President Truman’s Anti-Jewish Diary Entries

Peter J. Kuznick’s July 18 commentary on President Truman [and his comments on Jews in a 1947 diary] is a hatchet job. He implies that Truman’s policies caused the Cold War, a revisionist canard long since disproved by historians willing to look at the facts about Stalin’s aggressive policies objectively rather than through an anti-American prism. He hints darkly that Truman’s alleged racism may have been a factor in the nuclear bombing of Japan but gives no evidence for this allegation. He is oblivious to the hopeless naivete of Henry Wallace, who almost became Roosevelt’s running mate instead of Truman. He never mentions NATO, the Marshall Plan and Truman’s defense of democracy throughout Western Europe at a time when many future allies came close to going Communist.

Kuznick makes his agenda clear at the end: He hates the Bush administration, and Truman reminds him too much of President Bush. This hatred has blinded him to the many successes of the Truman administration.

Steven R. Gerber

New York City

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Regarding all the recent fuss about Truman and bigotry, let us not lose sight of the fact that Truman was raised in an environment of strict 19th century American values. His strength of character was rooted in those values, just as his strength as a leader was rooted in his personal philosophy that when it became one’s responsibility to make a decision, one had to make the best possible decision for all concerned and then stand ready to accept responsibility for the consequences.

Truman may have harbored personal prejudices, played poker, drunk whiskey and used colorful language in his personal life, but he also had enough soul to know that these things were vices and that they must be cast aside when making important decisions that affected the fate of people and nations. He knew that he would be held accountable for the choices he made. This is what “The Buck [i.e., blame] Stops Here” meant -- something the present administration seems to have forgotten.

William L. Moore

Hollywood

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So it has come to light that Truman thought that “the Jews” were selfish. Surely, honesty requires us to admit that the Jews, fleeing from the murderous hatefulness of Europeans, acted selfishly when they colonized British Mandate Palestine, treating the resident Palestinians as being, in effect, nonpersons. The world is still suffering from the dreadful consequences that have flowed out of this act of selfishness.

But Truman should have been the last one to cast stones at the Jews or anyone else. Truman, as the leader of the American people, committed what must be history’s ultimate act of selfishness on behalf of any people. For the ostensible purpose of preventing the deaths of a few thousand American GIs, which might have resulted from an invasion of Japan, Truman chose to murder 300,000 or more Japanese civilians with his nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In doing so, he flung open the doors to a world in which all life on this planet remains forevermore under the shadow of a nuclear holocaust.

K.V. Bapa Rao

Los Angeles