On our recent trip to the southeast part of the country we passed through Independence, MO and stopped to tour the Truman Presidential Museum and Library. While browsing through the many exhibits, I stopped and lingered for several minutes in front of a pencilled message that he had written to the Secretary of War giving his authority to use the atom bomb on the Japanese homeland in World War II. It simply said, “Sec War, Suggestions approved. Release when ready but not sooner than August 2. HST.” The date August 2, I’ve gone on to discover, was when he’d be on the way home from a meeting with Stalin and Churchill at the Potsdam Conference. He did not want them to know of his intentions while they still met and did not want them to react before that meeting adjourned.
At any rate, I thought that I would like to have had a photograph of that message which is being displayed behind glass, but photographs were not permitted. Not long ago we attended a fund-raising supper at Bismarck St. Mary’s High School where I entered a room where they were also sponsoring a used book sale. There I spotted the historian David McCullough’s biography entitled Truman and promptly bought it. In the photograph section of that book was a picture of the note, and I have spent some time reading and pondering that brief note and all the power its simple message expressed:
So much said with so few words!
That message poured a heady brew
which rose, foamed and overbrimmed
its turbid glass and flooded
those victim cities with waves
of fire and death. A firm hand
holding humble pencil wrote
this enjoining command. Kill
them to save American
lives went the argument, and
as written, so it was done.
