Henry Wallace, the secretary of commerce and former vice president, agreed with Stimson, as did Undersecretary of State Dean Acheson (though he later changed his position), but Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal laid down the definitive opposition. “The Russians, like the Japanese,” he argued, “are essentially Oriental in their thinking, and until we have a longer record of experience with them . . . it seems doubtful that we should endeavor to buy their understanding and sympathy. We tried that once with Hitler. There are no returns on appeasement.” Forrestal, a skilled bureaucratic infighter, had made his fortune on Wall Street and frequently framed his arguments in economic terms. The bomb and the knowledge that produced it, Forrestal argued, was “the property of the American people”—control over it, like the U.S. seizure of Japan’s former Pacific Island bases, needed to be governed by the concept of “sole Trusteeship.”