Hiroshima and Nagasaki Remembered

[Tiki Tam Tam]

Harry S. Truman: Advancing the Revolution

by Ralph Raico

This essay is reprinted with permission from John V. Denson, ed., Reassessing the Presidency: The Rise of the Executive State and the Decline of Freedom (Auburn, Alabama: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2001).

A ‘Near-Great’?

When Harry Truman left office in January 1953, he was intensely unpopular, even widely despised. Many of his most cherished schemes, from national health insurance (socialized medicine) to universal military training (UMT) had been soundly rejected by Congress and the public. Worst of all, the war in Korea, which he persisted in calling a "police action," was dragging on with no end in sight.

Yet today, Republican no less than Democratic politicians vie in glorifying Truman. When historians are asked to rank American presidents, he is listed as a "near-great." Naturally, historians, like everyone else, have their own personal views and values. Like other academics, they tend to be overwhelmingly left of center. As Robert Higgs writes: "Left-liberal historians worship political power, and idolize those who wield it most lavishly in the service of left-liberal causes."1 So it is scarcely surprising that they should venerate men like Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and Harry Truman, and agitate to get a credulous public to do the same.

But for anyone friendlier to limited government than the ordinary run of history professors, the presidency of Harry Truman will appear in a very different light. Truman’s predecessor had vastly expanded federal power, especially the power of the president, in what amounted to a revolution in American government. Under Truman, that revolution was consolidated and advanced beyond what even Franklin Roosevelt had ever dared hope for.

The Onset of the Cold War – Scaring Hell Out of the American People

Most pernicious of all, Truman’s presidency saw the genesis of a world-spanning American political and military empire.2 This was not simply the unintended consequence of some alleged Soviet threat, however. Even before the end of World War II, high officials in Washington were drawing up plans to project American military might across the globe. To start with, the United States would dominate the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans and the Western Hemisphere through a network of air and naval bases. Complementing this would be a system of air transit rights and landing facilities from North Africa to Saigon and Manila. This planning continued through the early years of the Truman administration.3

But the planners had no guarantee that such a radical reversal of our traditional policy could be sold to Congress and the people. It was the confrontation with the Soviet Union and "international communism," begun and defined by Truman and then prolonged for four decades, that furnished the opportunity and the rationale for realizing the globalist dreams.

That after World War II the Soviet Union would be predominant in Europe was inevitable, given the goals pursued by Roosevelt and Churchill: Germany’s unconditional surrender and its total annihilation as a factor in the balance of power.4 At Yalta, the two Western leaders acquiesced in the control over eastern Europe that had been won by Stalin’s armies, while affecting to believe that the Red dictator would cheerfully assent to the establishment of democratic governments in that area. The trouble was that genuinely free elections east of the Elbe (except in Czechoslovakia) would inescapably produce bitterly anti-Communist regimes. Such a result was unacceptable to Stalin, whose position was well-known and much more realistic than the illusions of his erstwhile allies. As he stated in the spring of 1945: "Whoever occupies a territory also imposes on it his own social system [as far] as his army can reach."5

When Truman became president in April 1945, he was at first prepared to continue the "Grand Alliance," and in fact harbored sympathetic feelings toward Stalin.6 But differences soon arose. The raping and murdering rampage of Red Army troops as they rolled over eastern Europe came as a disagreeable surprise to Americans who had swallowed the wartime propaganda, from Hollywood and elsewhere, on the Soviet "purity of arms." Stalin’s apparent intention to communize Poland and include the other conquered territories within his sphere of influence was deeply resented by leaders in Washington, who at the same time had no qualms about maintaining their own sphere of influence throughout all of Latin America.7

Stalin’s predictable moves to extend his sway around the periphery of the USSR further alarmed Washington. Exploiting the presence of Soviet forces in northern Iran (a result of the wartime agreement of the Big Three to divide up control of that country), he pressed for oil concessions similar to those gained by the United States and Britain. After the Soviets withdrew in return for a promise of concessions by the Iranian parliament, Iran, supported by the United States, reneged on the deal. Turning to Turkey, Stalin revived traditional Russian claims dating from Czarist days, pressuring Ankara to permit unimpeded transit for Soviet warships through the straits.

Most ominous, in Washington’s view, was the civil war in Greece, where royalist forces faced Red insurgents. Britain, bankrupted by the war, was compelled to abandon its support of the royalist cause. Would the United States take up the torch from the faltering hand of the great imperial power? Here, Truman told his cabinet, he "faced a decision more serious than ever confronted any president."8 The hyperbole is inane, but one can appreciate Truman’s problem. The United States had never had the slightest interest in the eastern Mediterranean, nor was it possible to discern any threat to American security in whatever outcome the Greek civil war might yield. Moreover, Stalin had conceded Greece to Britain, in his famous deal with Churchill in October 1944, whereby Russia was given control of most of the rest of the Balkans (a deal approved by Roosevelt). Accordingly, the Greek Communists did not enjoy Soviet backing: they were not permitted to join the Cominform, for instance, and their provisional government was not recognized by the Soviet Union or any other communist state.9

Given all this, how would Truman be able to justify U.S. involvement? Urged on by hardliners like Navy Secretary James Forrestal, who were emboldened by the (temporary) American monopoly of the atom bomb, he decided to frame the Communist uprising in Greece, as well as Soviet moves in Iran and Turkey, in apocalyptic terms. In countering them, he mused: "We might as well find out whether the Russians are as bent on world conquest now as in five or ten years."10 World conquest. Now, it seems, it was a Red Hitler who was on the march.11

Still, after the landslide Republican victory in the congressional elections of 1946, Truman had to deal with a potentially recalcitrant opposition. The Republicans had promised to return the country to some degree of normalcy after the statist binge of the war years. Sharp cuts in taxes, abolition of wartime controls, and a balanced budget were high priorities.

But Truman could count on allies in the internationalist wing of the Republican Party, most prominently Arthur Vandenberg, a former "isolationist" turned rabid globalist, now chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. When Truman revealed his new "doctrine" to Vandenberg, the Republican leader advised him that, in order to get such a program through, the president would have to "scare hell out of the American people."12 That Truman proceeded to do.

On March 12, 1947, in a speech before a joint session of Congress, Truman proclaimed a revolution in American foreign policy. More important than the proposed $300 million in aid for Greece and $100 million for Turkey was the vision he presented. Declaring that henceforth "it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressure," Truman situated aid to Greece and Turkey within a world-encompassing, life-or-death struggle "between alternative ways of life."13 As one historian has written, he

escalated the long, historic struggle between the Left and Right in Greece for political power, and the equally historic Russian urge for control of the Dardanelles [sic], into a universal conflict between freedom and slavery. It was a very broad jump indeed.14

At first, Truman’s radical initiative provoked uneasiness, even within his administration. George Kennan, often credited with fathering the cold war "containment" idea, strongly opposed military aid to Turkey, a nation which was under no military threat and which bordered the Soviet Union. Kennan also scoffed at the "grandiose" and "sweeping" character of the Truman Doctrine.15 In Congress, the response of Senator Robert Taft was to accuse the president of dividing the world into Communist and anti-Communist zones. He asked for evidence that our national security was involved in Greece, adding that he did not "want war with Russia."16 But Taft turned out to be the last, often vacillating, leader of the Old Right, whose ranks were visibly weakening.17 Although he was called "Mr. Republican," it was the internationalists who were now in charge of that party. In the Senate, Taft’s doubts were answered with calm, well-reasoned rebuttals. Vandenberg intoned: "If we desert the President of the United States at [this] moment we cease to have any influence in the world forever." Henry Cabot Lodge averred that repudiating Truman would be like throwing the American flag on the ground and stomping on it.18 In May, Congress appropriated the funds the president requested.

Meanwhile, the organs of the national-security state were being put into place.19 The War and Navy Departments and the Army Air Corps were combined into what was named, in Orwellian fashion, the Defense Department. Other legislation established the National Security Council and upgraded intelligence operations into the Central Intelligence Agency.

In the following decades, the CIA was to play a sinister, extremely expensive, and often comically inept role – especially in its continually absurd overestimations of Soviet strength.20 In establishing the CIA, Congress had no intention of authorizing it to conduct secret military operations, but under Truman this is what it quickly began to do, including waging a secret war on the Chinese mainland even before the outbreak of the Korean War (with no appreciable results).21 In 1999, after it targeted the Chinese embassy in Belgrade for bombing – supposedly a mistake, even though American diplomats had dined at the embassy and its location was known to everyone in the city – CIA has come to stand, in the words of one British writer, for "Can’t Identify Anything."22

In June 1947, Secretary of State George Marshall announced a wide-ranging scheme for economic aid to Europe. In December, the Marshall Plan was presented as an appropriations bill calling for grants of $17 billion over four years. The plan, it was claimed, would reconstruct Europe to the point where the Europeans could defend themselves. Congress at first was cold to the idea. Taft grumbled that American taxpayers should not have to support an "international WPA," arguing that the funds would subsidize the socialization programs under way in many of the recipient countries.23 The Marshall Plan led to intensified tensions with the Russians, who saw it as further proof that Washington aimed to undermine their rule over eastern Europe. Stalin instructed his satellite states to refuse to take part.24

‘World-Conquest’ Red Alert

Nineteen forty-eight was a decisive year in the cold war. There was great reluctance in the conservative Eightieth Congress to comply with Truman’s program, which included funding for the European Recovery Act (Marshall Plan), resumption of the draft, and Universal Military Training (UMT). To deal with this resistance, the administration concocted the war scare of 1948.

The first pretext came in February, with the so-called Communist coup in Czechoslovakia. But Czechoslovakia, for all intents and purposes, was already a Soviet satellite. Having led the Czechs in the "ethnic cleansing" of 3.5 million Sudeten Germans, the Communists enjoyed great popularity. In the general elections, they won 38 percent of the vote, constituting by far the largest single party. The American ambassador reported to Washington that Communist consolidation of power in early 1948 was the logical outgrowth of the Czech-Soviet military alliance dating back to 1943. George Marshall himself, in private, stated that "as far as international affairs are concerned," the formal Communist assumption of power made no difference: it would merely "crystallize and confirm for the future previous Czech policy."25 Still, the Communist "coup" was painted as a great leap forward in Stalin’s plan for "world conquest."

