For many historians and students of Truman, the defining event of his presidency is the dropping of the two atomic bombs (one uranium, the other plutonium) on Japan in August 1945. There have been several stated reasons for this: unwillingness to lose at least a million American troops in a bloody conventional assault on the country; a desire to show the Russians the might of the American muscle; and even a desire for revenge on Japan for Pearl Harbor, and for her inhumane treatment of American POW’s during the war.
These are all valid reasons, and I am not going to vainly speculate whether Japan might have surrendered on her own soon after the Russians entered the war in the Pacific (as is often alleged). But one key point needs to be made. It is a well-known fact that the atomic bomb affair had been kept secret from Truman prior to his sudden assumption of the presidency in April 1945, and even as President he still knew too little about it to be held accountable for a deliberate decision to unleash its little-understood horrors on the scale of mass destruction.
There was a further irony in this. Stalin actually knew more about these weapons than Truman did. And he also knew that by using the only two bombs in her possession at that time, America would now be bombless for at least a short while, and would not pose any atomic danger to the USSR, should a General Patton try to take this matter into his own hands.
But anyway, this is another story and it is being told elsewhere, for which reason I am not including it in the main body of this entry, considering that, surprising though it may seem, President Truman had really little to do with it.
The person of Harry S Truman (“S”-no dot! was his real given middle name, to please both grandparents, whose names did indeed start with an “S”), with the passage of time, appears increasingly intriguing. In spite of his ostensibly anti-Soviet stand and the essentially false premises of the famous Truman Doctrine (the events in Greece and Turkey had precious little, if anything at all, to do with Soviet expansionism), he was always held by the Soviet officials in an unexpectedly high regard. He was a well-respected adversary. (This is made all the more intelligible in the light of my two boxers metaphor: they are fierce competitors in the ring, but they know that they cannot live without each other, contributing to each other’s fame, glory, and even modus vivendi.) Truman’s domestic socialist leanings were even more pronounced than those of FDR, and the only reason why he is not presently recognized as a great social reformer is the fact that his reforms were, perhaps, too radical for their time, to make it through Congress. His personal integrity has been well established and was his distinctive trademark from early on, uncorrupted by his plunge into the Big-League Washington politics. Not the least among his glowing accomplishments was outstanding personal bravery, which he had amply demonstrated during his military service in World War I. Another great reason for his very high regard in Russia is, of course, the fact that, on FDR’s sudden demise, he splendidly took over the American Big-Three vacancy in Potsdam, whereas the other new face British Prime Minister Attlee’s “half-ration” never quite rubbed off on the otherwise extremely capable Mr. Attlee, hopelessly overshadowed and outclassed by his portly, cigar-smoking predecessor... (This note about the Truman and Attlee replacements is not an expression of my personal view of course, but of those Russians who were present at Potsdam.)
Another irony of Harry Truman’s life is a certain parallel between his political fortunes and his final place in history. Chronically in trouble with both his fellow Democrats (both Northern and Southern!) and their Republican counterparts, he was given up for politically dead on more occasions than that famous ‘Dewey wins over Truman’ 1948 miracle, yet he did manage to survive and endure. Likewise, in the eyes of history, he was shamefully underrated, while in office, yet his overall presidential performance rating had soared on his leaving office, easily promoting him from the status of mediocrity to near-greatness, virtually overnight. Today his presidential rankings range from the high of #7 to the very high low of #11.
There will be much more said about him in my History section, of course, just as I have noted in the case of his great predecessor FDR. In both these cases, please refer to that section for more. The most conspicuous case among these, in President Truman’s time, even more conspicuous than the Containment Doctrine, developed for him by George Kennan, was the Korean War, a most fascinating subject, which remains misunderstood, the mystery to be hopefully lifted after my shockingly unorthodox explication in the previously posted entry under the title Stalin’s Korean Charade.
