1945
Harry S. Truman
FROM THE TIME ARCHIVE
Dec. 31, 1945
The sweep of events in 1945 engulfed a whole era. The modern Dark Ages
gave way to a period in which man had another of his historically rare and
fragile chances to seek peace and ensue it. The Axis, an insane Atlantis which
no Francis Bacon would ever mourn, was shattered and submerged.
The men who had made that era perished with it, Benito Mussolini, Italy's
self-styled Man of Destiny, dies ignominiously and was hung by his heels like a
slaughtered pig alongside the body of his mistress. Adolf Hitler, Man of 1938,
died by his own hand, also with his mistress, in the rubble of Berlin. Or did
he die? Dead or alive, it did not much matter: Adolf Hitler, the force, had
perished.
More obliterating than death was the continued life of Hideki Tojo. But
for the Battle of Midway, he would certainly have been the Man of 1942. His war
had been the coldest and most calculating of all, his machinations the most
arrogant, his nation's defeat the most ruinous. When he tried to commit suicide
he failed again; at year's end he lived on, saved from death by U.S. blood,
shunned by his countrymen, still able to read that U.S. strategists had decoded
his every intention, that he had never really had a chance.
Death & the Ballot Box. Even among the victors, men's fortunes rose
and ebbed rapidly in the quick shift of the tides.
Franklin Roosevelt, Man of 1932, 1934 and 1941, was dead, struck down with
dramatic suddenness before he could witness the victory he had charted and
planned. Had he lived, 1945 would have been his year—the final flowering of
American hope and strength which he had nurtured through black days made
blacker by American indecision. But now he lay in a grave at Hyde Park, mourned
by the world.
Winston Churchill, Man of 1940, had somehow missed the flood. He had led
his country to victory, than, for all his gallant stubbornness in the face of
wartime disaster, suffered a humiliating political defeat.
To Chiang Kai-shek, China's Man of Eight Years, the events of 1945 came as
a reward for unwavering courage and patience. Of all the Allies, China had
endured the most. But the long- awaited, almost-despaired-of peace found Chiang
embroiled in something close to civil war. He might well be the Man of 1946, or
of some later year; he was not the Man of 1945.
Victory and Ravishment. Of all the world leaders of the '30s and early
'40s, the most solidly successful survivor was Joseph Stalin. Yet Stalin's
success was far from complete. His own country, though victorious, was
ravished. His world revolution (if he still sought one) was still a distant
goal. War's end did not bring Communism to the world or even to much of Europe.
As the talk between the world and his wife showed, Joseph Stalin was the
most feared man of 1945. By his followers in every country he was also the most
admired. But he did not dominate the year. And he ended it amidst rumors of ill
health, amidst mounting speculation whether his successor would be Diplomat
Molotov or Soldier Zhukov.
Soldiers & the Bomb. Except for one thing, 1945 would have been the
year of the Allied military men, of Zhukov or Montgomery, of Marshall,
MacArthur, Eisenhower of Nimitz, or—as in many respects it was—of G.I. Joe,
an unwilling hero, not knowing what he was fighting for but fighting superbly
well.
The biggest moments of 1945, save for that one thing, would have been the
German surrender at Reims, the Japanese surrender aboard the Missouri.
That one thing, the greatest of all 1945's great events, was the atom
bomb.
In the light of the past, the significant fact about 1945 was that it was
the last year of World War II. But in the light of the future, it was the first
year in which civilization possessed, in the sober words of the Smyth Report,
"the means to commit suicide at will."
What the world would best remember of 1945 was the deadly mushroom clouds
over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Here were the force, the threat, the promise of
the future. In their giant shadows, 45,000 feet tall, all men were pygmies.
The Assembly Line. If any one man had produced the atom bomb, he would
have been the Man of 1945 without challenge. But science, as it became more
complex, had become an assembly line, where individual men contributed a turn
here and there, often without knowing what came off at the end.
