Fallout Zone: The Bomb and What it Did to American Democracy
Eric Alterman talks with Pulitzer-prize winning author Garry Wills about his new book, Bomb Power: The Modern Presidency and the National Security State.
Garry Wills: After most wars, there is a rush to demobilize, bring the boys home, re-convert the industries to peacetime. But, after World War II, that didn’t happen.
After most wars, emergency powers are recanted, sometimes by the Supreme Court, which, for example, essentially said ‘well, it was understandable you broke the law, suspended habeas corpus, or interned Japanese Americans.’ But after World War II, in the national security area, the state of emergency continued. And the emergency powers not only continued, they increased on the model of the Manhattan Project.
Most people don’t remember the Manhattan Project as illegal through and through. Yet it was. It broke the Constitution, statutes, the military chain of command. It used unauthorized monies. It spied on American citizens and foreigners. It set out to kill Werner Heisenberg in Europe. It did all the things the CIA would later do, and nobody recanted that.
We went from the emergency of the war to the emergency of the Cold War, and now into the emergency of the War on Terrorism. And we created a range of new instruments unlike any created after World War I, the Civil War, or any other wars. The National Security Agency, the National Security Council, the Central Intelligence Agency, the massive prosecutions in secret, the massive clearance procedures, the massive loyalty investigations and tacit oaths—all of these were the creation of a National Security State in which the President was given authority never given to a president before.
It was decreed by the Congress in the Atomic Energy Act that only the President can initiate nuclear war. It had never been said that the President can initiate war. The Constitution says Congress has the power to declare war. The Atomic Energy Act gave the President the power to initiate nuclear war, and then, soon after, the power to initiate war in general.
When President Truman went into Korea, his Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, said, “This is not the nuclear war envisaged when you were given the power to initiate war, but in order to protect your power to initiate war, don’t ask Congress for any kind of authorization at all.” There has never since been a Congressional declaration of war. President Eisenhower proceeded to try to knock off five foreign governments without any kind of authorization from Congress, and without even notification or knowledge. And then to initiate secret wars of the kind President Nixon undertook in Cambodia. He invaded a country without even letting the Congress know he was invading it. It was called the Secret Bombing of Cambodia. It was not a secret to the Cambodians -- only to Congress.
Then, the Bush Administration, through its Office of Legal Counsel, said, not only can the President initiate war, only the President can initiate war. Then John Yoo said that, “well, true, the Constitution says that the Congress has the power to declare war, but, 'declare' doesn’t mean 'to initiate' or 'to authorize.' It just means to publicize. It’s a way to let people know that the President has started a war." So, there’s been a tremendous increase in the National Security State’s powers over the last half-century—and more. And there has been just as big an increase in the national effort to protect secrets, secrets that were used not primarily to fool the enemy—the Cambodians knew they were being bombed—but to fool the American people, Congress and the press. The National Security State has taken on a life of its own, one that is a bit like a Frankenstein’s monster in that it is almost impossible to cut back.
The War Powers Act was an attempt to give Congress, at least partially, the job of declaring war, but it was ignored from the minute it was enacted. It has never been observed by any subsequent President. The Church Committee tried to cut back the powers of the CIA; the legislation it pushed has been routinely ignored. Remember, for example, that Senator Moynihan resigned from the Senate Foreign Intelligence Committee because, he said, the CIA regularly lied to the Committee. Even when the President wants the CIA to cooperate, it won’t; in response to the Church Committee, President Ford reluctantly told his team, “Okay, answer the subpoenas of the Church Committee,” and, when William Colby did, he was vilified by the members of his own agency. Meanwhile, Richard Helms lied to Congress and was glorified by the agency.