Another seminal event on the Truman Administration’s watch was the establishment of the State of Israel. It is therefore of no small significance that one of President Truman’s most controversial, though lesser known reflections, to the effect that “the Jews have no sense of proportion nor do they have any judgment (sic!) on world affairs” (as quoted by Washington Post on July 11, 2003, from Truman’s 1947 Diary), with the all too obvious implication that Jews ought not to be allowed participation in US foreign policy development, was made virtually on the eve of this historical act of an unprecedented empowerment of the world Jewry in the last three millennia, namely, the creation of the modern Medinat Yisroel. It, therefore, needs to be looked at within this context, even if the subject is most uncomfortable.
Quotations like the one above are customarily treated wholesale as hot potatoes, and hardly ever allowed to be analyzed in a thorough scholarly manner. It is not quite clear whether this remark, branded anti-Semitic by Truman’s Jewish critics (which may be accurate up to a certain point, but totally irrelevant to our discussion), refers to the alleged propensity of the American Jews to be more partial to the interests of Israel than being in keeping with the proper interests of the United States (which, strangely enough, used to be the candid opinion of several high ranking Soviet officials and political strategists who were ethnically Jewish themselves, yet were all staunch Soviet loyalists and detractors of the West), or, perhaps, it would be more accurate to suggest that Give ‘em Hell Harry, the valiant Cold Warrior, may have sensed, back in 1947, the potential danger of an Israel populated up to one third by recent émigrés from the USSR, and undoubtedly infiltrated by Stalin’s agents, eager to subvert American foreign policy by appealing to the Jewish element of Washington’s political establishment. (Which, of course, completes and concludes the above-mentioned Soviet argument, and indeed represents the original intent of Comrade Stalin behind his own vigorous effort in the creation of the State of Israel, even if in Stalin’s time that intent may not have borne the expected fruit right away…)
Needless to say, this sharp-edged but very important and understandably unexplored subject is being further explored in other appropriate sections.
And finally, for those who are not exactly history buffs, the title of this entry alludes to President Truman’s famous dictum: “If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen!”
Truman Talk.
This small entry is devoted to Harry S Truman’s better or lesser-known quotations. As usual, I have chosen just a small selection of my favorites, starting with his good-natured attacks on the partisan hypocrisy of the Republicans. Nothing extraordinary here, but all these quotes are sentimentally reflecting the lost innocence of those “old days.”---
“A bureaucrat is a Democrat who holds some office that a Republican wants.”
“A leader in the Democratic Party is a boss, in the Republican Party he is a leader.”
The next set of quotes tells us something about Truman’s personal style, work ethics, and character, with a liberal sprinkling of good, often self-deprecating, and occasionally philosophical humor.---
“The buck stops here.”
“If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.”
“I never gave anybody hell. I just told the truth, and they thought it was hell.”
“It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit.”
“It is understanding that gives us an ability to have peace. When we understand the other fellow’s viewpoint, and he understands ours, then we can sit down and work out our differences.”
“If you can’t convince them, confuse them.”
“The reward of suffering is experience.”
“A pessimist is one who makes difficulties of his opportunities; an optimist is one who makes opportunities of his difficulties.”
“There is nothing new in the world except the history you do not know.”
“You want a friend in Washington? Get a dog.”
One particular thought of his on what it means to be a President, stands out so sharply that I want to quote it in isolation from all the rest.---
“When you get to be President, there are all those things,--the honors, the twenty-one gun salutes,--all those things. You have to remember it isn’t for you. It’s for the Presidency.”
All these sayings are of course exceptionally contemporary and topical as applied to our times.
The necessity for the public to be fully informed, which is a virtual impossibility in our age of propaganda victorious and triumphant:
"You can never get all the facts from just one newspaper, and unless you have all the facts, you cannot make proper judgments about what is going on.”
And, related to it, this thought on reading [need I say only good] books as the best education possible:
“Upon books the collective education of the race depends; they are the sole instruments of registering, perpetuating and transmitting thought."
I think that even in this quite limited selection, Truman’s colorful personality comes through in an appealing way, and tells much more about the man than all history books put together can. In fact, he is one of the best authors of good aphoristic dicta among the American presidents, statesmen and politicians, in my view. And it is proper to close this selection with two particularly prescient adages which I might call Truman’s legacy to the present generation of Americans, quoted now without further comment.---
“America was not built on fear. America was built on courage, imagination and an unbeatable determination to do the job at hand.”
