Of A-Bombs & Squirrel Heads

Every morning, for half an hour before breakfast, Harry Truman took a brisk walk on the streets of Independence, Mo. Two or three reporters tagged along, peppering him with questions; they called it a "walking press conference." After breakfast, he motored to his big Kansas City office, on the eleventh floor of the Federal Reserve Bank Building. There, one day last week, beside a heap of mail, he had time for still another interview.

What Truman had to say to I.N.S. Correspondent Robert Nixon was startling. Asked about Russian atomic-bomb strength, the ex-President answered: "I am not convinced the Russians have achieved the know-how to put the complicated mechanism together to make the A-bomb work. I am not convinced they have the bomb."

This statement completely reversed a long series of announcements for which Truman was responsible. In September 1949, he personally announced that an atomic explosion had occurred in Russia. Twice in 1951, through his press secretary, Joseph Short, Truman told the U.S. people that other atomic explosions had occurred in Russia (Short once used the phrase--"another atomic bomb"). The Atomic Energy Commission, which Truman appointed, said several times that "Russia has exploded three atomic bombs." Truman's Secretary of Defense said in 1951 that the Russians have a supply of atomic bombs.

Replying to Truman's Kansas City remarks last week, the Joint Congressional Committee on Atomic Energy pointed out that a special board of top U.S. nuclear physicists had unanimously agreed that the Russians had tested an atomic weapon device. Said the committee: "Never in the history of intelligence has such clear-cut evidence been examined so exhaustively, so often to arrive at the same simple and unavoidable conclusion." It was possible that Truman was right and everybody else wrong. Even so, it was odd that he had waited until he left the White House before exhibiting his doubts on a conclusion for which he was officially responsible.

Other Truman remarks of the week:

P: On Secretary of State Dulles' foreign-policy speech--"I don't think they will get anywhere just by loud talking."

P: On Congressmen who want to curb the presidential power to reorganize Government: "Squirrel heads . . . pinheads . . . brainy and mighty-domed . . . always know more than anybody else on any subject."

P: On the suggestion of General George C. Kenney that the U.S. should bomb Communist bases in Manchuria: "[It is] no way to end the [Korean] conflict unless we are prepared to put 5,000,000 men in there on the ground." As to General Kenney, who headed World War II Pacific air operations, Truman slurred him off as "MacArthur's flyboy."

At week's end, the walking press conferences and the exclusive interviews abruptly ended. Said Truman to the newsmen: "I'm not going to comment on public affairs now or any time in the near future. I've said everything about anything that I'm going to say. You boys can consider this a dry hole for news."

Nevertheless, the "boys" and their readers could not quite relax. There was no telling when a two-headed, squirrel-headed whale of a news story would come spouting out of that dry hole.

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