The Truman Show

Fifty-three years ago, President Harry S Truman authorized the use of atomic weapons against the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. What did he privately think and feel? History has given us only a few small bits and pieces of information, slowly, over time. We now know, for instance, that after seeing the first photos of what happened to these largely civilian population centers, the president seems to have had second thoughts; he immediately canceled preparations for a possible third bombing. “He said the thought of wiping out another 100,000 people was too horrible,” Secretary of Commerce Henry Wallace noted in his diary. “He didn’t like the idea of killing, as he said, ‘all those kids.’ ”

Yet publicly Truman maintained a very unsentimental position: The bombs had been used to prevent an invasion which he held might have cost from 250,000 to a million Japanese and American lives. Nothing more, nothing less--or so we have been led to believe.

Commonly accepted truths make the historians’ work all the more difficult. Was it really that clear? Could ordering the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the defining moments of terror in the 20th century, have ever been simple? Many historians no longer believe the bombs were necessary, and few top World War II military leaders ever defended using them.

In the course of writing my 1996 book, “The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb,” I discovered that the writing of history sometimes is as accidental as history itself. In this case, it came in the form of a letter I received in 1989 from the late John Gronouski, former U.S. ambassador to Poland.

In 1964, Gronouski had gone to Independence, Mo., to speak at a fund-raising dinner for a local member of Congress and, after an afternoon tour of the Truman Library, had the occasion to have a drink with the president at the country club bar.

“Mr. Truman ordered us each a double shot of Southern Comfort neat. (Not my favorite drink, but when drinking with ex-presidents you do as. . . !) After ordering each of us another of the same, he began about a 10-minute monologue on his decision to drop the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima. He did not ask me whether he did the right thing; he simply was explaining to me, and me alone, his rationale for deciding to drop the bomb. He did not address the question of the second bomb; I interpreted his explanation as his justification for dropping both bombs.

“His reasoning was that with which we are all familiar: He talked about the heavy loss of American (and Japanese) lives that resulted from the storming of the Japanese-held Pacific Islands. He added that on the basis of his best information, an invasion of Japan could have cost as many as 1 million American lives and casualties and an untold number of Japanese lives. He said that he regretted the loss of lives at Hiroshima (and Nagasaki, I presumed) but pointed out that the Japanese would have had many more dead and wounded [if they had resisted] an American invasion, and again [he] referred to the saving of American lives. He noted that the best intelligence available to him was of the strong opinion that Japanese morale was high and that dropping a bomb off the coast rather than in a populated area would not have induced the Japanese to surrender. As I say, he went on in this vein for about 10 minutes. At no time did he seem defensive nor did he solicit my opinion as to the merits of his decision.

“What fascinated me,” Gronouski emphasized, “is the fact that he out of the blue brought up the subject in conversation with an almost total stranger.

“At the time and when I thought about it later, I was struck by the fact that this man, who had a reputation of putting out of mind the consequences of tough decisions once he had made them, would spend 10 minutes explaining his actions to [me] almost 20 years after the event. I surmised that he had been troubled by criticism of his decision all of those years and surmised that the exercise he went through with me was probably one of countless times he had done the same thing with others. However, he gave no indication that he regretted his decision, only that he felt it necessary to point out to me the reasons why, in his mind, it was the right decision.”

I was moved by Gronouski’s report; it’s not often one catches so personal a glimpse of the effects of making so momentous a decision. But I was also troubled: Gronouski was a professional, a cautious man with words. I wondered if he was holding something back.

As occasionally happens when one writes a book, someone else reads it, and then things often get more intriguing. I recently received a letter from Carl Leiden, professor emeritus of political science at the University of Texas at Austin. Leiden, whom I do not know, was a good friend of Gronouski. There was more to the story, Leiden suggested, than a former ambassador might have wished to tell me. He did, however, speak more freely to Leiden, who ran into Gronouski at a cocktail party. They started chatting as the party was winding down.

“It was always my habit in interviews to take no notes at the interview itself but rather to write up the encounter as soon as possible afterward,” he told me. “I might also add that I have an excellent memory, and when I reread the note that I had made, it coincided exactly with my memory down to the brand name of the bourbon consumed.”

“In the bar,” Leiden wrote, “Truman ordered for them both doubles of Old Grand Dad (not Southern Comfort) and then a second round. After an exchange of pleasantries Gronouski--so he said--asked Truman, not specifically about the bombs, but rather in general whether there were any things that he regretted about his administration.

“Truman said instantly, ‘The bomb, of course.’ He went on to say that he had recurring nightmares about the dropping of the bombs and that he considered that it was the greatest mistake that he had made. But after detailing this, he added, significantly, I think, that of course he could never publicly repudiate his decision at the time. He would simply have to live with it.

“There was no reason for Gronouski to tell me this story. He must have told it in one variation or another to dozens of people. We all vary the details of our stories somewhat as we repeat them with the passage of time. But there was no reason for him to be untruthful to me, for the story just came out in conversation. I was convinced that he believed it. Like you, I was impressed by it, particularly by three things: One, Truman’s admission without prompting that dropping the bomb was his biggest mistake; two, his tortured dreams and nightmares about the bombings; and three, his insistence that he could not go public with this.”

Leiden’s account, a side of Give ‘Em Hell Harry we don’t often see, was corroborated in part by Joe O’Donnell, a World War II Marine Corps photographer. In 1950, O’Donnell and a number of other newsmen accompanied Truman to Wake Island to cover his visit with Gen. Douglas MacArthur. During a walk along the beach, O’Donnell turned to Truman and said, “ ‘Mr. President, I was a photographer at Hiroshima and Nagasaki with the Marine Corps, and I saw lots. I just wondered if you ever had second opinion [sic] about dropping the bombs?’ And boy, so sharp, he said, ‘Hell, yes! And I’ve had a lot of misgivings afterward.’ And I was so shocked, I was afraid to say, ‘What kind of misgivings?’ and you can take that for what it’s worth. I don’t know what he meant.”

After 53 years, historians still do not know the full story of why the atomic bombs were used. Truman’s daughter, Margaret, has refused to respond to scholarly requests to see all of his papers related to this decision. It may well be that the president did, in fact, believe the bombs had to be used to save lives--and that what he told Gronouski did not represent a serious reconsideration. Perhaps his comments were simply the understandable ruminations of a man whose decision resulted in more than 250,000 human deaths.

On the other hand, it was only a few months after succeeding Franklin Delano Roosevelt that a very inexperienced Truman had to make his most important decision. We also know that he was strongly influenced by his secretary of state, James F. Byrnes, whom many historians believe wanted to demonstrate the bomb to make Russia more “manageable” (as he told one scientist). Truman subsequently fired Byrnes and came to feel that Byrnes had misled him on many matters, and it is possible that his feelings extended to Hiroshima-related issues as well. The poignancy of both versions of the talk with Gronouski suggests that in his heart of hearts, the president may have had far more that he wanted to say about the atomic bombings than he ever felt was really possible.