“When even one American who has done nothing wrong is forced by fear to shut his mind and close his mouth,-- then all Americans are in peril.”
These are all valid reasons, and I am not going to vainly speculate whether Japan might have surrendered on her own soon after the Russians entered the war in the Pacific (as is often alleged). But one key point needs to be made. It is a well-known fact that the atomic bomb affair had been kept secret from Truman prior to his sudden assumption of the presidency in April 1945, and even as President he still knew too little about it to be held accountable for a deliberate decision to unleash its little-understood horrors on the scale of mass destruction.
There was a further irony in this. Stalin actually knew more about these weapons than Truman did. And he also knew that by using the only two bombs in her possession at that time, America would now be bombless for at least a short while, and would not pose any atomic danger to the USSR, should a General Patton try to take this matter into his own hands.
But anyway, this is another story and it is being told elsewhere, for which reason I am not including it in the main body of this entry, considering that, surprising though it may seem, President Truman had really little to do with it.
The person of Harry S Truman (“S”-no dot! was his real given middle name, to please both grandparents, whose names did indeed start with an “S”), with the passage of time, appears increasingly intriguing. In spite of his ostensibly anti-Soviet stand and the essentially false premises of the famous Truman Doctrine (the events in Greece and Turkey had precious little, if anything at all, to do with Soviet expansionism), he was always held by the Soviet officials in an unexpectedly high regard. He was a well-respected adversary. (This is made all the more intelligible in the light of my two boxers metaphor: they are fierce competitors in the ring, but they know that they cannot live without each other, contributing to each other’s fame, glory, and even modus vivendi.) Truman’s domestic socialist leanings were even more pronounced than those of FDR, and the only reason why he is not presently recognized as a great social reformer is the fact that his reforms were, perhaps, too radical for their time, to make it through Congress. His personal integrity has been well established and was his distinctive trademark from early on, uncorrupted by his plunge into the Big-League Washington politics. Not the least among his glowing accomplishments was outstanding personal bravery, which he had amply demonstrated during his military service in World War I. Another great reason for his very high regard in Russia is, of course, the fact that, on FDR’s sudden demise, he splendidly took over the American Big-Three vacancy in Potsdam, whereas the other new face British Prime Minister Attlee’s “half-ration” never quite rubbed off on the otherwise extremely capable Mr. Attlee, hopelessly overshadowed and outclassed by his portly, cigar-smoking predecessor... (This note about the Truman and Attlee replacements is not an expression of my personal view of course, but of those Russians who were present at Potsdam.)
Another irony of Harry Truman’s life is a certain parallel between his political fortunes and his final place in history. Chronically in trouble with both his fellow Democrats (both Northern and Southern!) and their Republican counterparts, he was given up for politically dead on more occasions than that famous ‘Dewey wins over Truman’ 1948 miracle, yet he did manage to survive and endure. Likewise, in the eyes of history, he was shamefully underrated, while in office, yet his overall presidential performance rating had soared on his leaving office, easily promoting him from the status of mediocrity to near-greatness, virtually overnight. Today his presidential rankings range from the high of #7 to the very high low of #11.
There will be much more said about him in my History section, of course, just as I have noted in the case of his great predecessor FDR. In both these cases, please refer to that section for more. The most conspicuous case among these, in President Truman’s time, even more conspicuous than the Containment Doctrine, developed for him by George Kennan, was the Korean War, a most fascinating subject, which remains misunderstood, the mystery to be hopefully lifted after my shockingly unorthodox explication in the previously posted entry under the title Stalin’s Korean Charade.
Another seminal event on the Truman Administration’s watch was the establishment of the State of Israel. It is therefore of no small significance that one of President Truman’s most controversial, though lesser known reflections, to the effect that “the Jews have no sense of proportion nor do they have any judgment (sic!) on world affairs” (as quoted by Washington Post on July 11, 2003, from Truman’s 1947 Diary), with the all too obvious implication that Jews ought not to be allowed participation in US foreign policy development, was made virtually on the eve of this historical act of an unprecedented empowerment of the world Jewry in the last three millennia, namely, the creation of the modern Medinat Yisroel. It, therefore, needs to be looked at within this context, even if the subject is most uncomfortable.
