TIME - Man of the Year/CompactPublishing-TimeMagazine-TimeManOfTheYear-Win31MSDOS.iso/moy/moyfiles/1945moy.001

Text File | 1993-07-21 | 14.3 KB | 306 lines

                                                                              ╚December 31, 1945

Man of the Year:Harry Truman

The Bomb & the Man



     The sweep of events in 1945 engulfed a whole era. The
modern Dark Ages gave way to a period in which man had another
of his historically rare and fragile chances to seek peace and
ensue it. The Axis, an insane Atlantis which no Francis Bacon
would ever mourn, was shattered and submerged.

     The men who had made that era perished with it, Benito
Mussolini, Italy's self-styled Man of Destiny, dies
ignominiously and was hung by his heels like a slaughtered pig
alongside the body of his mistress. Adolf Hitler, Man of 1938,
died by his own hand, also with his mistress, in the rubble of
Berlin. Or did he die? Dead or alive, it did not much matter:
Adolf Hitler, the force, had perished.

     More obliterating than death was the continued life of
Hideki Tojo. But for the Battle of Midway, he would certainly
have been the Man of 1942. His war had been the coldest and most
calculating of all, his machinations the most arrogant, his
nation's defeat the most ruinous. When he tried to commit
suicide he failed again; at year's end he lived on, saved from
death by U.S. blood, shunned by his countrymen, still able to
read that U.S. strategists had decoded his every intention, that
he had never really had a chance.

     Death & the Ballot Box. Even among the victors, men's
fortunes rose and ebbed rapidly in the quick shift of the tides.

     Franklin Roosevelt, Man of 1932, 1934 and 1941, was dead,
struck down with dramatic suddenness before he could witness
the victory he had charted and planned. Had he lived, 1945 would
have been his year -- the final flowering of American hope and
strength which he had nurtured through black days made blacker
by American indecision. But now he lay in a grave at Hyde Park,
mourned by the world.

     Winston Churchill, Man of 1940, had somehow missed the
flood. He had led his country to victory, than, for all his
gallant stubbornness in the face of wartime disaster, suffered
a humiliating political defeat.

     To Chiang Kai-shek, China's Man of Eight Years, the events
of 1945 came as a reward for unwavering courage and patience.
Of all the Allies, China had endured the most. But the long-
awaited, almost-despaired-of peace found Chiang embroiled in
something close to civil war. He might well be the Man of 1946,
or of some later year; he was not the Man of 1945.

     Victory and Ravishment. Of all the world leaders of the
'30s and early '40s, the most solidly successful survivor was
Joseph Stalin. Yet Stalin's success was far from complete. His
own country, though victorious, was ravished. His world
revolution (if he still sought one) was still a distant goal.
War's end did not bring Communism to the world or even to much
of Europe.

     As the talk between the world and his wife showed, Joseph
Stalin was the most feared man of 1945. By his followers in
every country he was also the most admired. But he did not
dominate the year. And he ended it amidst rumors of ill health,
amidst mounting speculation whether his successor would be
Diplomat Molotov or Soldier Zhukov.

     Soldiers & the Bomb. Except for one thing, 1945 would have
been the year of the Allied military men, of Zhukov or
Montgomery, of Marshall, MacArthur, Eisenhower of Nimitz, or
-- as in many respects it was -- of G.I. Joe, an unwilling hero,
not knowing what he was fighting for but fighting superbly well.

     The biggest moments of 1945, save for that one thing, would
have been the German surrender at Reims, the Japanese surrender
aboard the Missouri.

     That one thing, the greatest of all 1945's great events,
was the atom bomb.

     In the light of the past, the significant fact about 1945
was that it was the last year of World War II. But in the light
of the future, it was the first year in which civilization
possessed, in the sober words of the Smyth Report, "the means
to commit suicide at will."

     What the world would best remember of 1945 was the deadly
mushroom clouds over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Here were the
force, the threat, the promise of the future. In their giant
shadows, 45,000 feet tall, all men were pygmies.

     The Assembly Line. If any one man had produced the atom
bomb, he would have been the Man of 1945 without challenge. But
science, as it became more complex, had become an assembly line,
where individual men contributed a turn here and there, often
without knowing what came off at the end.

