our allies, Oppenheimer said. For a while anyway. Until they came to see their situation more clearly. Which Operation Candor could help them do.
A candid speech would have to acknowledge these points, wouldn’t it? And not suggest that the solution to the problems being posed by the nuclear arms race lay in “strength,” if you meant by that accumulating more nuclear weapons and better delivery systems. And not suggest either that meaningful defense,” whether “civil” or “military,” was possible.
Either of those suggestions would mean either that candor had been abandoned or that a dangerous delusion had taken hold.
Next: Drafting the Speech that Would Initiate Operation Candor: the National Security Council Meeting of July 22, 1953, II