Thinking of Truman

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One day in April of 1945, Vice President Harry Truman was summoned to the White House, where he was immediately ushered into the First Lady’s private study. “Harry,” Eleanor Roosevelt said. “The President is dead.” Truman couldn’t speak for a few moments. Then he said: “Is there anything I can do for you?” Truman later wrote that he’d never forget her reply.

“Is there anything we can do for you?” Eleanor asked.

Let us think of Truman as President Obama prepares to go to Hiroshima to apologize for America’s use of the atomic bomb. Oh, we understand that Mr. Obama is insisting he’s not intending to apologize per se. He is oblivious to what is obvious to everyone else, which is that it’s not what President Obama says that is the apology but the very fact of an American president fetching up at Hiroshima in the first place.

Truman deserves better. He was sworn in as president two hours after learning of FDR’s death. That was in the cabinet room. He then shooed out his wife and daughter and a few others and convened a brief cabinet meeting. Then the war secretary, Stimson, took the new president aside and asked to speak with him about, as Truman later put it in his memoirs, “a most urgent matter.”

Stimson wanted Truman to know about “an immense project,” envisaging “a new explosive of almost unbelievable destructive power.” It turned out to be the first the President had heard of the atomic bomb. Truman knew a lot more by July, when he traveled to Potsdam to meet Churchill and Stalin and start organizing the post-war world. To Stalin the president intimated news of a super-weapon in development, but held back particulars. Churchill already knew.

Sailing back to America on United States Ship Augusta, Truman sought to avoid the insufferable Jimmy Byrne. Instead, the president holed up in a cabin running a poker game that the United Press correspondent Merriman Smith called “a straight stud filibuster against his own secretary of state.” One day, according to Smith’s own account in an anthology of poker stories called “Dealer’s Choice,” Truman briefed Smith and a few others on his plan to unleash on Japan a new weapon called the atomic bomb.

“Little Boy” was dropped on Hiroshima on August 6. General Spaatz had been given four target cities from which to choose. “In deciding to use this bomb, I wanted to make sure that it would be used as a weapon of war in the manner prescribed by the laws of war,” Truman wrote in his memoirs. “That meant that I wanted it dropped on a military target. I had told Stimson that the bomb should be dropped as nearly as possibly upon a war production center of prime military importance.”

That was about the extent of Truman’s post-bombing explanation of his thinking. He understood the a-bomb’s outsize power, but he thought of it as but a military weapon. He understood — had been carefully briefed on — the likely cost to both sides of a military invasion of the kind the bomb might make unnecessary. Once the bomb was dropped, he warned the Japanese pointedly that he would keep bombing them until the country could fight no more.

Here was Truman’s message: “We are now prepared to obliterate more rapidly and completely every productive enterprise the Japanese have above ground in any city. We shall destroy their docks, their factories, and their communications. Let there be no mistake, we shall completely destroy Japan’s power to make war.” The Japanese surrendered after Nagasaki.

Today President Obama may talk of his aspirations for a world without nuclear weapons. That may — or may not — be a laudable policy goal. But what is the point of marking that policy at the site where the atomic bomb was first used and used for the purpose of bringing the worst war in the history of the world to an early conclusion? In 1953, Eleanor Roosevelt herself visited Hiroshima and from that dateline wrote of eliminating not atomic (or any other) weapons but the causes of war. She beseeched God to grant men ever greater wisdom.


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