Then, on March 5, came the shocking letter from General Lucius Clay, U.S. military governor in Germany, to General Stephen J. Chamberlin, head of Army Intelligence, in which Clay revealed his foreboding that war "may come with dramatic suddenness." Years later, when Clay’s biographer asked him why, if he sensed an impending war, this was the only reference he ever made to it, he replied:

General Chamberlin . . . told me that the Army was having trouble getting the draft reinstituted and they needed a strong message from me that they could use in congressional testimony. So I wrote this cable.26

On March 11, Marshall solemnly warned in a public address that: "The world is in the midst of a great crisis." Averell Harriman asserted:

There are aggressive forces in the world coming from the Soviet Union which are just as destructive as Hitler was, and I think are a greater menace than Hitler was.27

And so Harriman laid down the Hitler card, which was to become the master trump in the globalist propaganda hand for the next half-century and most likely for centuries to come.

Taft, campaigning for the Republican presidential nomination, was angered by the war hysteria drummed up by the administration:

I know of no indication of Russian intention to undertake military aggression beyond the sphere of influence that was originally assigned to them [at Yalta]. The situation in Czechoslovakia was indeed a tragic one, but Russian influence has predominated there since the end of the war.

Taft tried to introduce a note of sanity: "If President Truman and General Marshall have any private intelligence" regarding imminent war, "they ought to tell the American people about it." Otherwise, we should proceed on "the basis of peace."28

In reality, the administration had no such "private intelligence," hence the need to stage-manage Clay’s letter. On the contrary, Colonel Robert B. Landry, Truman’s air aide, reported that in their zone in eastern Germany, the Russians had dismantled hundreds of miles of railroad track and shipped it home – in other words, they had torn up the very railroads required for any Soviet attack on western Europe.29 Field Marshal Montgomery, after a trip to Russia in 1947, wrote to General Eisenhower: "The Soviet Union is very, very tired. Devastation in Russia is appalling, and the country is in no fit state to go to war."30 Today it would be very difficult to find any scholar willing to subscribe to Truman’s frenzied vision of a Soviet Union about to set off to conquer the world. As John Lewis Gaddis wrote:

Stalin is now seen as a cagey but insecure opportunist, taking advantage of such tactical opportunities as arose to expand Soviet influence, but without any long-term strategy for or even very much interest in promoting the spread of communism beyond the Soviet sphere.31

The nonexistence of Soviet plans to launch an attack on Europe holds for the entire cold war period. One scholar in the field concludes:

despite the fact that the Russian archives have yielded ample evidence of Soviet perfidy and egregious behavior in many other spheres, nothing has turned up to support the idea that the Soviet leadership at any time actually planned to start World War III and send the "Russian hordes" westward.32

So why the war scare in 1948? In a 1976 interview, looking back on this period, Air Force Brigadier General Robert C. Richardson, who served at NATO headquarters in the early 1950s, candidly admitted:

there was no question about it, that [Soviet] threat that we were planning against was way overrated and intentionally overrated, because there was the problem of reorienting the [U.S.] demobilization . . . [Washington] made this nine-foot-tall threat out there. And for years and years it stuck. I mean, it was almost immovable.33

Yet, anyone who doubted the wisdom of the administration’s militaristic policy was targeted for venomous smears. According to Truman, Republicans who opposed his universal crusade were "Kremlin assets," the sort of traitors who would shoot "our soldiers in the back in a hot war," a good example of Truman’s acclaimed "plain speaking."34,35 Averell Harriman charged that Taft was simply helping Stalin carry out his aims. The New York Times and the rest of the establishment press echoed the slanders. Amusingly, Republican critics of the war hysteria were labeled pro-Soviet even by journals like The New Republic and The Nation, which had functioned as apologists for Stalin’s terror-regime for years.36

Truman’s campaign could not have succeeded without the enthusiastic cooperation of the American media. Led by the Times, the Herald Tribune, and Henry Luce’s magazines, the press acted as volunteer propagandists for the interventionist agenda, with all its calculated deceptions. (The principal exceptions were the Chicago Tribune and the Washington Times-Herald, in the days of Colonel McCormick and Cissy Paterson.)37 In time, such subservience in foreign affairs became routine for the "fourth estate," culminating during and after the 1999 Yugoslav war in reporting by the press corps that was as biased as the Serbian Ministry of Information.

Overwhelmed by the propaganda blitz from the administration and the press, a Republican majority in Congress heeded the secretary of state’s high-minded call to keep foreign policy "above politics" and voted full funding for the Marshall Plan.38

The next major step was the creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. The true significance of the NATO treaty was hidden, as new Secretary of State Dean Acheson assured Congress that it would not be followed by other regional pacts, that no "substantial" numbers of American troops would be stationed in Europe, and that the Germans would under no circumstances be rearmed. Congress was likewise promised that the United States was under no obligation to extend military aid to its new allies, nor would an arms race with the Soviet Union ensue.39 Events came to the aid of the globalists. In September 1949, the Soviets exploded an atomic bomb.

Congress approved the military appropriation for NATO that Truman had requested, which, in the nature of things, was followed by a further Soviet buildup. This escalating back and forth became the pattern for the cold war arms race for the next fifty years, much to the delight of U.S. armaments contractors and the generals and admirals on both sides.

The Korean War

In June 1950, the National Security Council adopted a major strategic document, NSC-68, which declared, implausibly enough, that "a defeat of free institutions anywhere is a defeat everywhere." The United States should no longer attempt to "distinguish between national and global security." Instead, it must stand at the "political and material center with other free nations in variable orbits around it." NSC-68, which was not declassified until 1975, called for an immediate three- or four-fold increase in military spending, which would serve also to prime the pump of economic prosperity – thus formalizing military Keynesianism as a permanent fixture of American life. Moreover, public opinion was to be conditioned to accept the "large measure of sacrifice and discipline" needed to meet the protean Communist challenge for the indefinite future.40

Even Truman was dubious on the prospects for such a quantum leap in globalism in a time of peace. But again, events – and Truman’s shrewd exploitation of them – came to the aid of the internationalist planners. As one of Truman’s advisers later expressed it: In June 1950, "we were sweating over it," and then, "thank God Korea came along."41

For years, skirmishes and even major engagements had occurred across the 38th parallel, which divided North Korea from South Korea. On January 12, 1950, Secretary of State Acheson described the American defensive perimeter as extending from the Aleutians to Japan to the Philippines. South Korea (as well as Taiwan) was conspicuously placed outside this perimeter. One reason was that it was not considered to be of any military value. Another was that Washington did not trust South Korean strong man Syngman Rhee, who repeatedly threatened to reunite the country by force. Rhee was advocating a march north to American officials as late as mid-June 1950.42

On June 25, it was North Korea that attacked.43 The next day, Truman instructed U.S. air and naval forces to destroy Communist supply lines. When bombing failed to prevent the headlong retreat of the South Korean army, Truman sent American troops stationed in Japan to join the battle. General Douglas MacArthur was able to hold the redoubt around Pusan, then, in an amphibious invasion at Inchon, to begin the destruction of the North Korean position.

After the North Koreans retreated behind the 38th parallel, Truman decided against ending the war on the basis of the status quo ante. Instead, he ordered MacArthur to move north. Pyongyang was to be the first Communist capital liberated and the whole peninsula to be unified under the rule of Syngman Rhee. As U.N. forces (mainly U.S. and South Korean) swept north, the Chinese issued warnings against approaching their border at the Yalu River. These were ignored by an administration somehow unable to comprehend why China might fear massive U.S. forces stationed on its frontier. Chinese troops entered the war, prolonging it by another three years, during which most of the American casualties were sustained.44 MacArthur, who proposed bombing China itself, was dismissed by Truman, who at least spared the nation an even wider war possibly involving Russia as well.

Korea afforded unprecedented opportunities for advancing the globalist program. Truman assigned the U.S. Seventh Fleet to patrol the strait between Taiwan and the mainland. Four more U.S. divisions were sent to Europe, to add to the two already there, and another $4 billion was allocated for the rearmament of our European allies. Some months before the start of the Korean War, Truman had already initiated America’s fateful involvement in Indochina, supporting the French and their puppet ruler Bao Dai against the nationalist and Communist revolutionary Ho Chi Minh. Korea furnished welcome cover for stepping up aid to the French, which soon amounted to a half-billion dollars a year. The United States was thus providing the great bulk of the material resources for France’s colonialist war. The State Department defended this commitment, rather ridiculously, by citing Indochina’s production of "much-needed rice, rubber, and tin." More to the point was the fear expressed that the "loss" of Indochina, including Vietnam, would represent a defeat in the struggle against what was portrayed as a unified and coordinated Communist push to take over the world.45

At the same time, the degradation of political language went into high gear, where it remained for the rest of the cold war and probably permanently. To the authoritarian regimes in Greece and Turkey were now added, as components of the "free world" which Americans were obligated to defend, Rhee’s autocratic Republic of Korea, Chiang’s dictatorship on Taiwan, and even colonialist French Indochina.

With the outbreak of the Korean War, the Republicans’ capitulation to globalism was practically complete.46 As is standard procedure in American politics, foreign policy was a nonissue in the 1948 presidential campaign. Thomas E. Dewey, a creature of the Eastern establishment centered in Wall Street, was as much of an overseas meddler as Truman. Now, in the struggle against "international Communism," even erstwhile "isolationists" showed themselves to be arch-interventionists when it came to Asia, going so far as to make a hero of MacArthur for demanding an expansion of the war and the "unleashing" of Chiang’s army on the mainland. Taft supported sending troops to fight in Korea, while entering one major objection. Characteristically, it was on the constitutional question.

