Where the Buck Stops

by Harry Truman

  Nevertheless, I pleaded with the Japanese in my speech announcing Germany’s surrender, begging them to surrender, too, but was not too surprised when they refused. And on June 18, I met with the Joint Chiefs of Staff to discuss what I hoped would be our final push against the Japanese. We still hadn’t decided whether or not to use the atomic bomb, and the chiefs of staff suggested that we plan an attack on Kyushu, the Japanese island on their extreme west, around the beginning of November, and follow up with an attack on the more important island of Honshu. But the statistics that the generals gave me were as frightening as the news of the big bomb. The chiefs of staff estimated that the Japanese still had 5,000 attack planes, seventeen garrisons on the island of Kyushu alone, and a total of more than 2 million men on all of the islands of Japan. General Marshall then estimated that, since the Japanese would unquestionably fight even more fiercely than ever on their own homeland, we would probably lose a quarter of a million men and possibly as many as a half million in taking the two islands. I could not bear this thought, and it led to the decision to use the atomic bomb.

  We talked first about blockading Japan and trying to blast them into surrender with conventional weaponry; but Marshall and others made it clear that this would never work, pointing out that we’d hit Germany in this way, and they hadn’t surrendered until we got troops into Germany itself. Another general also pointed out that Germany’s munitions industries were more or less centralized and that our constant bombings of these facilities never made them quit, and Japan’s industries were much more spread apart and harder to hit. Then, when we finally talked about the atomic bomb, on July 21, coming to the awful conclusion that it would probably be the only way the Japanese might be made to surrender quickly, we talked first about hitting some isolated area, some low-population area where there would not be too many casualties but where the Japanese could see the power of the new weapon. Reluctantly, we decided against that as well, feeling that that just wouldn’t be enough to convince the fanatic Japanese. And we finally selected four possible target areas, all heavy military-manufacturing areas: Hiroshima, Kokura, Nagasaki, and Niigata.

  I know the world will never forget that the first bomb was dropped on Hiroshima on August 5, at 7:15 p.m. Washington time and the second on Nagasaki on August 9. One more plea for surrender had been made to the Japanese on July 29 and was rejected immediately. Then I gave the final order, saying I had no qualms “if millions of lives could be saved.” I meant both American and Japanese lives.

  The Japanese surrendered five days after the bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, and a number of major Japanese military men and diplomats later confirmed publicly that there would have been no quick surrender without it. For this reason, I made what I believed to be the only possible decision. I said something to this effect in a letter to my sister, Mary: “It was a terrible decision. But I made it. And I made it to save 250,000 boys from the United States, and I’d make it again under similar circumstances.” I said the same thing at somewhat greater length in a speech at a university in 1965: “It was a question of saving hundreds of thousands of American lives . . . You don’t feel normal when you have to plan hundreds of thousands of . . . deaths of American boys who are alive and joking and having fun while you’re doing your planning. You break your heart and your head trying to figure out a way to save one life . . . The name given to our invasion plan was Olympic, but I saw nothing godly about the killing of all the people that would be necessary to make that invasion. The casualty estimates called for 750,000 American casualties - 250,000 killed, 500,000 maimed for life . . . I couldn’t worry about what history would say about my personal morality. I made the only decision I ever knew how to make. I did what I thought was right.”

  I still think that. But God knows it underlines the need for an organization like the United Nations to prevent another and probably final world war.

  I’ll come back to George Washington just long enough to say goodbye to him. He was a great man and a good man, and when his work was over as our great first president, he went back home to Virginia for his long-earned rest. Just three years later, on December 14, 1799, at the age of sixty-seven, he went to his final rest. As I described earlier, he went back to Mount Vernon and ran his place, and he went out in a bad storm and caught pneumonia and died. They bled him, as they often did in those days, and modern doctors say that if they hadn’t bled him he might have lived. But everything I’ve read about his death indicates that he died peacefully, and perhaps he died because he’d accomplished his purpose. He knew that he’d done what was necessary for his country, and there was no longer a need or a desire to live any longer.

  THE NEXT PRESIDENT worth a lot of respectful attention is Thomas Jefferson, This means, of course, that I’m pretty much skipping over John Adams, the president between Washington and Jefferson, but I’m not doing that because I think that Adams was a terrible president. It’s just that he wasn’t very special, whereas Jefferson was special indeed in a lot of ways.

  To understand the difference between Adams and Jefferson, you have to understand the differences between two other and very important matters: the development and evolution of our country’s leading political parties and the essential philosophical differences between the two parties. Please forgive me if that sounds sort of stuffy and pedantic, but there’s no other way to put it, and I’ll try not to sound like a boring lecturer while I’m explaining it.