The agency now thinks that it has to protect the agency against the Congress and against the Constitution, against the press, and against the people. Even when somebody like President Obama comes in, he quickly reverses himself on signing statements for example, which the President can use to declare parts of a law unconstitutional—although that’s the business of the Supreme Court. Obama’s appointees also said that they would consider continuing extraordinary renditions and cut off torture investigations. So even a President who seems to have good intentions finds his hands tied, I can imagine why. Coming into office, he’s told things he didn’t know before – about our 800 military installations around the world, for example. And the security agencies come to him and say, "It took us many years to build this structure and to acquire all these assets—as they’re called. Don’t dismantle this. Don’t undercut us. Don’t destroy our morale. Don’t question our loyalty because after all, we have all these assets and could start blabbing all these secrets of what we’ve been up to all these years." What does a President do in that case? He’s told he has all these powers he didn’t know he had and that he can’t destroy them because he has to pass them on in their integrity to his successor, and, that’s how the monster lives.
Eric Alterman: I’m glad you spoke to why you thought President Obama had to reverse himself, because that was going to be my later question.
The National Security State has always figured in your writing. And the National Security State has been a familiar term and a lot of people have sounded alarmed about it, beginning in the late 1960s with regard to President Johnson’s unconstitutional actions with the war in Vietnam. Now, in this book you have a very strong thesis: namely, we’ve known about the National Security State, and about the abuses it implies, but the real problem is the bomb. The book is called Bomb Power. How much of the problems you describe are directly due to the bomb, and how much is simply a reflection of post-war insecurity and the ability of the executive branch to exploit that to get greater power? In other words, how much of this is paranoia surrounding the bomb and how much stems from the ability of the National Security State to accumulate power over time and the inability of Congress to curb it?
GW: It’s true: in wartime, the executive accumulates powers. But after other wars, including World War I, power did not grow at this accelerated rate because the government didn’t have the instruments of growth – the NFC, the NFA or the CIA – it has now. These institutions were created to keep our secrets and to develop and deploy the bomb. Remember, deploying the bomb was as important as developing it. After the war the people at Los Alamos wanted to develop cheaper, smaller, more destructive bombs, and they did, even before the hydrogen bomb. Their idea was that our bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki were clumsy bombs, infant bombs. They wanted to develop mature bombs. They wanted the ability to deploy them as well. This led to the Manhattan Project II. Lewis Strauss’ private air force developed special planes, special pilot training sessions, all of this in secret and with unauthorized money because Lewis Strauss thought from the outset that he was going to have to bomb Europe. And that he would have to have the means of delivery of the bomb. So right away, he started thinking of what kinds of planes to use and what pilots and how to reconfigure the planes to carry the bombs. After the war ended, we had to have the ability to deploy the bomb all around the world. Strategic air command put the bomb in the air for 24 hours a day. We had to have bases. We had to have radar installations and radiation testing sites all around the world. And then, of course, when we armed submarines with nuclear weapons, we had to have the same kinds of international areas. Then, when we had missiles, we had to have places like Turkey, where we could put them. We had to have governments that would submit to our use of bases. When they were not submissive, we knocked off the rooters of those governments. All of this was directly the result of the bomb.
Our reach and our need for constant security – the need to constantly test the loyalty of foreign governments and of our own citizens – in order to ensure that our nuclear monopoly, then our superiority, was protected with a massive, massive, secrecy program: this is different from the accretion of executive power that has occurred in the past. We have experienced all kinds of executive incursions before, but never on this scale -- and never with the driving motive of fear.
When we taught children to duck and cover, we developed an atmosphere of fear and the militarism of the presidency went forth at a tremendous rate. After previous wars, we never considered the President a Commander-in-Chief. The Constitution says the President is commander in chief of the military. At the time of the Constitution, standing armies were not popular during peacetime. But now we are told that he is our commander in chief, commander in chief of the nation. We’re constantly told we’re electing a commander-in-chief and we have to obey our commander-in-chief. When I wrote an Op-Ed in The New York Times saying, “I’m a civilian, he’s not my commander in chief,” I got the most extraordinarily angry letters, saying “If he’s not your commander in chief, you’re not an American, get out of this country.”
