We can set no bounds to the possibilities of airplanes flying through the stratosphere dropping atomic bombs on great cities . . . I understand that the power of the bomb delivered on Nagasaki may be multiplied many times as the invention develops. I have so far heard no suggestion of any possible means of defense . . . If mankind continues to make the atomic bomb without changing the political relationships of States, sooner or later these bombs will be used for mutual annihilation . . . It is clear to me, therefore, that, as never before, the responsible statesmen of the great Powers are faced with decisions vital not merely to the increase of human happiness but to the very survival of civilization.
—Prime Minister Clement Attlee to Harry Truman, September 25, 1945
AT 8 P.M. ON SEPTEMBER 2, 1945, on the starboard deck of the battleship named for the president’s home state, the USS Missouri, Japanese officials signed their names to the surrender documents. The scene in Tokyo Bay was awestriking. A fleet of navy ships lay at anchor, American flags rippling in the wind. American bombers roared overhead; General Carl Spaatz of the U.S. Army Air Forces had warned that those aircraft were ready to release eight thousand tons of bombs on Japan at the slightest sign of treachery. General MacArthur stood on the Missouri’s deck monitoring the proceedings, his face so expressionless, he looked like he was already turning into a bust that would sit in a museum. Once the Japanese officials signed the documents, MacArthur became the supreme ruler of eighty million Japanese subjects. Representing Truman on board the Missouri that night was the president’s nephew, Seaman First Class John C. Truman.
With peace came all the adversity that Truman anticipated, and a whole lot more. As one biographer, Robert J. Donovan, put it many years ago, “For President Truman the postwar period did not simply arrive—it broke about his head with thunder, lightning, hail, rain, sleet, dead cats, howls, tantrums, and palpitations of panic.” The president dug in. The now famous thirteen-inch-long sign appeared on his desk, a gift from his friend Fred Canfil, who had seen a sign like it in an Oklahoma reformatory. It read, THE BUCK STOPS HERE! Four days after Japan signed the surrender documents, on the one-month anniversary of Hiroshima, Truman delivered to Congress the twenty-one-point program that he had worked on with Judge Sam Rosenman aboard the USS Augusta, on his way home from Potsdam. In it, he outlined his domestic strategy for postwar America—hyper-fast reconversion to a peacetime economy, unemployment and labor programs, anti-inflation policy, investment in housing, small business, and farming, aid for veterans, and more. Many in Congress still hoped that Truman would prove more conservative than Roosevelt. From these twenty-one points, Truman showed that he would not. Republicans in Congress reacted negatively. In the 1946 midterm elections, Republicans seized control of the House and Senate for the first time since 1928, and from this point on, the man from Missouri found himself treading in a political shark tank.
In the Far East, China and Korea were spinning out of control. In Korea, American and Soviet military commanders agreed to allow the Japanese south of the 38th parallel to surrender to U.S. forces, and north of the 38th parallel to the Red Army. Less than five weeks after Japan’s surrender, a U.S. Army commander in Korea compared the situation in that country to “a powder keg ready to explode on application of a spark.” A civil war in Korea was inevitable. (Today the 38th parallel roughly demarcates the border between North and South Korea.) Before the end of 1946, China too was locked in a full-blown civil war, also between Communist and non-Communist regimes.
Throughout eastern Europe, the Soviets continued to consolidate power and spread influence. Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, Poland, Czechoslovakia—all these nations became firmly Sovietized. By 1949, the Soviet zone of occupation in Germany had closed off its borders, becoming its own communist country commonly known as East Germany. That same year, the Soviets successfully tested their own nuclear weapon.
The long period of runaway inflation and economic paralysis that many feared would strike the United States following the war never did. Still, Truman was criticized for his tax policy (“High Tax Harry”), for labor strife, and for his groundbreaking support of civil rights, which did not sit well with many Americans.
For the rest of his time in office, historic challenges faced the presidency. Today he is remembered for the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan, programs that hurled billions of dollars at European countries in an attempt to keep emerging democratic regimes from falling to communism. Truman’s recognition of Israel in 1948 made him the first world leader to embrace the new nation. His administration is remembered for the Berlin Airlift following the Soviet blockade, for the founding of the CIA and the Atomic Energy Commission, and for his role among others in the founding of NATO. He is remembered for firing General Douglas MacArthur in 1951—which set off a firestorm in Washington—and for his role in creating the modern Department of Defense.
In 1950, in a combined effort with the United Nations, Truman sent troops into Korea to fight Soviet-backed communist forces. The Cold War was no longer a war of posturing and paranoia. Like the “Phony War” of World War II, the Cold War became a real war of death and destruction. Truman was criticized for failing to get consent from Congress, which never declared war. This criticism only heightened when American forces failed to rid the Korean peninsula of communism.
Truman faced reelection in 1948, against Thomas Dewey of New York. His popularity ratings had plummeted by this time, but as in his 1940 Senate campaign, he surprised everyone, perhaps even himself, by declaring his candidacy and his resolve to win. As in his 1940 Senate campaign, he was given almost no chance at victory. Newspapers and polls unanimously predicted a landslide, but he came out victorious. Perhaps only the presidential election of 2016 surpasses 1948 as the biggest upset in American electioneering history. Truman’s victory moved his daughter, Margaret, to pronounce, “Harry S. Truman was no ‘accidental President,’” for now he had been elected by the American people.