  You have to realize, to begin with, that there was no thought at all about political parties when the Constitution was being put together. It was the idea of the people who wrote the Constitution that there would not be any partisan setup in the government because it was unnecessary; the purpose of the government, as they saw it, was to create an organization of the colonies, the states, so that there wouldn’t be any barriers between the states and they could transact business with each other and possibly with the rest of the world. And since it was intended to develop a government with a president and a Congress whose interest, principally, would be trade, there seemed to be no need, or even any likelihood, of differing political parties because everybody would want the same things.

  But that was just foolish, or at least naive. The origin of political parties wasn’t contemplated by the makers of the Constitution because they had no experience in free government independent of the British crown. And there was also the fact that, even though we were now an independent country, there was still an underground of perhaps as much as 30 or 35 percent of the population who were Royalists and had wanted to stay with Britain and wouldn’t have minded returning to British rule, so it was much more important to think about the objectives that kept Americans together instead of the things that separated us. Nevertheless, our first leaders should have realized that, even if we all had the same idea of wanting trade and business and plenty of it, the different kinds of people who became our first legislators would have very different ideas about how to run the government that was being set up. But they didn’t realize it, and that was, as I mentioned earlier, the cause of the basic rift between Washington and John Adams and Alexander Hamilton on one side and Jefferson and the people who thought the same way he did on the other side.

  Washington’s appointments weren’t political appointments in the sense in which that term is used today, meaning people whose theories of government operation are exactly the same as those of the president who appoints them. His appointments were made strictly on the basis of the known abilities of the men who were appointed; he knew them well and was familiar with their backgrounds and their experience, and that’s the reason he appointed both Hamilton and Jefferson. He was a man of good judgment, and I’m sure he was well aware that there were major differences in the thinking of the two men and that Jefferson felt differently about some things than Washington himself did, but he wanted both men in this cabinet because he was determined to establish the government so that it would survive and continue to run. And I’m also sure he had confidence in his
ability to make people get along together.

  He was right in this assessment of his ability, too, because he came to depend a lot on Hamilton during his administration, and he was just as dependent on Jefferson as he was on Hamilton. And though both Jefferson and Hamilton later said publicly that Washington didn’t have a good intellectual background, he was smart enough to make both of them perform. In that way, he was like Lincoln, who also had the ability to make men who didn’t want to get along get along together. That’s true of all of our great presidents. When people with different viewpoints have something that can be used for the benefit of the government, the chief executive should make use of everything they have no matter what they believe, and he can get them to perform if he has the ability to make people understand that what he’s trying to do is to run the government as it ought to be run. You’ve got to have an executive who has an urgent desire for the continuation of our great free government, and a man who has that desire ought to make use of every means at his command to keep that government running. That’s what Roosevelt did, and in a way, it was Wilson’s failing that he didn’t. He was smarter than anybody else, but he knew it, and he let the people around him know it even though he lost support that way. You can’t do that when you’re trying to run a government.

  The big difference in Jefferson’s and Hamilton’s thinking, as I also mentioned earlier, was that Jefferson believed that our leadership should come from the general population whereas Hamilton felt that it should come only from the upper classes. The reasoning of the two men was basic and simple. Hamilton felt that there should be a ruling class, a sort of political aristocracy - that the rich and the educated should be the heads of government and control the country’s finances and lawmaking because they knew more about most matters and would do a better job of running things. Jefferson’s idea, on the other hand, was that the people, properly educated, would know how to run the government just as well as the aristocrats of the time. And he expressed concern that, if the rich ran the country, they would be interested mostly in the welfare of their peers and not in the welfare of people who worked in the fields and on farms and in other jobs that put calluses on your hands.

  You’ve got to remember that Jefferson’s point of view was a radical and revolutionary approach because just about all the governments up to that time had been monarchies with the idea that the king was the representative of Almighty God. The description of the king’s authority was “the divine right of kings,” and the word “divine” was meant literally in the dictionary sense of “pertaining to God or being a god,” and not in the way one lady tells another lady her new dress is divine and means it looks kind of nice. But from about 1760, I guess, to about 1800, the point that Jefferson and others kept pounding home and reminding people like Hamilton of was that the idea of the United States was that government should not be by the divine right of kings but by the consent of the people. That’s made very clear in the Declaration of Independence. It’s right in the first line.

  It’s ironic that Hamilton became the voice of the aristocracy and Jefferson became the voice of the man on the street because, in a sense, Hamilton had less right to try to develop an aristocratic class than anyone else in the country, whereas Jefferson was the son and grandson of wealthy landowners and the husband of Martha Wayles Skelton, a young widow who brought to the marriage a fortune equaling Jefferson’s own holdings. The reason I say that Hamilton was an unlikely spokesman for the aristocrats is that, you’ll recall, he was born in the West Indies without knowing who his father was. He came to this country without friends or family and deserves a tremendous amount of credit for making a success of his life by the use of his mind; he had a great brain, and one of the most terrible things that ever happened in this country is that his life ended when he was only forty-nine. He did a lot of good things for the country and would have done many more if he’d lived longer. But he had a viewpoint that was entirely different from Jefferson’s, and for that matter mine, and in that line of thinking he was dead wrong. Jefferson’s simple and logical belief that a country should be run by the people of the country has gone all around the world since his time, and the whole world has been in a sort of revolution ever since as a result of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States. So there’s no doubt, simply no doubt at all, about the fact that that makes Jefferson a great world figure as well as a great American.