Now the President is a military figure. He’s saluted when he gets off the plane. The President is not in uniform, and he’s not a military figure. When heirs to General Washington’s estate tried to get a tax break on the basis that Washington had been a Veteran, the court said “Well it’s true. In the army, before the Constitution existed, he was paid by the Continental Congress and it paid his pension, but, as the President, he has no claim on the military. He gets no military pay; he gets no military pension; he cannot be court-martialed as all military officers can. He can only be impeached, which is a civilian offense.” It was the genius of our Constitution to have a civilian leader of the military. Now, we’ve effectively gotten rid of this idea. We salute the President. It’s ridiculous that people who never served in the military, or like President Clinton, dodged it or were too young to be involved, like President Obama, are saluted -- and salute back -- as if they were officers. They’re not. They’re our republican, civilian leaders.
EA: Are there legal remedies to the problems of the National Security State?
GW: We need to find leadership in the Congress or elect leaders to the Congress who have spine. Congress has surrendered all along the line to these executive accretions. It should challenge signing statements. When the President says, “Well this is what Congress thinks is wrong, but I don’t think it is. I’m not going to obey it,” that’s either a pocket veto or a nullification or a line item veto, or any of a number of things that have been rejected in the past. But Congress has not challenged the signing statements in any effective way. Congress should say, “What we say is the law, and if you don’t agree, take it to the Supreme Court.” Challenging the signing statements should be a first step.
President Obama came in and issued signing statements, and then said, “Well I won’t issue reservations at signing, but if I’ve already said somewhere that if something is unconstitutional, I won’t enforce it.” That’s worse. That’s a stealthy signing statement. You don’t even know what he’s not going to enforce. Congress should stand up to that. We should try to elect people who will and to find people who will to challenge executive power and to glorify those who do and shame those who don’t. You know Al Franken had trouble trying to pass an amendment that said that our contractors in Iraq should not gang rape their fellow contractors and escape court procedures. He had trouble getting that passed.
Finding and electing good strong representatives is about the only thing we can do. We had wonderful changes in our laws from the bottom-up on things like labor law, feminist law, and other things. But the National Security State operates from the top-down and by tremendous secrecy. It’s even hard to know even what you are supposed to object to because it’s kept from you. Hence there’s little that direct citizen action can accomplish. We can only work through our representatives and try to find them and promote them and elect them because there’s no other way that we can break through secrecy pact.
One of my favorite examples of how the secrecy pact works involves the first President Bush’s decision to go into Kuwait. He asked for support from Congress, not a declaration or observances of the War Powers Act, but he asked Congress to go along with his plans. Congress held hearings. And Admiral Powell, the former Chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff, went before a Congressional committee and said, “We haven’t provided much time for sanctions to work. Why not try sanctions for a longer period and see if we absolutely have to go to war?” After that, Secretary of State Jim Baker came before the committee and said “Admiral Powell no longer has clearance. He can’t read the cables. Why should you listen to him?”
If you can’t listen to people like this, you can’t listen to anyone other than the priests of the secrecy. We have no way to judge them, direct them, correct them, and then, as Senator Moynihan, said, “All kinds of things are done by the executive without useful outside information because only the people who have clearance are listened to.” His example was the Bay of Pigs. He said the premise of the Bay of Pigs was to put a few people onto the shore and form a rebellion against Fidel Castro. “Well,” said Moynihan, “every academic expert, every poster, every journalist who had been there knew Fidel Castro was at the height of his popularity, the moment after the successful revolution.” The idea that a few people could foment a rebellion is ridiculous. And Moynihan said, “Why didn’t the President heed the huge body of available information?" He said, “Because it was not classified.” If it’s not classified, it doesn’t matter.
EA. Yes. That was a good lesson. The most impressive thing about John Kennedy was his ability to learn from his mistakes. He famously complained he was getting better information about Vietnam from David Halberstam and The New York Times than he was from the CIA. This is an example of him having learned from mistakes.