The President as War-maker at Will

When North Korea invaded the South, Truman and Acheson claimed unlimited presidential authority to engage the United States in the war, which they kept referring to as a "police action." Truman stated: "The president, as Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of the United States, has full control over the use thereof."47 This flies in the face of Article 1, section 8 of the U.S. Constitution, where the power to declare war is vested in Congress. The deliberations at the Constitutional Convention and other statements of the Founding Fathers are unequivocal in this respect. While the president, as commander-in-chief, is given authority to deploy American forces in wartime, it is Congress that decides on war or peace. Wouldn’t it be surpassing strange if the Founders, so concerned to limit, divide, and balance power, had left the decision to engage the country in war to the will of a single individual?48

So well-established was this principle that even Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt, no minimizers of executive prerogatives, bowed to it and went to Congress for their declarations of war. It was Truman who dared what even his predecessor had not. As two constitutional scholars, Francis D. Wormuth and Edwin B. Firmage, have written:

The Constitution is not ambiguous. . . . The early presidents, and indeed everyone in the country until the year 1950, denied that the president possessed [the power to initiate war]. There is no sustained body of usage to support such a claim.49

At the time, college history professors rushed to blazon the allegedly countless occasions when presidents sent U.S. forces into war or warlike situations without congressional approval. Lists of such occasions were afterward compiled by other apologists for executive power in foreign affairs – in 1971, for instance, by the revered conservative Barry Goldwater. These incidents have been carefully examined by Wormuth and Firmage, who conclude:

One cannot be sure, but the number of cases in which presidents have personally made the decision [in contrast, for instance, to overzealous military and naval officers], unconstitutionally, to engage in war or in acts of war probably lies between one and two dozen. And in all those cases the presidents have made false claims of authorization, either by statute or by treaty or by international law. They have not relied on their powers as commander in chief or as chief executive.50

At all events, as Chief Justice Earl Warren held in 1969, articulating a well-known constitutional principle on behalf of seven other justices: "That an unconstitutional action has been taken before surely does not render that action any less unconstitutional at a later date."51

The administration sometimes alluded to the vote of the U.N. Security Council approving military action in Korea as furnishing the necessary authority. This was nothing but a smokescreen. First, because according to the U.N. Charter, any Security Council commitment of members’ troops must be consistent with the members’ "respective constitutional processes." The United Nations Participation Act of 1945 also required congressional ratification for the use of American forces. In any case, Truman stated that he would send troops to Korea whether or not authorized by the Security Council. His position really was that a president may plunge the country into war simply on his own say-so.52

Today presidents assert the right to bomb at will countries which, like North Korea in 1950, never attacked us and with which we are not at war – Sudan, Afghanistan, Iraq, and, massively, Yugoslavia. They are eagerly seconded in this by "conservative" politicians and publicists, nor does the American public demur. Back in 1948, Charles Beard already noted the dismal ignorance among our people of the principles of our republican government:

American education from the universities down to the grade schools is permeated with, if not dominated by, the theory of presidential supremacy in foreign affairs. Coupled with the flagrant neglect of instruction in constitutional government, this propaganda . . . has deeply implanted in the minds of rising generations the doctrine that the power of the president over international relations is, for all practical purposes, illimitable.53

Needless to say, the situation has in no way improved, as the public schools grind out tens of millions of future voters to whom the notion, say, that James Madison had something to do with the Constitution of the United States would come as an uninteresting revelation.

The Korean War lasted three years and cost 36,916 American deaths and more than 100,000 other casualties. Additionally, there were millions of Korean dead and devastation of the peninsula, especially in the north, where the U.S. Air Force pulverized the civilian infrastructure – with much "collateral damage" – in what has since become its emblematic method of waging war.54 Today, nearly a half-century after the end of the conflict, the United States continues to station troops as a "tripwire" in yet another of its imperial outposts.55

The indirect consequences of Truman’s "police action" have been equally grim. Hans Morgenthau wrote:

The misinterpretation of the North Korean aggression as part of a grand design at world conquest originating in and controlled by Moscow resulted in a drastic militarization of the cold war in the form of a conventional and nuclear armaments race, the frantic search for alliances, and the establishment of military bases.56

Truman is glorified for his conduct of foreign affairs more than anything else. Whether one concurs in this judgment depends mainly on the kind of country one wishes America to be. Stephen Ambrose has summed up the results of the foreign policy of Harry Truman:

When Truman became president he led a nation anxious to return to traditional civil-military relations and the historic American foreign policy of noninvolvement. When he left the White House his legacy was an American presence on every continent of the world and an enormously expanded armament industry. Yet so successfully had he scared hell out of the American people, the only critics to receive any attention in the mass media were those who thought Truman had not gone far enough in standing up to the communists. For all his troubles, Truman had triumphed.57

The Führerprinzip in the Economic Arena

Harry Truman’s conception of presidential power as in principle unlimited was as manifest in his domestic as in his foreign policy. Some key episodes illustrate this.

In May 1946, Truman decided that the proper response to the strike of railroad workers was to draft the strikers into the Army. Even his attorney general, Tom Clark, doubted that the Draft Act permitted "the induction of occupational groups" or that the move was at all constitutional. But, as Truman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer David McCullough wrote, in his typical stupefied admiration: "Truman was not interested in philosophy. The strike must stop. ‘We’ll draft them and think about the law later,’ he reportedly remarked."58 McCullough neglects to note that bold "action" in defiance of law is considered a characteristic of fascist regimes.

On May 25, Truman addressed Congress, requesting the authority "to draft into the Armed Forces of the United States all workers who are on strike against their government." His proposal was greeted with tumultuous applause, and the House quickly approved the bill by 306 to 13. In the Senate, though, the bill was stopped in its tracks by Senator Taft. He was joined by left-liberals like Claude Pepper of Florida. Eventually, the Senate rejected the bill by 70 to 13.

Later that year, another "crisis" led Truman to contemplate further exercise of dictatorial power. While most of the wartime price controls had been lifted by this time, controls remained on a number of items, most prominently meat. Strangely enough, it was precisely in that commodity that a shortage and a black market developed. The meat shortage was eroding support for the Democrats, who began to look with trepidation on the upcoming congressional elections. Party workers were told by usually loyal voters, "No meat, no votes." Truman was forced to act. He would address the nation again, announcing and explaining the decision he had made.

In his draft for the speech, Truman was bitter. He indicted the American people for their greed and selfishness, so different from the selfless patriotism of the heroes who had won the Medal of Honor. The draft continued:

You’ve deserted your president for a mess of pottage, a piece of beef – a side of bacon. . . . If you the people insist on following Mammon instead of Almighty God, your president can’t stop you all by himself. I can no longer enforce a law you won’t support. . . . You’ve gone over to the powers of selfishness and greed.59

This crazy tirade was omitted from the speech Truman made on October 14.60 But ever the cheap demagogue, he pilloried the meat industry as responsible for the shortage, "those who, in order further to fatten their profits, are endangering the health of our people by holding back vital foods which are now ready for market and for which the American people are clamoring." The failed haberdasher, it appears, had little understanding of the role that prices might play in a market economy. In his speech, Truman confided that he had carefully weighed and discussed with his cabinet and economic experts a number of possible solutions. One was "to have the Government seize the packing houses." But this would not have helped, since the packing houses were empty. Then came a notion that "would indeed be a drastic remedy": "that the government go out onto the farms and ranges and seize the cattle for slaughter." Truman gave the idea "long and serious consideration." Here is why, in the end, he declined to go the route of the Bolsheviks in the Ukraine:

We decided against the use of this extreme wartime emergency power of Government. It would be wholly impracticable because the cattle are spread throughout all parts of the country.61

This statement from the feisty, "near-great" Man of the People deserves to be read more than once.62

So, sadly and reluctantly, Truman announced the end of price controls on meat, although he advised the country that "some items, like rent, will have to be controlled for a long time to come."

On April 8, 1952, as a nationwide strike loomed in the steel industry, Truman issued Executive Order 10340, directing his Secretary of Commerce Charles Sawyer to seize the steel mills.

He acted, he claimed, "by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Constitution and the laws of the United States, and as President of the United States and Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces of the United States."63 He could not, however, point to any such law, despite his reference to "the laws of the United States." Nor did any provision of the Constitution give the president the right to seize private property by proclamation. But, as McCullough tells us, Truman was convinced "from his reading of history" that "his action fell within his powers as President and Commander-in-Chief." After all, hadn’t Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus during a national emergency?64 On April 9, the Star-Spangled Banner was raised over the nation’s steel mills, and the steel companies immediately took the case to court.

At a news conference on April 17, Truman was asked: "Mr. President, if you can seize the steel mills under your inherent powers, can you, in your opinion, also seize the newspapers and/or the radio stations?" Truman replied: "Under similar circumstances the President of the United States has to act for whatever is for the best of the country. That’s the answer to your question."65

The next day, the New York Times reported:

The president refused to elaborate. But White House sources said the president’s point was that he had power in an emergency, to take over "any portion of the business community acting to jeopardize all the people."

The case of Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer quickly reached the Supreme Court, where Truman’s argument was rejected by a vote of 6 to 3. Speaking for the three was Truman’s crony, Chief Justice Fred Vinson, who argued that the president had the authority to enact all laws necessary for carrying out laws previously passed by Congress. Any man worthy of the office of president, Vinson wrote, should be "free to take at least interim action necessary to execute legislative programs essential to the survival of the nation." The majority, including Hugo Black, William O. Douglas, Felix Frankfurter, and even Truman’s former attorney general, Tom Clark, decided otherwise.66

At that April 17 news conference, no reporter thought to ask a follow-up question to Truman’s stunning reply. His claim of the unlimited right to dispose at his discretion of the property of any and all citizens – a viewpoint for which a king of England was beheaded – made as little impression on the press then as it has on his admirers ever since. One wonders what it would take to spark their outrage or even their interest.67

In economic policy, the years of Truman’s "Fair Deal" were a time of consolidation and expansion of government power. In February 1946, the Employment Act was passed. Inspired by the newly dominant Keynesian economics, it declared that henceforth the economic health of the nation was primarily the responsibility of the federal government. With the coming of the Korean War, economic controls were again the order of the day. (Bernard Baruch was once more, for the third time since 1917, a prime agitator for their introduction.) Truman declared a "national emergency." New boards and agencies oversaw prices and wages, established priorities in materials allocation, and instituted controls over credit and other sectors of the economy.68 As in the world wars, the aftermath of Truman’s Korean War exhibited the "ratchet-effect," whereby federal government spending, though diminished, never returned to the previous peacetime level.69

A Heritage of Sinkholes

Truman’s legacy includes programs and policies that continue to inflict damage to this day. Three cases are especially noteworthy.