Quotations like the one above are customarily treated wholesale as hot potatoes, and hardly ever allowed to be analyzed in a thorough scholarly manner. It is not quite clear whether this remark, branded anti-Semitic by Truman’s Jewish critics (which may be accurate up to a certain point, but totally irrelevant to our discussion), refers to the alleged propensity of the American Jews to be more partial to the interests of Israel than being in keeping with the proper interests of the United States (which, strangely enough, used to be the candid opinion of several high ranking Soviet officials and political strategists who were ethnically Jewish themselves, yet were all staunch Soviet loyalists and detractors of the West), or, perhaps, it would be more accurate to suggest that Give ‘em Hell Harry, the valiant Cold Warrior, may have sensed, back in 1947, the potential danger of an Israel populated up to one third by recent émigrés from the USSR, and undoubtedly infiltrated by Stalin’s agents, eager to subvert American foreign policy by appealing to the Jewish element of Washington’s political establishment. (Which, of course, completes and concludes the above-mentioned Soviet argument, and indeed represents the original intent of Comrade Stalin behind his own vigorous effort in the creation of the State of Israel, even if in Stalin’s time that intent may not have borne the expected fruit right away…)
Needless to say, this sharp-edged but very important and understandably unexplored subject is being further explored in other appropriate sections.
And finally, for those who are not exactly history buffs, the title of this entry alludes to President Truman’s famous dictum: “If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen!”
Truman Talk.
This small entry is devoted to Harry S Truman’s better or lesser-known quotations. As usual, I have chosen just a small selection of my favorites, starting with his good-natured attacks on the partisan hypocrisy of the Republicans. Nothing extraordinary here, but all these quotes are sentimentally reflecting the lost innocence of those “old days.”---
“A bureaucrat is a Democrat who holds some office that a Republican wants.”
“A leader in the Democratic Party is a boss, in the Republican Party he is a leader.”
The next set of quotes tells us something about Truman’s personal style, work ethics, and character, with a liberal sprinkling of good, often self-deprecating, and occasionally philosophical humor.---
“The buck stops here.”
“If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.”
“I never gave anybody hell. I just told the truth, and they thought it was hell.”
“It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit.”
“It is understanding that gives us an ability to have peace. When we understand the other fellow’s viewpoint, and he understands ours, then we can sit down and work out our differences.”
“If you can’t convince them, confuse them.”
“The reward of suffering is experience.”
“A pessimist is one who makes difficulties of his opportunities; an optimist is one who makes opportunities of his difficulties.”
“There is nothing new in the world except the history you do not know.”
“You want a friend in Washington? Get a dog.”
One particular thought of his on what it means to be a President, stands out so sharply that I want to quote it in isolation from all the rest.---
“When you get to be President, there are all those things,--the honors, the twenty-one gun salutes,--all those things. You have to remember it isn’t for you. It’s for the Presidency.”
All these sayings are of course exceptionally contemporary and topical as applied to our times.
The necessity for the public to be fully informed, which is a virtual impossibility in our age of propaganda victorious and triumphant:
"You can never get all the facts from just one newspaper, and unless you have all the facts, you cannot make proper judgments about what is going on.”
And, related to it, this thought on reading [need I say only good] books as the best education possible:
“Upon books the collective education of the race depends; they are the sole instruments of registering, perpetuating and transmitting thought."
I think that even in this quite limited selection, Truman’s colorful personality comes through in an appealing way, and tells much more about the man than all history books put together can. In fact, he is one of the best authors of good aphoristic dicta among the American presidents, statesmen and politicians, in my view. And it is proper to close this selection with two particularly prescient adages which I might call Truman’s legacy to the present generation of Americans, quoted now without further comment.---
“America was not built on fear. America was built on courage, imagination and an unbeatable determination to do the job at hand.”
“When even one American who has done nothing wrong is forced by fear to shut his mind and close his mouth,-- then all Americans are in peril.”
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