Old State Department Building

The Old State Department Building was a setting for consequential diplomatic work and tightly guarded nuclear-policy deliberations during Harry S. Truman’s presidency. In its crowded corridors and offices, officials worked through an urgent European crisis while the building also hosted the decisive final meeting of the Z Committee’s debate over whether to proceed with the hydrogen bomb.

A department in transition

In February, packing boxes cluttered the halls as the State Department prepared to move to Foggy Bottom. The building was nevertheless still a place of active work: Dean Acheson, Charles Bohlen, and other officials spent the weekend there preparing a report for Truman on the crisis in Greece and Turkey. The move underway gave the corridors a provisional quality, but the business conducted inside them was immediate. On Monday, Acheson and George C. Marshall met with Truman and urged prompt assistance for Greece, estimating that the country alone needed a quarter of a billion dollars for the remainder of 1947.

The Greek aid crisis

The building’s offices became part of the rapid policy work prompted by Britain’s announcement that it would withdraw from Greece. Acheson and his colleagues worked through the weekend before Marshall and Acheson presented their recommendation to Truman. The question was not simply how much aid Greece required: Truman and his advisers believed the crisis called for a broader response, and the President soon convened congressional leaders at the White House to argue for action. The Old State Department Building thus appears in the account as the site of preparation and deliberation preceding a major appeal to Congress, rather than as the setting for the public announcement itself.

The Z Committee’s final session

A separate, highly secret debate also unfolded in the building. From November 1949 through January 1950, discussion of the hydrogen bomb took place largely in Acheson’s immense fifth-floor office, a room he likened to the dining salon of an ocean liner. The three-member Z Committee—Acheson, Louis A. Johnson, and David E. Lilienthal—met there only twice amid sharp disagreement. On January 31, 1950, the committee convened for its final session in Room 216. Acheson presented a draft statement recommending that work on the hydrogen bomb proceed; Johnson agreed, while Lilienthal argued that moving ahead in an atmosphere of excitement could foreclose another approach to the arms race and create a dangerous illusion of security. Acheson judged that delaying American work would not delay Soviet work and that the public would not accept a policy of delay.

A setting for consequential decisions

The building’s significance in these episodes rests on the contrast between its ordinary administrative circumstances and the weight of the decisions being prepared there. Packing boxes marked an impending institutional move, while officials inside were addressing the possible reach of Soviet influence and the future of nuclear weapons. The Greek aid work and the Z Committee’s closed deliberations were distinct episodes, but both show the Old State Department Building as a place where policy took shape through hurried preparation, private discussion, and disagreement among senior officials.