The atom bomb was the creation of France's long-dead Henri Becquerel, who
discovered radioactivity, and the Curies, who discovered radium. It was the
creation of Albert Einstein, sitting quietly in an old sweater, keeping his
speculative pencil always pointed close to the secrets of physics.
In the Manhattan project were hundreds of creators and hundreds of others
who helped make the creation possible. But all of them, by the very nature of
the project, were workers in bits and pieces. Some of their names had become
household words: Major General Leslie R. Groves and Dr. Vannevar Bush, the
administrators; Drs. Compton and Fermi, the physicists; Drs. Urey and Lawrence,
the atom crackers; and Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer, sometimes called "the
smartest of the lot," who assembled the first bomb in New Mexico's desert
fastness.
But in all this group there was no man to whom the others could point and
say: "This is the one."
The Man at Line's End. It was no scientist who, by historic accident,
somewhat unwittingly, somewhat against his own will, became more than any other
man responsible for the bomb, its use in 1943 and its future. It was an
ordinary, uncurious man without any pretensions to scientific knowledge,
without many pretensions of any kind, a man of average size and weight, wearing
bifocal glasses, fond of plain food, whiskey-and-water and lodge meetings. It
was Harry Truman, 32nd President of the U.S.
In the '20s, when the tides of industry and empire were running with
intoxicating speed, Harry Truman was content to be an obscure Missouri county
judge. In the '30s, not by his own momentum but by the chance whim of a
political boss, he was in the U.S. Senate. As 1945 began he was Vice President,
a man struck by political lightning at the Chicago convention while eating a
hotdog with mustard.
As the year started, Harry Truman had no idea that his Government was
engaged in atomic research. At year's end, President Truman was custodian of
the bomb and its precarious secret, buffer against its terror, repository of
whatever promise it might contain for a world which could use its secret in
peace.
Harry Truman, a very plain man indeed, who had never sought or dreamed of
being Man of the Atomic Year, had been cast up to his position by an accident
of the tides, by the shifting forces of politics. In the same startled and
unpremeditated fashion, mankind itself, shrinking from the shadow of Hiroshima,
dwarfed by the Event of 1945, had got where it was.
Awkward Mantle. The Man of the Year personified the problem of the year.
His very name had almost the force of a pun. Like most of mankind, he was ill
prepared for the destiny and responsibility which had been thrust upon him. He
did not want the responsibility; the destiny rested awkwardly on his shoulders.
Like many an average citizen Harry Truman greeted the bomb with few
immediate overtones of philosophic doubt. When it was dropped on Hiroshima, by
his order, he was aboard the cruiser Augusta, returning from his first
international conference at Potsdam. He rushed to the officers' wardroom,
announced breathlessly: "Keep your seats, gentlemen...We have just dropped a
bomb on Japan which has more power than 20,000 tons of TNT. It was an
overwhelming success." Applause and cheering broke out; the President hastened
along to spread the word in the other messes.
His other announcement, released at the White House, showed considerably
more awareness of what the bomb meant to humanity in good and evil. But a few
weeks later he was again treating it with an oddly offhand air. He chose a
fishing lodge at Tennessee's Reelfoot Lake, an informal "bull session" with
newsmen against a background of bourbon and poker, to announce that the U.S.
intended to keep the secret of the bomb to itself.
Infinite Puzzle. This seemed no paradox to Harry Truman. But the problem
went deeper. The world, obviously, would not accept a U.S. trusteeship. The
Germans had started the race for the bomb; the Japanese had been experimenting,
too. Now the Russians started working furiously. Any other nation with the
inclination and the money could get into the race, and some of them doubtless
would.
The scientists, in coldly factual terms, spelled out the possibilities:
— In three to five years, any nation could learn the bomb's secret.
— The U.S. could have a stockpile of 10,000 bombs in ten to 15 years, any
other nation presumably in 13 to 20 years.
— For a nation which wanted to use it, the bomb was a cheap way to wage
war—perhaps ten, perhaps 100 times cheaper than fighting with TNT.