     The atom bomb was the creation of France's long-dead Henri
Becquerel, who discovered radioactivity, and the Curies, who
discovered radium. It was the creation of Albert Einstein,
sitting quietly in an old sweater, keeping his speculative
pencil always pointed close to the secrets of physics.

     In the Manhattan project were hundreds of creators and
hundreds of others who helped make the creation possible. But
all of them, by the very nature of the project, were workers in
bits and pieces. Some of their names had become household words:
Major General Leslie R. Groves and Dr. Vannevar Bush, the
administrators; Drs. Compton and Fermi, the physicists; Drs.
Urey and Lawrence, the atom crackers; and Dr. J. Robert
Oppenheimer, sometimes called "the smartest of the lot," who
assembled the first bomb in New Mexico's desert fastness.

     But in all this group there was no man to whom the others
could point and say: "This is the one."

     The Man at Line's End. It was no scientist who, by historic
accident, somewhat unwittingly, somewhat against his own will,
became more than any other man responsible for the bomb, its use
in 1943 and its future. It was an ordinary, uncurious man
without any pretensions to scientific knowledge, without many
pretensions of any kind, a man of average size and weight,
wearing bifocal glasses, fond of plain food, whiskey-and-water
and lodge meetings. It was Harry Truman, 32nd President of the
U.S.

     In the '20s, when the tides of industry and empire were
running with intoxicating speed, Harry Truman was content to be
an obscure Missouri county judge. In the '30s, not by his own
momentum but by the chance whim of a political boss, he was in
the U.S. Senate. As 1945 began he was Vice President, a man
struck by political lightning at the Chicago convention while
eating a hotdog with mustard.

     As the year started, Harry Truman had no idea that his
Government was engaged in atomic research. At year's end,
President Truman was custodian of the bomb and its precarious
secret, buffer against its terror, repository of whatever
promise it might contain for a world which could use its secret
in peace.

     Harry Truman, a very plain man indeed, who had never sought
or dreamed of being Man of the Atomic Year, had been cast up to
his position by an accident of the tides, by the shifting forces
of politics. In the same startled and unpremeditated fashion,
mankind itself, shrinking from the shadow of Hiroshima, dwarfed
by the Event of 1945, had got where it was.

     Awkward Mantle. The Man of the Year personified the problem
of the year. His very name had almost the force of a pun. Like
most of mankind, he was ill prepared for the destiny and
responsibility which had been thrust upon him. He did not want
the responsibility; the destiny rested awkwardly on his
shoulders.

     Like many an average citizen Harry Truman greeted the bomb
with few immediate overtones of philosophic doubt. When it was
dropped on Hiroshima, by his order, he was aboard the cruiser
Augusta, returning from his first international conference at
Potsdam. He rushed to the officers' wardroom, announced
breathlessly: "Keep your seats, gentlemen . . . We have just
dropped a bomb on Japan which has more power than 20,000 tons
of TNT. It was an overwhelming success." Applause and cheering
broke out; the President hastened along to spread the word in
the other messes.

     His other announcement, released at the White House, showed
considerably more awareness of what the bomb meant to humanity
in good and evil. But a few weeks later he was again treating
it with an oddly offhand air. He chose a fishing lodge at
Tennessee's Reelfoot Lake, an informal "bull session" with
newsmen against a background of bourbon and poker, to announce
that the U.S. intended to keep the secret of the bomb to itself.

    Infinite Puzzle. This seemed no paradox to Harry Truman. But
the problem went deeper. The world, obviously, would not accept
a U.S. trusteeship. The Germans had started the race for the
bomb; the Japanese had been experimenting, too. Now the Russians
started working furiously. Any other nation with the inclination
and the money could get into the race, and some of them
doubtless would.

    The scientists, in coldly factual terms, spelled out the
possibilities:

 -- In three to five years, any nation could learn the bomb's
secret.

 -- The U.S. could have a stockpile of 10,000 bombs in ten to
15 years, any other nation presumably in 13 to 20 years.

 -- For a nation which wanted to use it, the bomb was a cheap
way to wage war -- perhaps ten, perhaps 100 times cheaper than
fighting with TNT.