GW: I‘m not as sanguine as you are about this. The direct effect of the Bay of Pigs was Operation Mongoose, in which Bobby Kennedy tried to kill Fidel Castro and sabotage his crops and mine his harbors and in every way destabilize that government and bring about regime change, as we now say, which is why Fidel accepted the missiles from Khrushchev. After all, there was no reason for him to accept them. He knew that if there was a nuclear war, the first effect of those missiles would be that his island would vaporize and disappear from the face of the map. But, he was convinced, quite reasonably, that the attempts to undermine his government were a full out invasion, which the military did want at that point. Castro knew he could not stand up against the United States in a conventional war. The only way he could deter invasion was to accept these missiles. Then President Kennedy—this is how well he learned—went before the American people and said there was no conceivable defensive rationality in these missiles. They’re there for only one purpose—to attack us for an aggressive purpose. That was not true. That was a lie. They were defensive. Fidel knew what had gone on and had to protect himself. This is another instance in which the enemy knows what the secrets are, and the American people and the Congress and the press don’t.
EA: This would be a good moment for me to plug my book, When Presidents Lie, a large part of which is about the lies President Kennedy told about the Cuban missile crisis. Here’s my final question. Walter Isaacson reviewed the book for The New York Times on the front page of the Book Review, together with a review of John Yoo’s new book. The review was sympathetic to your view; Walter effectively said you were a more serious scholar than Yoo, but said your story was one that would be relegated to history, because it’s impossible to imagine anything would or could be done to address this issue, whereas Yoo wrote about issues in which there would be a winner and a loser, though it’s not a hundred percent clear who is going to win and who is going to lose. I don’t want to pick on Walter, because I think his is probably a representative response to your book, but how did you feel when people like Walter say things like, “Yes, well, I agree, This is terrible. But it’s a lost cause. Its very nice that Garry Wills has brought this to our attention, but it’s just something we’re going to have to live with because, we’ve lost control of this as we’ve lost control of so much in modern life?”
GW: That was an extraordinary review. Aside from one little side reference, you’d never know that John Yoo was principally famous for defending torture. Andrew Sullivan said, “Walter Isaacson is afraid to say the ‘t’ word.” Also, he was reviewing the two books, and in my book, I have a very extensive critique of Yoo, to which Isaacson never referred. Yoo’s argument is so absurd that to say it has the inevitability of history is very difficult. For instance, he says, “Only the President can declare war.” This goes far beyond the normal acceptance. Walter implies that he’s just saying what everybody’s accepting now. That’s not true. He said that only the President can declare war and his proof was one citation from Samuel Johnson’s 18th century dictionary, which said “declare” means “publicize.” He never cited a legal context for “declare;" the idea we have to throw up our hands and say “John Yoo’s on the winning side” is, I think, scandalous.
EA: Is there anything hopeful we can leave readers? Are there any plausible avenues of action other than working to elect better representatives? Can there be an action suit or some sort of private inquiry led by organizations like the Brennan Center or the Center for Constitutional Rights or similar groups?
GW: The only thing they can do is pressure Congress. The Courts are, for the time being, useless. One of the many extraordinary powers Vice President Cheney took upon himself was the vetting of the Supreme Court nominees. When he did that, people thought that he was going to make sure that they were conservative, largely on issues like abortion and gay rights, et cetera. However, what he was actually asking them was, “do you agree with the unitary executive?” which is the fundamental, theoretical position of this new presidential power. They did. And they proved that since they got on the Court. So for the time being, the Court is not going to be a corrective. If I were in Congress, the first thing I would do is draft a bill saying the President cannot issue signing statements that question the legality of the law. That has to go to the Supreme Court. That would be a very simple act of legislation. The Court is not going to overrule a law that implicates their power.
EA: This could come up at confirmation hearings if Justice Stevens retires, which seems likely. I think you’ve described a plausible first step scenario as there will be Senators who want to reassert some of Congress’ powers with regard to making law.
GW: When Sotomayor was confirmed, they asked her about all kinds of feminist and sexual matters but they didn’t ask her whether she believes in the unitary executive. That should have been the first thing they asked her, as well as the first thing they should ask anyone.
EA: That’s useful and we agree on it and maybe we should stop there. Thanks very much for your time, and thanks for writing this book.
Garry Wills’ latest book is Bomb Power: The Modern Presidency and the National Security State (Penguin Press); Eric Alterman, Nation columnist and Professor of English and Journalism, is the author, most recently, of Why We're Liberals: A Political Handbook for Post-Bush America (Viking).
Permalink