There was as yet no sign of confidence from the Man of the Year, nor from
most of humanity, that anything could be done about the problem. The feeling
was abroad that the complexity of modern life had made all men, even
Presidents, even Men of the Year, mere foam flecks on the tide.
Shallow Peace. In such a world, who dared to be optimistic?
World War II had ended badly. Except on the military side, where Allied
might and Allied generalship were crushing and supreme, it had never been
fought well. The why of the fighting had never been adequately spelled out.
Franklin Roosevelt, looking for a name for the war, could come up with nothing
better than "The War for Survival." Arthur Koestler, viewing the whole
catastrophe with detachment, said that it was a war in which a lie fought
against a half-truth. In such a contest, the lie had had a tremendous
psychological advantage.
The war was over, but peace was only the absence of war. Over Europe lay
the heavy hand of political turmoil and hunger, the unfathomable problems of
reconstruction and reparations. The Middle East was torn with strife, Asia
wracked by revolt. Even the fortunate Western Hemisphere contained some of the
tightest dictatorships in modern history.
The struggle of freedom versus tyranny, of the individual against the
power of the state—fought and won in the speciously clear-cut terms of
war—was emerging again in the more dubious terms of peace.
In peacetime terms, as in the final analysis, it was the battle of the
compromising democrat against the implacable Left. And in this conflict the
democrat was under severe handicaps. Some of the handicaps were self-imposed.
In the democracies, pundits and plain people alike were simply afraid of using
the four-letter words of contemporary politics. They refused to recognize or
admit that the Left was indeed implacable—as it was in Russia or in the words
of Britain's Harold Laski. Like the notion of sex in a previous generation,
this thought was too dangerous, or too horrible. It was not so much that the
democrats did not have a creed as that they found it difficult and embarrassing
to reconcile their belief with their actions.
Eternal Distinction. The Democrat, who believed in the practical necessity
of compromise and who acknowledged the innate imperfection and impermeability
of man, had a creed of his own. He acknowledged the eternal distinction between
the things of God and the things of Caesar, and the eternal distinction between
fundamental principle and practical human expedience. He admitted that he did
not understand the things of God; but to the pitifully small extent that he did
understand them he called them principles—and on these he could never
compromise. One of these principles, however hard of application, was Freedom.
Another of those principles was that the end never justifies the means. And,
putting those two principles together, he could never allow himself to say that
it is justifiable to commit crimes in order to achieve for man a "larger
freedom."
He did not say that it was his duty to establish moral or other Utopias;
indeed, he knew that men are incapable of doing any such thing. He stood for
compromise in all purely human affairs precisely because he did not dare
compromise with the monstrous arrogance of the doctrine that the State is God.
The corollaries of this fundamental belief were these:
— As a practical matter, the democrat searched the past for every bit of
political or economic wisdom which he could fit into a pattern useful for the
present.
— He believed that in the Democratic Society there is great room for
experiment, for the method of trial and error, for the free play of economic
and social innovation, including risk and error.
— He believed that there is no practical problem of human need or welfare
which could not be solved in a liberal Democratic Society. He knew that these
problems were never finally solved, but he did not admit that his society
presented any permanent bar to their solution.
Evanescent Chance. Pondering the great events of 1945, the democrat could
justly feel that once again he had been given another chance. One generation of
tyrants had been overcome; there were many places on earth where a man could
walk proudly, no matter his race or religion, his economic or political
beliefs.
For the moment, at least, he could once again attach some importance to
matters irrelevant to war, less dynamic than politics. He could turn some
attention again to poetry and art. He could applaud Actress-of-the-Year Ingrid
Bergman, wrinkle his pseudo-Philistine brow over the re-emergence of
Artist-of-the- Year Pablo Picasso, still full of invention and razzle-dazzle,
still able to rouse resentment. He could view the discovery of streptomycin by
Doctor-of-the-Year Selman Wakeman as something more than irony.
Conscious of the fact that he and his world had been given added time to
struggle against it. That, perhaps by the same kind of accident which made
Harry Truman the Man of 1945, was the hope of 1946.
COVERS GALLERY: Click here to see the cover image from 1945
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