  And though it may be ironic that Jefferson became the voice of the people, it isn’t really surprising because he knew history, the way so many of the members of the Continental Congress did, and learned a lot of the lessons that history can teach us, and he had a wide-ranging mind that made him seek out the right things in life even when they weren’t the most popular things. He had the idea that knowledge was the most important thing that a man could have in life, and he tried to attain as much of it as he could. He was a brilliantly educated man, a graduate of William and Mary College and a lawyer, and he was also an architect, farmer, a musician, an inventor, and almost everything else you could be in that period except a doctor of medicine, and I’m sure he could have been that, too, if he wanted to be.

  He was interested in everything. He had one of the best libraries in the whole Western Hemisphere, and whenever he went abroad, he added books to it that he thought were necessary for a man to understand and read. As a matter of fact, that library was finally the foundation of the Library of Congress; all of Jefferson’s books are in the Library of Congress in toto. He brought a great many plants to this country from Europe and used them as a start of a separate agricultural program for the United States. He had a hand in starting a conservation program to save the soil of Virginia and keep it from washing into the Atlantic Ocean. He was very much interested in agriculture, and, in fact, you can’t find anything in which the welfare of the people was at stake in which he wasn’t interested. And the only reason that Virginia’s soil isn’t as rich as it was in Jefferson’s time is that the generations that followed him weren’t as interested in following that program as he was.

  He had a wind gauge on his roof that registered down in the front hall of his mansion. He had his bed fixed so that he could pull it up and out of the way with ropes, which I guess was the first Murphy bed. He built a cart with special springs so that it was more comfortable when he rode back and forth to the Capitol. That cart is still there in his home, Monticello, in Virginia. He knew enough about architecture, incidentally, so that Monticello is based on a building in Italy, a building he saw just outside of Venice, and he also brought back the plans of a beautiful little temple in France and based the Virginia capitol building on that.

  He also made our monetary system a decimal system. Jefferson was the man who made the tenth part of a dollar a dime, and the one-hundredth part of a dollar a cent - a one-cent piece they called it in those days, which I guess is still the proper name for it - and, of course, the other coins were half-dollars and quarters. It made it a much easier arrangement than the British pound sterling, which had all sorts of complications that were difficult to remember and figure out. The British are still sticking to that plan, and it’s always hard to figure out what you have in British money when you try to translate it into American money. He also tried his level best to get the metric system of weights and measures adopted in this country, but didn’t succeed in accomplishing that one.26

  He was also interested in art and drawing and the music of the day, music we’d call classical today, and he was a fiddler himself. In his house, back there at Monticello, they still have his stand where he stood practicing his violin. He was a very good violinist, as good as I am a pianist. Well, he wouldn’t have to be very good to be that.

  As I say, not all of Jefferson’s ideas were popular, though most of them were absolutely right. When he was campaigning for the presidency, he was called a Jacobin, the name given the men who started the French revolution because that was the Parisian name for the Dominican order and the first r
evolutionary meetings were at the Dominican monastery. That was a pejorative term because many Americans felt the French revolution wasn’t a “respectable” one like our own - it was sort of like calling someone a Communist today - but Jefferson didn’t give a damn about that because he felt that the French were as much entitled to freedom as we were. He was also called an atheist because he didn’t believe in a state church, an official church of the government, and, in fact, made it clear that he didn’t much like any church at all, though he did admire many, though not all, of the teachings of religion. He wrote that he was “a real Christian, that is to say a disciple of the doctrines of Jesus” because those doctrines were “the most perfect and sublime . . . ever taught by man,” but also felt that the clergy had distorted the meanings of some of Jesus’ teachings and that, therefore, the Bible should be read even more critically and analytically than any other book.

  And you’ll recall that it was Jefferson, as governor of Virginia, who wrote the Statute of Religious Liberty in 1786, which said that “no man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship” but that all people “shall be free to profess . . . their opinion in matters of religion.” He summed up very bluntly one time his view that no man harmed anyone else in choosing and practicing his own religion, or no religion. “It does me no injury,” he said, “for my neighbor to say that there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” But he showed his belief in what he considered the good teachings of religion by putting together an abridged version of the Bible himself, taking the directions for leading the proper kind of a life out of the Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles and some of the Epistles and collecting them together. I’ve got the book, and it’s very good reading.