     There was as yet no sign of confidence from the Man of the
Year, nor from most of humanity, that anything could be done
about the problem. The feeling was abroad that the complexity
of modern life had made all men, even Presidents, even Men of
the Year, mere foam flecks on the tide.

     Shallow Peace. In such a world, who dared to be optimistic?

     World War II had ended badly. Except on the military side,
where Allied might and Allied generalship were crushing and
supreme, it had never been fought well. The why of the fighting
had never been adequately spelled out. Franklin Roosevelt,
looking for a name for the war, could come up with nothing
better than "The War for Survival." Arthur Koestler, viewing the
whole catastrophe with detachment, said that it was a war in
which a lie fought against a half-truth. In such a contest, the
lie had had a tremendous psychological advantage.

     The war was over, but peace was only the absence of war.
Over Europe lay the heavy hand of political turmoil and hunger,
the unfathomable problems of reconstruction and reparations. The
Middle East was torn with strife, Asia wracked by revolt. Even
the fortunate Western Hemisphere contained some of the tightest
dictatorships in modern history.

     The struggle of freedom versus tyranny, of the individual
against the power of the state -- fought and won in the
speciously clear-cut terms of war -- was emerging again in the
more dubious terms of peace.

     In peacetime terms, as in the final analysis, it was the
battle of the compromising democrat against the implacable Left.
And in this conflict the democrat was under severe handicaps.
Some of the handicaps were self-imposed. In the democracies,
pundits and plain people alike were simply afraid of using the
four-letter words of contemporary politics. They refused to
recognize or admit that the Left was indeed implacable -- as it
was in Russia or in the words of Britain's Harold Laski. Like
the notion of sex in a previous generation, this thought was too
dangerous, or too horrible. It was not so much that the
democrats did not have a creed as that they found it difficult
and embarrassing to reconcile their belief with their actions.

     Eternal Distinction. The Democrat, who believed in the
practical necessity of compromise and who acknowledged the
innate imperfection and impermeability of man, had a creed of
his own. He acknowledged the eternal distinction between the
things of God and the things of Caesar, and the eternal
distinction between fundamental principle and practical human
expedience. He admitted that he did not understand the things
of God; but to the pitifully small extent that he did understand
them he called them principles -- and on these he could never
compromise. One of these principles, however hard of
application, was Freedom. Another of those principles was that
the end never justifies the means. And, putting those two
principles together, he could never allow himself to say that
it is justifiable to commit crimes in order to achieve for man
a "larger freedom."

     He did not say that it was his duty to establish moral or
other Utopias; indeed, he knew that men are incapable of doing
any such thing. He stood for compromise in all purely human
affairs precisely because he did not dare compromise with the
monstrous arrogance of the doctrine that the State is God.

     The corollaries of this fundamental belief were these:

 --  As a practical matter, the democrat searched the past for
every bit of political or economic wisdom which he could fit
into a pattern useful for the present.

 --  He believed that in the Democratic Society there is great
room for experiment, for the method of trial and error, for the
free play of economic and social innovation, including risk and
error.

 --  He believed that there is no practical problem of human
need or welfare which could not be solved in a liberal
Democratic Society. He knew that these problems were never
finally solved, but he did not admit that his society presented
any permanent bar to their solution.

     Evanescent Chance. Pondering the great events of 1945, the
democrat could justly feel that once again he had been given
another chance. One generation of tyrants had been overcome;
there were many places on earth where a man could walk proudly,
no matter his race or religion, his economic or political
beliefs.

     For the moment, at least, he could once again attach some
importance to matters irrelevant to war, less dynamic than
politics. He could turn some attention again to poetry and art.
He could applaud Actress-of-the-Year Ingrid Bergman, wrinkle his
pseudo-Philistine brow over the re-emergence of Artist-of-the-
Year Pablo Picasso, still full of invention and razzle-dazzle,
still able to rouse resentment. He could view the discovery of
streptomycin by Doctor-of-the-Year Selman Wakeman as something
more than irony.

     Conscious of the fact that he and his world had been given
added time to struggle against it. That, perhaps by the same
kind of accident which made Harry Truman the Man of 1945, was
the hope of 1946.