In his message to Congress on January 20, 1949, Truman launched the concept of aid from Western governments to the poorer nations that were soon to be called, collectively, the Third World. Point Four of his speech sketched a new program to provide technical assistance to the "more than half the people of the world [who] are living in conditions approaching misery," and whose "economic life is primitive and stagnant." This was to be "a cooperative enterprise in which all nations work together through the United Nations and its specialized agencies" – in other words, a state-funded and state-directed effort to end world poverty.70

According to Peter Bauer, Point Four "inaugurated a far-reaching policy and a supporting terminology."71 In the decades that followed, foreign aid was promoted by a proliferating international bureaucracy, as well as by religious and secular zealots ignorantly confident of the purity of their antisocial cause. Western guilt feelings, fostered by the leftist intelligentsia and self-seeking Third World politicians, facilitated the channeling of hundreds of billions of dollars to governments in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Today, even "conservative" politicians and publicists are devotees. "Development aid" has become institutionalized and is intended to continue indefinitely, with all its attendant harm: reinforced statism, inferior economic performance, and corruption on the greatest scale the world has ever known.72

Truman began the "special relationship" between the United States and Zionism. Franklin Roosevelt, while not blind to Jewish interests, favored an evenhanded approach in the Middle East as between Arabs and Jews. Truman, on the other hand, was an all-out champion of the Zionist cause.73

There were two major reasons for Truman’s support. One was a sentimental attachment that was strongly reinforced by many who had influence with him, including his old business partner, Eddie Jacobson as well as David K. Niles, and Eleanor Roosevelt.74 Visiting the president, the Chief Rabbi of Israel told him: "God put you in your mother’s womb so that you could be the instrument to bring about the rebirth of Israel after two thousand years." Instead of taking offense at such chutzpah, the president was deeply moved. One of his biographers reports: "At that, great tears started rolling down Harry Truman’s cheeks."75

The second reason for Truman’s support was political opportunism. With congressional elections coming up in 1946 and then a very difficult presidential campaign in 1948, the votes of Zionist Jews in New York, Illinois, California, and other states could be critical. White House Counsel Clark Clifford was particularly persistent in arguing this angle, to the point that Secretary of State Marshall, who was skeptical of the pro-Zionist bias, angrily objected. Clifford, said Marshall, was trying to have the president base a crucial foreign policy position on "domestic political considerations."76

American backing was indispensable in the birth of the state of Israel. In November 1947, the United Nations, led by the United States, voted to partition Palestine. The mandate had to be gerrymandered in order to create a bare majority in the territory allotted the Jews, who, while comprising one-third of the population, were given 56 percent of the land. On America’s role, veteran State Department official Sumner Welles wrote:

By direct order of the White House every form of pressure, direct and indirect, was brought to bear upon countries outside the Moslem world that were known to be either uncertain or opposed to partition.77

In her biography of her father, Margaret Truman spoke, in terms that today would be viewed as verging on anti-Semitism, of "the intense pressure which numerous Jews put on Dad from the moment he entered the White House and his increasing resentment of this pressure." She quotes from a letter Truman sent to Eleanor Roosevelt:

I fear very much that the Jews are like all underdogs. When they get on top, they are just as intolerant and as cruel as the people were to them when they were underneath. I regret this situation very much, because my sympathy has always been on their side.78

But Truman’s sporadic resentment did not prevent him from promoting Zionist plans for Palestine at the important points. He stubbornly ignored the advice not only of his own State Department, but also of his British ally, who kept reminding him of the commitment made by Roosevelt and by Truman himself, that the Arab states would be consulted on any settlement of the Palestine question.79 When Israel declared its independence, on May 15, 1948, the United States extended de facto recognition ten minutes later. Since then, with the exception of the Eisenhower years, the bonds linking the United States to Israel have grown ever tighter, with American leaders seemingly indifferent to the costs to their own country.80

In the end, the part of Truman’s legacy with the greatest potential for harm is NATO. Allegedly created in response to a (nonexistent) Soviet threat to overrun Europe, it has already outlived the Soviet Union and European communism by a decade. At the beginning of the new century, there is no possibility that this entrenched military and civilian bureaucratic apparatus will simply fade away. When did such a huge collection of functionaries ever surrender their lucrative, tax-funded positions without a revolution?

In the course of NATO’s aggression against Yugoslavia – illegal, according to the U.S. Constitution, the Charter of the United Nations, and NATO’s own charter – its mission has been "redefined." No longer merely a defensive alliance (against whom?), it will now roam the world, a law unto itself, perpetually "in search of monsters to destroy." In 1951, General Eisenhower, then supreme Allied commander in Europe, stated: "If in ten years time, all American troops stationed in Europe for national defense purposes have not been returned to the United States, then this whole project [NATO] will have failed."81 A growing threat to the independence, the well-being, and the very lives of the peoples of the world, NATO may turn out in the end to have been Truman’s greatest failure.

There are also episodes in Truman’s presidency that have been forgotten in the rush to certify him as a "near-great" but that should not go unmentioned. Among the more notable ones:

Truman endorsed the Nuremberg trials of the top German leaders, appointing Robert H. Jackson, a justice of the Supreme Court, as chief American prosecutor.82 The trials were exposed as a vindictive violation of the canons of Anglo-American law by Senator Taft, who was labeled a pro-Nazi by Democratic and labor union leaders for his pains.83 At Nuremberg, when the question came up of responsibility for the murder of thousands of Polish POWs at Katyn, Truman followed the cowardly policy laid down by FDR: the proof already in the possession of the U.S. government – that it was the Soviets who had murdered the Poles – was suppressed.84

In the early months of Truman’s presidency, the United States and Britain directed the forced repatriation of tens of thousands of Soviet subjects – and many who had never been Soviet subjects – to the Soviet Union, where tens of thousands were executed by the NKVD or cast into the gulag. Their crime had been to fight against Stalinist domination on the side of the Germans. Terrible scenes occurred in the course of this repatriation (sometimes called "Operation Keelhaul"), as the condemned men, and in some cases women with their children, were forced or duped into returning to Stalin’s Russia. American soldiers had orders to "shoot to kill" those refusing to go. Some of the victims committed suicide rather than fall into the hands of the Soviet secret police.85

At home, the Truman administration brought the corrupt practices of the president’s mentor to the White House. Truman had entered politics as the protégé of Tom Pendergast, the boss of the Kansas City Democratic machine. One of Truman’s first acts as president was to fire the U.S. attorney general for western Missouri, who had won 259 convictions for vote fraud against the machine and had sent Boss Pendergast to federal prison, where he died. Over the years, the Truman administration was notorious for influence-peddling, cover-ups, and outright theft.86 It ranks with the administration of Bill Clinton for the dishonest practices of its personnel, although Truman and his wife Bess were never themselves guilty of malfeasance.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki

The most spectacular episode of Truman’s presidency will never be forgotten, but will be forever linked to his name: the atomic bombings of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945 and of Nagasaki three days later. Probably around two hundred thousand persons were killed in the attacks and through radiation poisoning; the vast majority were civilians, including several thousand Korean workers. Twelve U.S. Navy fliers incarcerated in a Hiroshima jail were also among the dead.87

Great controversy has always surrounded the bombings. One thing Truman insisted on from the start: The decision to use the bombs, and the responsibility it entailed, was his. Over the years, he gave different, and contradictory, grounds for his decision. Sometimes he implied that he had acted simply out of revenge. To a clergyman who criticized him, Truman responded, testily:

Nobody is more disturbed over the use of Atomic bombs than I am but I was greatly disturbed over the unwarranted attack by the Japanese on Pearl Harbor and their murder of our prisoners of war. The only language they seem to understand is the one we have been using to bombard them.88

Such reasoning will not impress anyone who fails to see how the brutality of the Japanese military could justify deadly retaliation against innocent men, women, and children. Truman doubtless was aware of this, so from time to time he advanced other pretexts. On August 9, 1945, he stated: "The world will note that the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a military base. That was because we wished in this first attack to avoid, insofar as possible, the killing of civilians."89

This, however, is absurd. Pearl Harbor was a military base. Hiroshima was a city, inhabited by some three hundred thousand people, which contained military elements. In any case, since the harbor was mined and the U.S. Navy and Air Force were in control of the waters around Japan, whatever troops were stationed in Hiroshima had been effectively neutralized.

On other occasions, Truman claimed that Hiroshima was bombed because it was an industrial center. But, as noted in the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, "all major factories in Hiroshima were on the periphery of the city – and escaped serious damage."90 The target was the center of the city. That Truman realized the kind of victims the bombs consumed is evident from his comment to his cabinet on August 10, explaining his reluctance to drop a third bomb: "The thought of wiping out another 100,000 people was too horrible," he said; he didn’t like the idea of killing "all those kids."91 Wiping out another one hundred thousand people . . . all those kids.

Moreover, the notion that Hiroshima was a major military or industrial center is implausible on the face of it. The city had remained untouched through years of devastating air attacks on the Japanese home islands, and never figured in Bomber Command’s list of the 33 primary targets.92

Thus, the rationale for the atomic bombings has come to rest on a single colossal fabrication, which has gained surprising currency: that they were necessary in order to save a half-million or more American lives. These, supposedly, are the lives that would have been lost in the planned invasion of Kyushu in December, then in the all-out invasion of Honshu the next year, if that was needed. But the worst-case scenario for a full-scale invasion of the Japanese home islands was forty-six thousand American lives lost.93 The ridiculously inflated figure of a half-million for the potential death toll – nearly twice the total of U.S. dead in all theaters in the Second World War – is now routinely repeated in high-school and college textbooks and bandied about by ignorant commentators. Unsurprisingly, the prize for sheer fatuousness on this score goes to President George W. Bush, who claimed in 1991 that dropping the bomb "spared millions of American lives."94

Still, Truman’s multiple deceptions and self-deceptions are understandable, considering the horror he unleashed. It is equally understandable that the U.S. occupation authorities censored reports from the shattered cities and did not permit films and photographs of the thousands of corpses and the frightfully mutilated survivors to reach the public.95 Otherwise, Americans – and the rest of the world – might have drawn disturbing comparisons to scenes then coming to light from the Nazi concentration camps.

The bombings were condemned as barbaric and unnecessary by high American military officers, including Eisenhower and MacArthur.96 The view of Admiral William D. Leahy, Truman’s own chief of staff, was typical:

the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. . . . 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 not taught to make wars in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children.97

The political elite implicated in the atomic bombings feared a backlash that would aid and abet the rebirth of horrid prewar "isolationism." Apologias were rushed into print, lest public disgust at the sickening war crime result in erosion of enthusiasm for the globalist project.98 No need to worry. A sea-change had taken place in the attitudes of the American people. Then and ever after, all surveys have shown that the great majority supported Truman, believing that the bombs were required to end the war and save hundreds of thousands of American lives, or more likely, not really caring one way or the other.

Those who may still be troubled by such a grisly exercise in cost-benefit analysis – innocent Japanese lives balanced against the lives of Allied servicemen – might reflect on the judgment of the Catholic philosopher G.E.M. Anscombe, who insisted on the supremacy of moral rules.99 When, in June 1956, Truman was awarded an honorary degree by her university, Oxford, Anscombe protested.100 Truman was a war criminal, she contended, for what is the difference between the U.S. government massacring civilians from the air, as at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the Nazis wiping out the inhabitants of some Czech or Polish village?

Anscombe’s point is worth following up. Suppose that, when we invaded Germany in early 1945, our leaders had believed that executing all the inhabitants of Aachen, or Trier, or some other Rhineland city would finally break the will of the Germans and lead them to surrender. In this way, the war might have ended quickly, saving the lives of many Allied soldiers. Would that then have justified shooting tens of thousands of German civilians, including women and children? Yet how is that different from the atomic bombings?

