Human Wrongs Watch
By Ronald Takaki*, 11 August 2014 – TRANSCEND Media Service
During the days before that fateful August 6, 1945, General Douglas MacArthur learned that Japan had asked Russia to negotiate a surrender. “We expected acceptance of the Japanese surrender daily,” one of his staff members recalled. When he was notified that an atomic bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima, the general was “livid.” MacArthur declared that the atomic attack on Hiroshima was “completely unnecessary from a military point of view.”
Image: International Campaign Against Nuclear Weapons (ICAN)
Why then did the president make the decision to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima?
Harry S. Truman was an accidental president. He had been sworn into office only months earlier, when Franklin D. Roosevelt suddenly died on April 12 [1945].
Truman admitted to his wife that he had little knowledge of foreign policy. Feeling inadequate to fill the shoes of the great F.D.R., he had to face indignities and sarcasm.
In the streets, people asked, “Harry who?” and mocked him as “the little man in the White House.”
But Truman hid his insecurity behind a façade of toughness. Publicly, he presented himself as a man of the frontier. He blustered: “The buck stops here.”
HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 