Still, among all those historic chapters, Truman is remembered first and foremost for his decision to employ atomic weapons—Little Boy and Fat Man, the only two nuclear bombs ever used against human targets. More than seventy years later, this decision remains almost certainly the most controversial that any president has ever made.
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How many human beings did the two atomic bombs kill? It is impossible to say, and that alone inspires a sense of the weapons’ capacity to annihilate. The United States Department of Energy has estimated the number at 200,000, maybe more, over a five-year span, “as cancer and other long-term effects took hold.” And that is just for the Hiroshima bomb.
Since August 1945, the atomic bombings have pit moralists against one another. Critics tend to argue with theories, leaving only questions rather than answers. Was the bomb used for political purposes? Was it a power play against the Soviets? Did the Americans race to use it to stop the Soviets from charging farther into the Far East? How deeply did racism toward the Japanese play into the decision? Would Japan have surrendered without the use of the bomb? And if so, when, and after how many more lives lost? To use a colloquialism, the answers to these questions depend on whom you ask.
General Eisenhower argued against dropping the bomb, in conversations with the president prior to August 1945. There is no record of Admiral Leahy’s opposition prior to Hiroshima, but after the war Leahy wrote: “It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons . . . My own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was taught not to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children.”
Leahy’s argument is dubious. Why was it wrong to kill with atomic bombs, when the Americans had been firebombing civilian neighborhoods in Japan for months? (After the war, regarding these firebombing missions, Curtis LeMay wrote, “I suppose if I had lost the war, I would have been tried as a war criminal . . . But all war is immoral, and if you let that bother you, you’re not a good soldier.”)
The fact remains, almost every advisor to Truman recommended the bomb’s use at the time. Noted Henry Stimson, as he looked back two years later in 1947: “The face of war is the face of death . . . The decision to use the atomic bomb was a decision that brought death to over a hundred thousand Japanese. No explanation can change that fact and I do not wish to gloss it over. But this deliberate, premeditated destruction was our least abhorrent choice.”
George Marshall, the most respected military mind of his era, later wrote: “I regarded the dropping of the bomb as of great importance and felt that it would end the war possibly better than anything else, which it did, and I think that all the claims about the bombings afterward were rather silly.”
Churchill provided another point of view in his writings after the war: “The historic fact remains, and must be judged in the after time, that the decision whether or not to use the atomic bomb to compel the surrender of Japan was never even an issue. There was unanimous, automatic, unquestioned agreement around our table; nor did I ever hear the slightest suggestion that we should do otherwise.”
Eleanor Roosevelt supported Truman’s use of the bomb, and this author has never heard the argument that FDR would have decided against its employment.
Every person who advised Truman on the matter saw this decision from a different point of view. As for Truman himself, there remains no evidence that he used the bomb for any political reason. He measured the lives that would be lost in a ground invasion of Japan and did the math: “It occurred to me that a quarter of a million of the flower of our young manhood were worth a couple of Japanese cities, and I still think they were and are.”
This author agrees with historians Stephen Ambrose and Douglas Brinkley, who wrote in their book Rise to Globalism: “The simplest explanation is perhaps the most convincing. The bomb was there. Japan was not surrendering. Few in the government thought seriously about not using it. To drop it as soon as it was ready seemed natural, the obvious thing to do. As Truman later put it, ‘The final decision of where and when to use the atomic bomb was up to me. Let there be no mistake about it. I regarded the bomb as a military weapon and never had any doubt that it should be used.’ ”
Truman left office amid miserable approval ratings in January 1953, as Eisenhower began his term. The American economy was booming, but global instability, the spread of communism, fear of the nuclear arms race, the Korean War, bipartisan bickering, all of it cast a dark shadow on Truman’s administration at its denouement.
The day Harry and Bess moved out of the White House, he turned around at the door and waved good-bye to staff members. He had served as president for seven years, nine months, and eight days. He hesitated one last moment before leaving “the Great White Jail,” then repeated a joke he often told. He said, “You know, many times in my despair at the White House, I’ve always wondered whether the nation and the world would have been much better off if Harry Truman, instead of being President of the United States, had played piano at a bawdy house.” “Then,” recalled a photographer who was there that day, “he turned around and left.”
Through the years, historians have revived Truman’s approval ratings. In 2015 one Boston Globe writer noted, “Harry S. Truman is now considered one of our most successful presidents, rating in the top 10 in every historical survey.” Ironically, Truman’s greatest strength came from what was perceived, on April 12, 1945, as his greatest weakness: his ordinariness. As Jonathan Daniels wrote of Truman, “Americans felt leaderless when Roosevelt died. Truman taught them, as one of them, that their greatness lies in themselves.”
Harry S. Truman died twenty years after leaving office, the day after Christmas in 1972, at age eighty-eight. Bess Truman followed ten years later, and they are buried next to each other in a courtyard of the Harry S. Truman Library & Museum in Independence, Missouri. At the time of Truman’s death, he was well aware that his legacy was still embattled. While he was president, he kept a quotation of Abraham Lincoln in a leather portfolio on his desk. It read, “I do the very best I know how—the very best I can; and I mean to keep doing so to the end. If the end brings me out all right, what is said against me won’t amount to anything. If the end brings me out wrong, ten angels swearing I was right won’t make any difference.”