By early summer 1945, the Japanese fully realized that they were beaten. Why did they nonetheless fight on? As Anscombe wrote: "It was the insistence on unconditional surrender that was the root of all evil."101

That mad formula was coined by Roosevelt at the Casablanca conference, and, with Churchill’s enthusiastic concurrence, it became the Allied shibboleth. After prolonging the war in Europe, it did its work in the Pacific. At the Potsdam conference, in July 1945, Truman issued a proclamation to the Japanese, threatening them with the "utter devastation" of their homeland unless they surrendered unconditionally. Among the Allied terms, to which "there are no alternatives," was that there be "eliminated for all time the authority and influence of those who have deceived and misled the people of Japan into embarking on world conquest [sic]." "Stern justice," the proclamation warned, "would be meted out to all war criminals."102

To the Japanese, this meant that the emperor – regarded by them to be divine, the direct descendent of the goddess of the sun – would certainly be dethroned and probably put on trial as a war criminal and hanged, perhaps in front of his palace.103 It was not, in fact, the U.S. intention to dethrone or punish the emperor. But this implicit modification of unconditional surrender was never communicated to the Japanese. In the end, after Nagasaki, Washington acceded to the Japanese desire to keep the dynasty and even to retain Hirohito as emperor.

For months before, Truman had been pressed to clarify the U.S. position by many high officials within the administration, and outside of it, as well. In May 1945, at the president’s request, Herbert Hoover prepared a memorandum stressing the urgent need to end the war as soon as possible. The Japanese should be informed that we would in no way interfere with the emperor or their chosen form of government. He even raised the possibility that, as part of the terms, Japan might be allowed to hold on to Formosa (Taiwan) and Korea. After meeting with Truman, Hoover dined with Taft and other Republican leaders, and outlined his proposals.104

Establishment writers on World War II often like to deal in lurid speculations. For instance: if the United States had not entered the war, then Hitler would have "conquered the world" (a sad undervaluation of the Red Army, it would appear; moreover, wasn’t it Japan that was trying to "conquer the world"?) and killed untold millions. Now, applying conjectural history in this case: assume that the Pacific war had ended in the way wars customarily do – through negotiation of the terms of surrender. And assume the worst – that the Japanese had adamantly insisted on preserving part of their empire, say, Korea and Formosa, even Manchuria. In that event, it is quite possible that Japan would have been in a position to prevent the Communists from coming to power in China. And that could have meant that the thirty or forty million deaths now attributed to the Maoist regime would not have occurred.

But even remaining within the limits of feasible diplomacy in 1945, it is clear that Truman in no way exhausted the possibilities of ending the war without recourse to the atomic bomb. The Japanese were not informed that they would be the victims of by far the most lethal weapon ever invented (one with "more than two thousand times the blast power of the British ‘Grand Slam,’ which is the largest bomb ever yet used in the history of warfare," as Truman boasted in his announcement of the Hiroshima attack). Nor were they told that the Soviet Union was set to declare war on Japan, an event that shocked some in Tokyo more than the bombings.105 Pleas by some of the scientists involved in the project to demonstrate the power of the bomb in some uninhabited or evacuated area were rebuffed. All that mattered was to formally preserve the unconditional surrender formula and save the servicemen’s lives that might have been lost in the effort to enforce it. Yet, as Major General J.F.C. Fuller, one of the century’s great military historians, wrote in connection with the atomic bombings:

Though to save life is laudable, it in no way justifies the employment of means which run counter to every precept of humanity and the customs of war. Should it do so, then, on the pretext of shortening a war and of saving lives, every imaginable atrocity can be justified.106

Isn’t this obviously true? And isn’t this the reason that rational and humane men, over generations, developed rules of warfare in the first place?

While the mass media parroted the government line in praising the atomic incinerations, prominent conservatives denounced them as unspeakable war crimes. Felix Morley, constitutional scholar and one of the founders of Human Events, drew attention to the horror of Hiroshima, including the "thousands of children trapped in the thirty-three schools that were destroyed." He called on his compatriots to atone for what had been done in their name, and proposed that groups of Americans be sent to Hiroshima, as Germans were sent to witness what had been done in the Nazi camps. The Paulist priest, Father James Gillis, editor of The Catholic World and another stalwart of the Old Right, castigated the bombings as "the most powerful blow ever delivered against Christian civilization and the moral law." David Lawrence, conservative owner of U.S. News and World Report, continued to denounce them for years.107 The distinguished conservative philosopher Richard Weaver was revolted by

the spectacle of young boys fresh out of Kansas and Texas turning nonmilitary Dresden into a holocaust . . . pulverizing ancient shrines like Monte Cassino and Nuremberg, and bringing atomic annihilation to Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Weaver considered such atrocities as deeply "inimical to the foundations on which civilization is built."108

Today, self-styled conservatives slander as "anti-American" anyone who is in the least troubled by Truman’s massacre of so many tens of thousands of Japanese innocents from the air. This shows as well as anything the difference between today’s "conservatives" and those who once deserved the name.

Leo Szilard was the world-renowned physicist who drafted the original letter to Roosevelt that Einstein signed, instigating the Manhattan Project. In 1960, shortly before his death, Szilard stated another obvious truth:

If the Germans had dropped atomic bombs on cities instead of us, we would have defined the dropping of atomic bombs on cities as a war crime, and we would have sentenced the Germans who were guilty of this crime to death at Nuremberg and hanged them.109

The destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a war crime worse than any that Japanese generals were executed for in Tokyo and Manila. If Harry Truman was not a war criminal, then no one ever was.

Notes

1.

Robert Higgs, "No More ‘Great Presidents,’" The Free Market (March 1997): 2.
2.

Even such a defender of U.S. policy as John Lewis Gaddis, in "The Emerging Post-Revisionist Synthesis on the Origins of the Cold War," Diplomatic History 7, no. 3 (Summer 1983): 171–93, states that part of the "post-revisionist" consensus among diplomatic historians is that an American empire did indeed come into being. But this American empire, according to Gaddis, is a "defensive" one. Why this should be a particularly telling point is unclear, considering that for American leaders "defense" has entailed effectively controlling the world.
3.

Melvyn P. Leffler, "The American Conception of National Security and the Beginnings of the Cold War, 1945–1948," American Historical Review 89, no. 2 (April 1984): 346–81. See also the comments by John Lewis Gaddis and Bruce Kuniholm, and Leffler’s reply, pp. 382–400.
4.

See Ralph Raico, "Rethinking Churchill," in The Costs of War: America’s Pyrrhic Victories, John V. Denson, ed., 2nd ed. (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1999).
5.

Walter LaFeber, America, Russia, and the Cold War, 1945–1990, 6th rev. ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1991), p. 13. Cf. Stalin’s comment at Yalta: "A freely elected government in any of these countries would be anti-Soviet, and that we cannot allow." Hans J. Morgenthau, "The Origins of the Cold War," in Lloyd C. Gardner, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and Hans J. Morgenthau, The Origins of the Cold War (Waltham, Mass.: Ginn, 1970), pp. 87–88.
6.

Melvyn R. Leffler, "Inside Enemy Archives: The Cold War Reopened," Foreign Affairs (July/August 1996): 134–35.
7.

At the State Department, Henry Stimson and John J. McCloy agreed in May 1945 that (in McCloy’s words) "we ought to have our cake and eat it too," that is, control South America and "at the same time intervene promptly in Europe; we oughtn’t to give away either asset [sic]." Stephen E. Ambrose, Rise to Globalism: American Foreign Policy Since 1938, 3rd rev. ed. (New York: Penguin, 1983), p. 103.
8.

Alonzo L. Hamby, Man of the People: A Life of Harry S. Truman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 391.
9.

Frank Kofsky, Harry S. Truman and the War Scare of 1948: A Successful Campaign to Deceive the Nation (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993), pp. 244–45.
10.

Ambrose, Rise to Globalism, p. 117.
11.

In their attacks on Patrick Buchanan’s A Republic, Not an Empire: Reclaiming America’s Destiny (Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 1999) for his insistence that Nazi Germany posed no threat to the United States after 1940, Buchanan’s critics have generally resorted to fatuous smears. This is understandable, since they are wedded to a fantasy of Hitlerian power that, ironically, is itself a reflection of Hitlerian propaganda. The fact is that Nazi Germany never conquered any militarily important nation but France. The danger of 80 million Germans "conquering the world" is a scarecrow that has, obviously, served the globalists well.
12.

Ambrose, Rise to Globalism, pp. 132–33.
13.

Ronald E. Powaski, The Cold War: The United States and the Soviet Union, 1917–1991 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 72.
14.

Ambrose, Rise to Globalism, p. 133. That self-interest played a role in the exaggeration of the "crisis" is the conclusion of Ronald Steel, "The End of the Beginning," Diplomatic History 16, no. 2 (Spring 1992): 297, who writes that universalizing the struggle would "enable the United States greatly to expand its military and political reach," which "enhanced its appeal to American foreign policy elites eager to embrace the nation’s new opportunities."
15.

LaFeber, America, Russia, and the Cold War, pp. 53–54.
16.

Ronald Radosh, Prophets on the Right: Profiles of Conservative Critics of American Globalism (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1975), pp. 155–56.
17.

See Ted Galen Carpenter’s informative The Dissenters: American Isolationists and Foreign Policy, 1945–1954 (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Texas, 1980). On the same topic, but concentrating on the intellectual leaders of the Old Right, see Joseph R. Stromberg’s perceptive analysis, The Cold War and the Transformation of the American Right: The Decline of Right-Wing Liberalism (M.A. thesis, Florida Atlantic University, 1971).
18.

Melvyn P. Leffler, A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1992), p. 146.
19.

See Michael J. Hogan, A Cross of Iron: Harry S. Truman and the Origins of the National Security State, 1945–1954 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
20.

Cf. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Secrecy: The American Experience (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997), pp. 195–99 and passim. In 1997, former President Gerald Ford recalled his days as a member of the House Defense Appropriations Committee, when spokesmen for the CIA would warn over and over again of the imminent danger of the Soviet Union’s surpassing the United States "in military capability, in economic growth, in the strength of our economies. It was a scary presentation."
21.

Truman later maintained that he never intended the CIA to involve itself in "peacetime cloak-and-dagger operations." This, however, was a lie. See John Prados, Presidents’ Secret Wars: CIA and Pentagon Covert Operations from World War II through the Persian Gulf War, rev. ed. (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1996), pp. 20–21, 28–29, 65–67; also Peter Grose, Operation Rollback: America’s Secret War Behind the Iron Curtain (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), which discusses George Kennan’s 1948 plan, approved by the Truman administration, to carry out paramilitary actions behind the Iron Curtain, including guerrilla attacks and sabotage.
22.

