CIA Born: Truman Signs the National Security Act

One signature reorganized the entire American national security apparatus, creating the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Council, the Department of Defense, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff in a single legislative stroke. Harry Truman signed the National Security Act in a ceremony aboard his presidential aircraft, the Sacred Cow, consolidating a wartime intelligence and military bureaucracy that had been improvised, duplicated, and frequently at war with itself. World War II had exposed catastrophic failures in American intelligence coordination. Pearl Harbor remained the defining example: multiple agencies possessed fragments of information suggesting an imminent Japanese attack, but no central authority existed to assemble the pieces. The Office of Strategic Services, created during the war under William "Wild Bill" Donovan, had demonstrated the value of centralized intelligence but was dissolved by Truman in October 1945, leaving the country without a civilian spy agency. The Act's most consequential creation was the Central Intelligence Agency, charged with coordinating intelligence from all government sources and conducting covert operations abroad. The CIA replaced the Central Intelligence Group, a weak interim body that had lacked both budget authority and operational independence. Rear Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter became the first CIA director, though the agency would not achieve its full scope until Allen Dulles took command in 1953. The military provisions were equally sweeping. The Act merged the Departments of War and Navy into a single National Military Establishment, later renamed the Department of Defense. James Forrestal became the first Secretary of Defense, a position that placed civilian authority over all branches of the armed forces for the first time. The National Security Council was established to advise the president on integrating domestic, foreign, and military policies. Truman later said he never intended the CIA to become a "cloak and dagger" agency, but the Cold War transformed it into exactly that within five years.