Our Submission

by digby

Following up on Tristero’s post below, Rick Perlstein actually interviewed Gary Wills:

One day last November, I spent the morning at Garry Wills’s elegant brick home along the main street of Evanston, Illinois, pondering the Promethean scale of presidential power in the atomic age. Wills’s startling new book, Bomb Power (Penguin Press, $28), argues that the prototype of the modern president is not Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, or Ronald Reagan. It’s General Leslie Groves—the administrator of the Manhattan Project, which Wills says was the inadvertent template for today’s secret government and imperial presidency. And his reasoning will scare the hell out of you.

The Manhattan Project was the single most awesome undertaking in the history of the country, occupying some eighty facilities nationwide. Hanford, in Washington State, where project officials collected and prepared the plutonium, employed more than one hundred thousand people. The electromagnetic plant at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, covered 825
acres. Project administrators also commandeered an entire Pacific island as the staging ground for the fatal atomic-bomb flights. To staff the laboratories at Los Alamos, New Mexico, Groves enjoyed the kind of powers ascribed to Jesus in the Left Behind series: All of a sudden, the greatest scientists in the country and their families would suddenly disappear, Hoovered up into the desert behind a triple ring of fences, “with sentries on horseback or in jeeps patrolling the circuit twenty-four hours a day.” Almost nobody was allowed to know what any of it was for, and only one man understood how to master all its parts: Groves, who “carried the whole enterprise in his head.”

The power then passed to Harry Truman, who as vice president didn’t even know such authority existed, and who as president, Wills maintains, never really had any choice but to vouchsafe America’s hegemony in the postwar world by flexing the authority to use the bomb. From him that legacy passed to every new president, with no check or balance whatsoever. “The power over the atom is outside the constitutional order of succession under the Twenty-fifth Amendment, and outside the military chain of command,” Wills argues, “a model for the covert activities and overt authority of the government.” His conclusion, as awesome as a mushroom cloud itself: “The President’s permanent alert meant our permanent submission.”

You can read the rest of it at the link. (You have to sign up, but it’s free and pretty easy.)

Americans can’t seem to wrap their minds around the National Security State. And if there’s ever been a better example of its power and consequences all you have to do is look at the actions of our current president. Whatever else you may feel about him, there is little doubt that he, of all presidents, understood going in that something had gone very wrong. And, so fa,r there’s little reason to believe that he’s been either willing or able to do much about it. Assuming good intentions, one can only conclude that the president must submit as well.

.