A Grenville Clark Hypothetical

Nova Law Review Volume 7, Issue 1 1982 Article 14 A Grenville Clark Hypothetical Gerald T. Dunne∗ ∗ Copyright c 1982 by the authors. Nova Law Review is produced by The Berkeley Electronic Press (bepress). https://nsuworks.nova.edu/nlr A Grenville Clark Hypothetical Gerald T. Dunne Abstract In any discussion of Nuclear Weapons, Grenville Clark (18821967) is an important figure. He had a long, happy, and successful life. Born to wealth, power, and position, his historic achievements included distinction in two wars-launching the Plattsburg training camps which were the catalyst of the Preparedness Movement in World War I, and in World War II virtually single-handedly securing the enactment of the Selective Service and Training Act of 1940 which produced a minimally armed America on the eve of Pearl Harbor. KEYWORDS: nuclear, weapons, training camps Dunne: A Grenville Clark Hypothetical A Grenville Clark Hypothetical* Gerald T. Dunne** In any discussion of Nuclear Weapons, Grenville Clark (18821967) is an important figure. He had a long, happy, and successful life. Born to wealth, power, and position, his historic achievements included distinction in two wars-launching the Plattsburg training camps which were the catalyst of the Preparedness Movement in World War I, and in World War II virtually single-handedly securing the enactment of the Selective Service and Training Act of 1940 which produced a minimally armed America on the eve of Pearl Harbor. Peacetime attainments must include organization of a critical resistance to FDR's court-packing plan of 1937 and revitalization of the Federal Civil Rights Act. Most significant, however, was his response to Secretary Stimson's post-Hiroshima charge to "go home and stop World War III". Though racked with cancer, Clark gave the last full measure of devotion in attempting, through proposals for disarmament, world government, and world law, to forestall terminal nuclear holocaust. This surely will be his enduring achievement. Grenville Clark went to his grave in early 1967, believing that his life and work, notwithstanding intermediate success had been an ultimate failure; his sunset efforts to alarm the human race to the mortal peril which beset it seemed to have availed nothing; if anything that peril had only proliferated and magnified during his effort to constrain it. Nonetheless he had striven mightily, expending personal fortune and dwindling physical resources in writing, speaking and traveling. A measure of his concern could be glimpsed in his approach to a public relations expert (a maneuver unthinkable otherwise) to promote sales of a landmark book, World Peace Through World Law. The expert, Edward Bernays, who had seen all manner of men in his time, expressed an expert probatory judgment: "His personality was most aristocratic, * Adapted and revised from the forthcoming book, GRENVILLE CLARK: PUBLIC LIFE, PRIVATE MAN. ** Professor of Law, St. Louis University. Published by NSUWorks, 1982 1 Nova Law Review, Vol. 7, Iss. 1 [1982], Art. 14 1 66 Nova Law Journal 7:1982 and his behavior gentle and unassuming. I liked him." 1 Nonetheless, the impact of personality could go just so far, and in the scale of Grenville Clark's grand design, it was not far enough. The nuclear danger impended and worsened with inertia, the strongest force in human affairs deployed on the side of confrontation and potential disaster. Then two things happened. The Diplomat On May 19, 1981, George F. Kennan received the Einstein Award. In any case, an award to Kennan would have merely gilded the lily; Kennan had already left his mark on his times; his credentials ran from the first blueprint for Soviet containment, expressed in a famous "Mr. X" article in Foreign Affairs in 19472 to persona non grata expulsion from the USSR in 1953. Kennan's laureate response was in a totally different idiom than his "X" article; it denounced: the supreme sacrilege of putting an end to the civilization out of which we have grown, the civilization which made us what we are, the civilization, without which our children and grandchildren can have no chance of self-realization, possibly no chance for life itself., Kennan went on to stress "the admonition to neglect nothing - no effort, no unpleasantness, no controversy, no sacrifice - which could conceivably help preserve us from committing this fatal folly."' 4 He then reached the core of his argument against nuclear weaponry: I question whether these devices are really weapons at all .... To my mind the nuclear bomb is the most useless weapon ever invented. It can be employed to no rational purpose. It is not even an effective defense against itself. It is only something with which, in a moment of petulance or panic, you commit such fearful acts of de1. Letter from Edward Bernays to Gerald Dunne (May 19, 1981). 2. Kennan, The Sources of Soviet Conduct, 25 FOREIGN AFF. 566 (1947). 3. Address by George Kennan, Albert Einstein Peace Prize Foundation (May 19, 1981) (condensed in The Illusion of Security, St. Louis Post Dispatch, May 31, 1981, at E2, col. 4). 4. Id. https://nsuworks.nova.edu/nlr/vol7/iss1/14 2 Dunne: A Grenville Clark Hypothetical 7:1982 A Grenville Clark Hypothetical 167 struction as no sane person would ever wish to have on his conscience.5 Kennan admitted that his admonitions were not new but rather restatements of what "wise and far-seeing people" had been asserting for "over thirty years." He named names, beginning with Albert Einstein and concluding with every president of the United States from Dwight Eisenhower to Jimmy Carter." He did not name Grenville Clark, whose book World Peace Through World Law expressed his thesis in extended and systematic form. Perhaps the omission was deliberate, for in 1948 (in Clark's view at least) the laureate was an integral part of the "Truman-Leahy-Marshall-Levett (sic)-Kennan-Harriman combination" whose "fixed ideas" 7 were frozen into an icy Cold War carapate. In a subsequent New Yorker article, 8 Kennan edged close to Clark in several planes of encounter. One was a plea for a less demonic perception of the Soviet adversary. A second insisted on the quantum difference separating nuclear arms from conventional ones. The third could have been vintage Clark, as far as it went: there are many people who consider it useless, or even undesirable to try to get rid of these weapons entirely, and that a satisfactory solution can somehow be found . . . . I believe that until we con- sent to recognize that the nuclear weapons we hold in our own hands are as much a danger to us as those that repose in the hands of our supposed adversaries there will be no escape from the confusions and dilemmas to which such weapons have now brought us 9 5. Id. 6. Id. 7. Letter from Grenville Clark to Cord Meyer (Feb. 28, 1948), quoted in J. Bantell, Perpetual Through World Law 217 (1979) (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Connecticut). 8. Ken (...truncated)