Geoffrey Wheatcroft, in the Times Literary Supplement (July 16, 1999): 9. For an excellent analysis of the United States’ and NATO’s successive lies on the bombing of the Chinese embassy, and the American media’s endorsement and propagation of the lies, see Jared Israel, "The Arrogance of Rome," Emperors-Clothes.com, April 18, 2000.
23.

Radosh, Prophets on the Right, pp. 159–61. The Marshall Plan and its supposed successes are now enveloped by what Walter A. McDougall, in Promised Land, Crusader State: The American Encounter with the World Since 1776 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997), p. 180, rightly calls a "mythology." The basic cause of Europe’s recovery was the relatively free-market principles put into practice (in West Germany, for instance), and, more than anything else, the character of the European peoples, sometimes called "human capital." What the Marshall Plan and the billions in U.S. military aid largely accomplished was to allow the European regimes to construct their welfare states, and, in the case of France, for one, to continue trying to suppress colonial uprisings, as in Vietnam. Cf. George C. Herring, America’s Longest War: the United States and Vietnam, 1950–1976 (New York: Knopf, 1979), p. 8: "substantial American funds under the Marshall Plan enabled France to use its own resources to prosecute the war in Indochina." See also Tyler Cowen, "The Marshall Plan: Myths and Realities," in U.S. Aid to the Developing World: A Free Market Agenda, Doug Bandow, ed. (Washington, D.C.: Heritage, 1985), pp. 61–74; and Alan S. Milward, "Was the Marshall Plan Necessary?" Diplomatic History 13 (Spring 1989): 231–53, who emphasizes the pressures placed on European governments by the Plan’s administrators to adopt Keynesian policies.
24.

Vladislav Zubok, "Stalin’s Plans and Russian Archives," Diplomatic History 21, no. 2 (Spring 1997): 299. The Soviet documents show that Stalin and Molotov were "convinced that the U.S. aid was designed to lure the Kremlin’s East European neighbors out of its orbit and to rebuild German strength." See also Leffler, "Inside Enemy Archives," p. 133.
25.

Kofsky, Truman, p. 99.
26.

Ibid., p. 106.
27.

Ronald E. Powaski, Toward an Entangling Alliance: American Isolationism, Internationalism, and Europe, 1901–1950 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1991), pp. 201–02.
28.

Harry W. Berger, "Senator Robert A. Taft Dissents from Military Escalation," in Cold War Critics: Alternatives to American Foreign Policy in the Truman Years, Thomas G. Paterson, ed. (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1971), pp. 181–82; and Kofsky, Truman, p. 130.
29.

Ibid., pp. 294–95.
30.

Michael Parenti, The Sword and the Dollar: Imperialism, Revolution, and the Arms Race (New York: St. Martin’s, 1989), p. 147.
31. Gaddis, "The Emerging Post-Revisionist Synthesis," p. 181. Morgenthau, "The Origins of the Cold War," p. 95, anticipated this conclusion: "The limits of Stalin’s territorial ambition were the traditional limits of Russian expansionism." Even Vladislav Zubok, who believes that the now available Soviet documents show the U.S. leaders in a much better light than many had thought, nonetheless concedes, "Stalin’s Plans," p. 305:

there was an element of overreaction, arrogance, and selfish pragmatism in the American response to Stalin’s plans. . . . The Soviet military machine was not a military juggernaut, western Europe was not under threat of a direct Soviet military assault, and the Sino–Soviet bloc lacked true cohesion. . . . American containment of Stalin’s Soviet Union may indeed have helped the dictatorship to mobilize people to the task of building a superpower from the ashes and ruins of the impoverished and devastated country. It may even have helped Stalin to trample on the seeds of liberalism and freedom in Soviet society.

Cf. Leffler, "Inside Enemy Archives," pp. 132, 134: "The new research clearly shows that American initiatives intensified Soviet distrust and reinforced Soviet insecurities . . . [recent research indicates] that American policies made it difficult for potential reformers inside the Kremlin to gain the high ground."

32. Matthew Evangelista, "The ‘Soviet Threat’: Intentions, Capabilities, and Context," Diplomatic History 22, no. 3 (Summer 1998): 445–46. On how information from recently opened Soviet archives has undermined the old cold war account, see also the account by Leffler, "Inside Enemy Archives," pp. 120–35. Leffler, hardly a "New Left" (or libertarian) historian, concludes: "Americans should reexamine their complacent belief in the wisdom of their country’s cold war policies."

The fact that Stalin was the worst tyrant and greatest mass-murderer in twentieth-century European history has by now been established beyond a doubt. However, here one should heed Murray Rothbard’s admonition against doing "a priori history," that is, assuming that in a given international conflict it is always the relatively liberal state that is in the right as against the relatively illiberal state, which must always be the aggressor. Murray N. Rothbard, For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto, rev. ed. (New York: Collier-Macmillan, 1978), pp. 289–91.
33. Evangelista, "The Soviet ‘Threat,’" p. 447. See also Steel, "The End of the Beginning," "Unquestionably, the Soviet Union was far weaker ideologically, politically, structurally, and, of course, economically, than was generally assumed." An astonishing admission that the whole cold war was fueled, on the American side, by wild overestimations of Soviet strength was made in 1990 by Strobe Talbott, deputy secretary of state:

for more than four decades, Western policy has been based on a grotesque exaggeration of what the USSR could do if it wanted, therefore what it might do, therefore what the West must be prepared to do in response. . . . Worst-case assumptions about Soviet intentions have fed, and fed upon, worst-case assumptions about Soviet capabilities.

John A. Thompson, "The Exaggeration of American Vulnerability: The Anatomy of a Tradition," Diplomatic History 16, no. 1 (Winter 1992): 23. Thompson’s article is highly instructive on how hysteria regarding impending attacks on the United States during the twentieth century – a time when America grew ever stronger – has contributed to entanglement in foreign conflicts.

34. Justus D. Doenecke, Not to the Swift: The Old Isolationists in the Cold War Era (Lewisburg, Penn.: Bucknell University Press, 1979), p. 216. Truman’s slanders were particularly vile, since his own motivation in generating the war-scare was at least in part self-aggrandizement. As his trusted political adviser Clark Clifford noted in a memo to the president:

There is considerable political advantage to the administration in its battle with the Kremlin. The worse matters get up to a fairly certain point – real danger of imminent war – the more is there a sense of crisis. In times of crisis, the American citizen tends to back up his president. (Kofsky, Truman, p. 92)

35.

Cf. George Will’s judgment, in The Leveling Wind: Politics, the Culture, and Other News, 1990–1994 (New York: Viking, 1994), p. 380: "Truman’s greatness was a product of his goodness, his straight-ahead respect for the public, respect expressed in decisions briskly made and plainly explained." In truth, despite Will’s blather, Truman was all of his life a demagogue, a political "garbage-mouth" whose first instinct was to besmirch his opponents. In his tribute to Truman, Will employs his usual ploy whenever he is moved to extol some villainous politico or other: his subject’s greatness could only be denied by pitiful post-modernist creatures who reject all human excellence, nobility of soul, etc. This maneuver is nowhere sillier than in the case of Harry Truman.
36.

Doenecke, Not to the Swift, pp. 200, 216.
37.

Ted Galen Carpenter, The Captive Press: Foreign Policy Crises and the First Amendment (Washington, D.C.: Cato Institute, 1995), pp. 45–52. Carpenter’s excellent study covers the whole period of the cold war.
38.

The commotion over Soviet plans to "conquer the world" intensified in June 1948 with the blockade of West Berlin. The United States and its allies had unilaterally decided to jettison four-power control of Germany, and instead to integrate their occupation zones and proceed to create a west German state. Stalin’s clumsy response was to exploit the absence of any formal agreement permitting the western powers access to Berlin, and institute the blockade.
39.

LaFeber, America, Russia, and the Cold War, pp. 83–84. Some award for Orwellian Newspeak is due the Democratic foreign affairs leader in the Senate, Tom Connally, who stated that NATO "is but the logical extension of the principle of the Monroe Doctrine."
40.

See especially Jerry W. Sanders, Peddlers of Crisis: The Committee on the Present Danger and the Politics of Containment (Boston: South End Press, 1983); also Gabriel Kolko, Century of War: Politics, Conflict, and Society Since 1914 (New York: New Press, 1994), pp. 397–98; and Powaski, Cold War, pp. 85–86.
41.

Michael Schaller, The United States and China in the Twentieth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), pp. 131–32.
42.

Bruce Cumings, Korea’s Place in the Sun: A Modern History (New York: Norton, 1997), pp. 257–58. Japan was unable to act as a counterweight to Communist regimes in east Asia because, like Germany, it had been annulled as a power. In addition, the constitution imposed on Japan by the American occupiers forced it to renounce warmaking as a sovereign right.
43.

The attack was authorized by Stalin, "in expectation that the United States might eventually turn [South Korea] into a beachhead for a return to the Asian mainland in alliance with a resurgent Japan" (Zubok, "Stalin’s Plans," p. 301).
44.

Eric A. Nordlinger, Isolationism Reconfigured: American Foreign Policy for a New Century (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995), pp. 168–69.
45.

Walter LaFeber, America, Russia, and the Cold War, pp. 107–08; see also Herring, America’s Longest War, pp. 6–23. France’s war against the Viet Minh began in 1946 with a typical colonialist atrocity, when a French cruiser bombarded Haiphong, killing 6,000 civilians; ibid., p. 5. Acts of brutality such as this were on the minds of the "isolationist" Republicans like Taft, George Bender, and Howard Buffet when they inveighed against American support of Western imperialism in terms which would be considered "leftist" today.
46.

On the shift of conservatives from "isolationism" to internationalism, see Murray N. Rothbard, "The Transformation of the American Right," Continuum (Summer 1964): 220–31.
47.

John Hart Ely, War and Responsibility: Constitutional Lessons of Vietnam and Its Aftermath (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993), pp. 10–11.
48.

See, for example, James Wilson’s statement: "This system will not hurry us into war; it is calculated to guard against it. It will not be in the power of a single man, or a single body of men, to involve us in such distress; for the important power of declaring war is vested in the legislature at large." Ibid., p. 3. Illustrative of the present-day decay of constitutional thinking is the statement of the noted conservative advocate of the doctrine of "original intent," Robert Bork (ibid., p. 5): "The need for presidents to have that power [to use military force abroad without Congressional approval], particularly in the modern age, should be obvious to almost anyone."
49.

