Thirty-third president of the United States
Harry S. Truman (1884-1972) was the 33rd president of the United States, serving from 1945 to 1953. A member of the Democratic Party, he previously served as a United States senator from Missouri from 1935 to 1945 and briefly as the 34th vice president in 1945 under Franklin D. Roosevelt. Assuming the presidency after Roosevelt's death, Truman implemented the Marshall Plan in the wake of World War II to rebuild the economy of Western Europe and established both the Truman Doctrine and NATO to contain the expansion of Soviet communism. He proposed numerous progressive domestic reforms, but few were enacted by the conservative coalition that dominated the Congress.
Born
Articles
Machiavelli and U.S. Politics Part 5: War Crimes and Atrocities, by Lawrence M. Ludlow, FFF.org, 24 Aug 2005
Continues the examination of Machiavelli's The Prince, focusing on what he wrote about war and finding parallels with recent U.S. policy
Continues the examination of Machiavelli's The Prince, focusing on what he wrote about war and finding parallels with recent U.S. policy
President Truman's bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is a prime example [of rationalization]. Those nuclear explosions yielded approximately 200,000 innocent civilian victims. Their real purpose was to "send a message" to ... the Soviet Union ... Truman, however, misled Americans by claiming that the nuclear weapons were used to prompt a faster surrender and save the lives of 500,000 American soldiers ... Americans were not told that the Japanese leadership already had sued for peace before the bombings—seeking virtually the same terms that were obtained after the bombings.
Related Topics: Germany, Iraq, Iraq War, Italy, Politicians, Protection Against Cruel and Unusual Punishments, Vietnam War, War
The Political Sterility of Jon Stewart, by Sheldon Richman, The Goal Is Freedom, 7 Nov 2014Laments the dearth of poltical satire, as evidenced by Jon Stewart's backtracking on his answer about not having voted and recanting a 2009 comment about Harry Truman being a war criminal
[I]n 2009 [Stewart] called President Harry Truman a "war criminal" for the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which killed or maimed nearly 200,000 Japanese civilians ... [T]hat statement ... was the unvarnished truth. Truman's victims threatened no one, and the war was essentially over. Yet those civilians were subjected to the most ghastly of fates. Some were vaporized on the spot, literally leaving only their shadows behind. And ... Truman dropped the second bomb three days later. He considered dropping a third, but decided he didn't want to kill any more children.
Truman, A-Bombs, and the Killing of Innocents, by Sheldon Richman, The Goal Is Freedom, 9 Aug 2013
Written on the 68th anniversary of the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki, discusses whether that bombing and the previous one at Hiroshima were really necessary and whether they should be considered war crimes
Written on the 68th anniversary of the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki, discusses whether that bombing and the previous one at Hiroshima were really necessary and whether they should be considered war crimes
Sixty-eight years ago today a president of the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Nagasaki, a city full of innocent Japanese. It was the second time in three days that Harry Truman had done such a thing ... Appallingly, history has been kind to Truman, and people who profess a variety of political views claim to admire the "plucky" plain-speaking guy from Independence, Mo. ... [I]f Truman wasn't a mass murderer, no one was. (Truman said no to a bombing demonstration on an uninhabited island.) He was a liar too. In announcing the first bombing, he called Hiroshima an "Army base."
The introductory paragraph uses material from the Wikipedia article "Harry S. Truman" as of 7 Sep 2024, which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0.