Francis D. Wormuth and Edwin B. Firmage, To Chain the Dog of War: The War Power of Congress in History and Law, 2nd ed. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989), p. 151.
50.

Wormuth and Firmage, To Chain the Dog of War, p. 151.
51.

Ibid., p. 135.
52.

Emily, War and Responsibility, pp. 151–52, n. 60. A year earlier the North Atlantic Treaty had been submitted to the Senate for approval. Article 5 specifically ensured that "U.S. response to aggression in the area covered by the alliance would be governed by ‘constitutional processes,’ thereby requiring congressional approval." Ponawski, Toward Entangling Alliance, pp. 208–09. On the origins of unlimited presidential warmaking powers, see Robert Shogan, Hard Bargain: How FDR Twisted Churchill’s Arm, Evaded the Law, and Changed the Role of the American Presidency, paperback edition (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1999), preface to the paperback edition, "Paving the Way to Kosovo."
53.

Charles A. Beard, President Roosevelt and the Coming of the War, 1941: A Study in Appearances and Realities (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1948), p. 590. Beard listed as among the major purveyors of this doctrine "powerful private agencies engaged nominally in propaganda for ‘peace,’" which look to the president to advance their ideas for "ordering and reordering the world."
54.

Kolko, Century of War, pp. 403–08. General Curtis LeMay boasted of the devastation wreaked by the Air Force: "We burned down just about every city in North and South Korea both . . . we killed off over a million civilian Koreans and drove several million more from their homes." Callum A. MacDonald, Korea: The War Before Vietnam (New York: Free Press, 1986), p. 235. I am grateful to Joseph R. Stromberg for drawing my attention to this quotation. It gives one pause to realize that the savagery of the U.S. air war was such as to lead even Winston Churchill to condemn it. Ibid., pp. 234–35. In Fall 1999, it was finally disclosed that "early in the Korean War, American soldiers machine-gunned hundreds of helpless civilians under a railroad bridge in the South Korean countryside," allegedly in order to thwart the infiltration of North Korean troops. Former U.S. soldiers "described other refugee killings as well in the war’s first weeks, when U.S. commanders ordered their troops to shoot civilians of an allied nation, as a defense against disguised enemy soldiers, according to once-classified documents found in U.S. military archives" (Washington Post, September 30, 1999). A few months later, other declassified U.S. military documents revealed that the South Korean government executed without trial more than 2,000 leftists as its forces retreated in the first stages of the war; the occurrence of such executions was known to the American military authorities at the time (New York Times, April 21, 2000). In addition, there is evidence that the United States may, in fact, have experimented with bacteriological warfare in Korea, as charged by China and North Korea. See Stephen Endicott and Edward Hagerman, The United States and Biological Warfare: Secrets from the Early Cold War and Korea (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998).
55.

Doug Bandow, Tripwire: Korea and U.S. Foreign Policy in a Changed World (Washington, D.C.: Cato Institute, 1996).
56.

Morgenthau, "Origins of the Cold War," p. 98.
57.

Ambrose, Rise to Globalism, p. 185. On the ultimate price paid by the nation for Truman’s "triumph," see the important article by Robert Higgs, "The Cold War Economy: Opportunity Costs, Ideology, and the Politics of Crisis," Explorations in Economic History 31 (1994): 283–312.
58.

David McCullough, Truman (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992), pp. 501–06.
59.

Hamby, Man of the People, pp. 382–83.
60.

Public Papers of Harry S. Truman, 1946 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1962), pp. 451–55.
61.

Ibid., p. 453.
62.

Murray N. Rothbard dealt with this grab for power in a brilliant piece of economic journalism, "Price Controls Are Back!" in his Making Economic Sense (Auburn, Ala.: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 1995), pp. 123–27.
63.

Wormuth and Firmage, To Chain the Dog of War, p. 174.
64.

McCullough, Truman, pp. 896–97. McCullough’s implied apology for Truman here is a good indication of the tenor and caliber of his gargantuan puff-piece. For a debunking of McCullough by two scholars, see the review by Gar Alperovitz and Kai Bird, "Giving Harry Hell," The Nation (May 10, 1993): 640–41.
65.

The Public Papers of Harry S. Truman, 1952–53 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1966), pp. 272–73.
66.

McCullough, Truman, pp. 900–01.
67. One Congressman was led by Truman’s remarks and his seizure of the steel mills to demand his impeachment (New York Times, April 19, 1952). George Bender, Republican of Ohio, stated:

I do not believe that our people can tolerate the formation of a presidential precedent which would permit any occupant of the White House to exercise his untrammeled discretion to take over the industry, communications system or other forms of private enterprise in the name of "emergency."

But Bender was one of the last, and best, of the Old Right leaders (much more consistent and outspoken than Taft) and thus out of tune with the times. Of course the American people could and did tolerate such a precedent. What is still uncertain is whether there is any limit whatever to their tolerance of acts of oppression by their government.

68.

Robert Higgs, Crisis and Leviathan: Critical Episodes in the Growth of American Government (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 227, 244–45.
69.

Jonathan R.T. Hughes, The Governmental Habit: Economic Controls from Colonial Times to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 1977), pp. 208–09. Federal expenditures in the early Eisenhower years were, on average, twice as high as in the period 1947–1950.
70.

The Public Papers of Harry S. Truman, 1949 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1964), pp. 114–15.
71.

Peter Bauer, Equality, the Third World, and Economic Delusion (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981), pp. 139, 275, n. 1. See also Peter Bauer and Cranley Onslow, "Fifty Years of Failure," The Spectator (September 5, 1998): 13–14.
72.

Graham Hancock, Lords of Poverty: The Power, Prestige, and Corruption of the International Aid Business (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1989).
73.

Alfred M. Lilienthal, The Zionist Connection: What Price Peace? (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1978), pp. 45–100.
74.

The depth of Eleanor’s understanding of the Middle East situation is illustrated by her statement: "I’m confident that when a Jewish state is set up, the Arabs will see the light: they will quiet down; and Palestine will no longer be a problem." Evan M. Wilson, Decision on Palestine: How the U.S. Came to Recognize Israel (Stanford, Calif.: Hoover Institution Press, 1979), p. 116.
75.

Merle Miller, Plain Speaking: An Oral Biography of Harry S. Truman (New York: G.P. Putnam, 1973), p. 218.
76.

Wilson, Decision on Palestine, pp. 134, 142; Lilienthal, The Zionist Connection, pp. 82–83.
77.

Wilson, Decision on Palestine, p. 126.
78.

Margaret Truman, Harry S. Truman (New York: William Morrow, 1973), pp. 381, 384–85.
79. Clement Attlee, British prime minister during the decisive years, was a strong critic of Truman’s policy:

The president went completely against the advice of his own State Department and his own military people. . . . The State Department’s view was very close to ours, they had to think internationally, but most of the politicians were influenced by voting considerations. There were crucial elections coming up at the time, and several big Jewish firms had contributed to Democratic Party funds. (p. 181)

Attlee reminded Truman of the American promises to Arab leaders that they, as well as the Zionists, would be fully consulted on Palestine: "It would be very unwise to break these solemn pledges and so set aflame the whole Middle East." Clement Attlee, Twilight of Empire: Memoirs of Prime Minister Clement Attlee, Francis Williams, ed. (New York: A.S. Barnes, 1963), pp. 181, 190.

80.

See Lilienthal, The Zionist Connection, and Sheldon L. Richman, "Ancient History": U.S. Conduct in the Middle East Since World War II and the Folly of Intervention (Washington, D.C.: Cato Institute, 1991).
81.

Eugene J. Carroll, Jr., "NATO Enlargement: To What End?" in NATO Enlargement: Illusions and Reality, Ted Galen Carpenter and Barbara Conry, eds. (Washington, D.C.: Cato Institute, 1998), p. 199.
82.

See, for example, The Public Papers of Harry S. Truman, 1946, pp. 455, 480–81.
83.

James A. Patterson, Mr. Republican: A Biography of Robert A. Taft (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1972), pp. 327–29.
84.

Werner Maser, Nuremberg: A Nation on Trial, Richard Barry, trans. (New York: Scribener’s, 1979), pp. 112–13.
85.

Julius Epstein, Operation Keelhaul: The Story of Forced Repatriation from 1944 to the Present (Old Greenwich, Conn.: Devin-Adair, 1973), esp. pp. 99–104. See also Nicholas Bethell, The Last Secret: Forcible Repatriation to Russia, 1944–47 (London: Andre Deutsch, 1974); and Jason Kendall Moore, "Between Expediency and Principle: U.S. Repatriation Policy Toward Russian Nationals, 1944–1949," Diplomatic History 24, no. 3 (Summer 2000).
86.

Jules Abels, The Truman Scandals. (Chicago: Regnery, 1956); Henry Regnery, Memoirs of a Dissident Publisher (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1979), pp. 132–38.
87.

On the atomic bombings, see Gar Alperovitz, The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb and the Architecture of an American Myth (New York: Knopf, 1995); and idem, "Was Harry Truman a Revisionist on Hiroshima?" Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations Newsletter 29, no. 2 (June 1998); also Martin J. Sherwin, A World Destroyed: The Atomic Bomb and the Grand Alliance (New York: Vintage, 1977); and Dennis D. Wainstock, The Decision to Drop the Atomic Bomb (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1996).
88.

Alperovitz, Decision, p. 563. Truman added: "When you deal with a beast you have to treat him as a beast. It is most regrettable but nevertheless true." For similar statements by Truman, see ibid., p. 564. Alperovitz’s monumental work is the end-product of four decades of study of the atomic bombings and is indispensable for comprehending the often complex argumentation on the issue.
89.

Ibid., p. 521.
90.

Ibid., p. 523.
91.

Barton J. Bernstein, "Understanding the Atomic Bomb and the Japanese Surrender: Missed Opportunities, Little-Known Near Disasters, and Modern Memory," Diplomatic History 19, no. 2 (Spring 1995): 257. General Carl Spaatz, commander of U.S. strategic bombing operations in the Pacific, was so shaken by the destruction at Hiroshima that he telephoned his superiors in Washington, proposing that the next bomb be dropped on a less populated area, so that it "would not be as devastating to the city and the people." His suggestion was rejected. Ronald Schaffer, Wings of Judgment: American Bombing in World War II (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 147–48.
92.

This is true also of Nagasaki.
93.

See Barton J. Bernstein, "A Post-War Myth: 500,000 U.S. Lives Saved," Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 42, no. 6 (June–July 1986): 38–40; and idem, "Wrong Numbers," The Independent Monthly (July 1995): 41–44.
94.

J. Samuel Walker, "History, Collective Memory, and the Decision to Use the Bomb," Diplomatic History 19, no. 2 (Spring 1995): 320, 323–25. Walker details the frantic evasions of Truman’s biographer, David McCullough, when confronted with the unambiguous record.
95.

Paul Boyer, "Exotic Resonances: Hiroshima in American Memory," Diplomatic History 19, no. 2 (Spring 1995): 299. On the fate of the bombings’ victims and the public’s restricted knowledge of them, see John W. Dower, "The Bombed: Hiroshimas and Nagasakis in Japanese Memory," in ibid., pp. 275–95.
96.

Alperovitz, Decision, pp. 320–65. On MacArthur and Eisenhower, see ibid., pp. 352 and 355–56.
97.

William D. Leahy, I Was There (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1950), p. 441. Leahy compared the use of the atomic bomb to the treatment of civilians by Genghis Khan, and termed it "not worthy of Christian man." Ibid., p. 442. Curiously, Truman himself supplied the foreword to Leahy’s book. In a private letter written just before he left the White House, Truman referred to the use of the atomic bomb as "murder," stating that the bomb "is far worse than gas and biological warfare because it affects the civilian population and murders them wholesale." Barton J. Bernstein, "Origins of the U.S. Biological Warfare Program," Preventing a Biological Arms Race, Susan Wright, ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990), p. 9.
98.

Barton J. Bernstein, "Seizing the Contested Terrain of Early Nuclear History: Stimson, Conant, and Their Allies Explain the Decision to Use the Bomb," Diplomatic History 17, no. 1 (Winter 1993): 35–72.
99.

One writer in no way troubled by the sacrifice of innocent Japanese to save Allied servicemen – indeed, just to save him – is Paul Fussell; see his Thank God for the Atom Bomb and Other Essays (New York: Summit, 1988). The reason for Fussell’s little Te Deum is, as he states, that he was among those scheduled to take part in the invasion of Japan, and might very well have been killed. It is a mystery why Fussell takes out his easily understandable terror, rather unchivalrously, on Japanese women and children instead of on the men in Washington who conscripted him to fight in the Pacific in the first place.
100.

G.E.M. Anscombe, "Mr. Truman’s Degree," in idem, Collected Philosophical Papers, vol. 3, Ethics, Religion and Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1981), pp. 62–71.
101.

Anscombe, "Mr. Truman’s Degree," p. 62.
102.

Hans Adolf Jacobsen and Arthur S. Smith, Jr., eds., World War II: Policy and Strategy. Selected Documents with Commentary (Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC-Clio, 1979), pp. 345–46.
103.

For some Japanese leaders, another reason for keeping the emperor was as a bulwark against a possible postwar communist takeover. See also Sherwin, A World Destroyed, p. 236: "the [Potsdam] proclamation offered the military die-hards in the Japanese government more ammunition to continue the war than it offered their opponents to end it."
104.

Alperovitz, Decision, pp. 44–45.
105.

Cf. Bernstein, "Understanding the Atomic Bomb," p. 254: "it does seem very likely, though certainly not definite, that a synergistic combination of guaranteeing the emperor, awaiting Soviet entry, and continuing the siege strategy would have ended the war in time to avoid the November invasion." Bernstein, an excellent and scrupulously objective scholar, nonetheless disagrees with Alperovitz and the revisionist school on several key points.
106.

J.F.C. Fuller, The Second World War, 1939–45: A Strategical and Tactical History (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1948), p. 392. Fuller, who was similarly scathing on the terror-bombing of the German cities, characterized the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki as "a type of war that would have disgraced Tamerlane." Cf. Barton J. Bernstein, who concludes, in "Understanding the Atomic Bomb," p. 235:

In 1945, American leaders were not seeking to avoid the use of the A-bomb. Its use did not create ethical or political problems for them. Thus, they easily rejected or never considered most of the so-called alternatives to the bomb.

107.

Felix Morley, "The Return to Nothingness," Human Events (August 29, 1945) reprinted in Hiroshima’s Shadow, Kai Bird and Lawrence Lifschultz, eds. (Stony Creek, Conn.: Pamphleteer’s Press, 1998), pp. 272–74; James Martin Gillis, "Nothing But Nihilism," The Catholic World, September 1945, reprinted in ibid., pp. 278–80; Alperovitz, Decision, pp. 438–40.
108.

Richard M. Weaver, "A Dialectic on Total War," in idem, Visions of Order: The Cultural Crisis of Our Time (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1964), pp. 98–99.
109.

Wainstock, Decision, p. 122.

June 28, 2004

Ralph Raico [send him mail] is a senior scholar of the Mises Institute.

Copyright © 2001 by the Ludwig von Mises Institute.
http://www.lewrockwell.com/raico/raico20.html

 

[untitled]

I was creating a new thread but found this old one by Tiki Tam Tam .....

Today is the 66th anniversary of Hiroshima

 

[untitled]

Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

[untitled]

Replicas of the bombs dropped on the two cities......

Little Boy (Post war model)... Hiroshima ....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Boy

Fat Man (mock up).... Nagasaki

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fat_Man

 

[untitled]

Enola Gay - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Enola Gay is a Boeing B-29 Superfortress bomber, named after Enola Gay Tibbets, mother of pilot Paul Tibbets. On 6 August 1945, during the final stages of World War II, it became the first aircraft to drop an atomic bomb as a weapon of war. The bomb, code-named "Little Boy", was targeted at the city of Hiroshima, Japan, and caused extensive destruction.

The Enola Gay gained additional attention in 1995 when the cockpit and nose section of the aircraft were exhibited during the bombing's 50th anniversary at the National Air and Space Museum (NASM) of the Smithsonian Institution in downtown Washington, D.C. The exhibit was changed due to a controversy over original historical script displayed with the aircraft. Since 2003 the entire restored B-29 has been on display at NASM's Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center.

Paul Tibbets pictured below

Presently

 

[rollindays]

Japan got what it deserved in 1945, shoulda never attacked Pearl Harbor & gone against America.

 

[untitled]

Harry S. Truman: Advancing the Revolution

by Ralph Raico

This essay is reprinted with permission from John V. Denson, ed., Reassessing the Presidency: The Rise of the Executive State and the Decline of Freedom (Auburn, Alabama: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2001).

A ‘Near-Great’?

When Harry Truman left office in January 1953, he was intensely unpopular, even widely despised. Many of his most cherished schemes, from national health insurance (socialized medicine) to universal military training (UMT) had been soundly rejected by Congress and the public. Worst of all, the war in Korea, which he persisted in calling a "police action," was dragging on with no end in sight.

Yet today, Republican no less than Democratic politicians vie in glorifying Truman. When historians are asked to rank American presidents, he is listed as a "near-great." Naturally, historians, like everyone else, have their own personal views and values. Like other academics, they tend to be overwhelmingly left of center. As Robert Higgs writes: "Left-liberal historians worship political power, and idolize those who wield it most lavishly in the service of left-liberal causes."1 So it is scarcely surprising that they should venerate men like Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and Harry Truman, and agitate to get a credulous public to do the same.

Would have been much easier if you had broken this article and posted it in smaller manageable chunks.
Would have made it a whole lot easier to read .... I am assuming this is one of your earlier posts

 

[untitled]

Japan got what it deserved in 1945, shoulda never attacked Pearl Harbor & gone against America.

Why do you think it attacked the US ? Was japan insane ?

 

[DV RULES]

Real face of US as leader of Human rights will ever expose and unchanged by that attack.

Barbarism never could be changed even in 21st century, but only methods changed.

Pathetic that life of more than 120 hundred people didn't give relaxation to world prominent democracy till now.

 

[ChineseTiger1986]

Why do you think it attacked the US ? Was japan insane ?

They wanna control the realm of the Pacific Ocean in order to access more resources which they desperately need in their conquest of China.

Their resources were nearly exhausted in the 4 years campaign against China. And they don't have enough to fuel their war machines anymore.

 

[sur]

Dajjali-US is biggest TERRORIST & mass-MURDERER planet earth has ever seen ...

 

[Tshering22]

Real face of US as leader of Human rights will ever expose and unchanged by that attack.

Barbarism never could be changed even in 21st century, but only methods changed.

Pathetic that life of more than 120 hundred people didn't give relaxation to world prominent democracy till now.

As much as it was undesirable, had they not done that, we'd all be talking Japanese right now.

 

[Chogy]

The nuking of Japan ended the greatest horror that mankind has ever seen... WW2. No one celebrates the nukings, but they should be remembered and understood.

There were four options available to the Allies to end the war.

1) blockade Japan for years. Millions of Japanese die from starvation and disease.

2) Invade Japan. Millions of Japanese and allied soldiers die. Japanese were making bamboo spears to give to children to soak up allied ammunition.

3) Do nothing. Go home. Fight the whole war again in 10 or 15 years.

4) Or maybe, just maybe, the nukes would force the military leaders of Japan to realize the hopelessness of their position.

You've got to pick one. They picked option 4, it worked, the war ended.

Demo the bomb - Probably wouldn't have changed the minds of Japan. Even when the Emperor wanted to surrender after the cities were obliterated, Japan's generals and admirals wanted to fight on, and some of them tried a coup d'etat vs. the Emperor. It was a close thing.

 

[Pakchina]

Should also be remembered and not denied as being done by Japanese Historians-the millions of women and children savagely killed by the Japanese Imperial Army during the Japanese invasion of China during World War 2. There must not be discrimination and negationism that is remembering of Jews killing-Austwitch and the Atomic Bomb victims while forgetting and denying other millions of voluntary mass killings committed by the Japanese Imperial Army. Japanese atrocities-Wikipedia. The Japanese army had committed atrocities and massacre of millions of civilians in China. This also should be remembered and not denied and forgotten. This massacre and all the atrocities were committed by the Japanese Imperial Army without any war objective while the US army was forced to drop the atomic bomb in view of forcing the Japanese Imperial Government and Army to stop the suicide war of the Japanese Imperial Army. Moreover many of the Japanese Imperial Army Officials had never been judged for crimes against humanity and for war crimes. It is high time for the World to bring these criminals to justice as they are having a real good retired life while their hands are full of innocent victims' blood.

 

[Chogy]

^^ Very true. Japanese atrocities in China are easily in the same league (perhaps worse) than the Nazi's Jewish pogrom.

At least the Germans acknowledge the crime. The Japanese are trying to claim victim status for WW2. Japanese school children are all taught about the U.S. bombing campaign, but they pay much less attention to the horrors of Japanese occupation of China.



Most of the Chinese prisoners were used as bayonet targets to instill "warrior spirit" in green Japanese troops.