"Truman" visits Galion, defends past decisions

By Matt Echelberry

Inquirer Reporter

Date: April 11, 1951

Time: 5:00 a.m.

Loca­tion: The Blair House, Wash­ing­ton, D.C.

On a rainy early morn­ing, Pres­i­dent Harry S. Tru­man steps out of the Blair House on Penn­syl­va­nia Avenue, where he is stay­ing while the White House is under­go­ing exten­sive repairs. He greets a crowd of reporters with a sigh and announces that Gen­eral Dou­glas MacArthur, leader of mil­i­tary forces in Korea, is offi­cially relieved of his duties.

Tru­man went on to dis­cuss the chal­lenges he has faced since tak­ing office on Apr. 12, 1945, when Franklin D. Roo­sevelt died sud­denly. Just one day after tak­ing office, he felt as if “the moon, the stars, and all the plan­ets had fallen” on him. Through­out his tenure as pres­i­dent of the United States, from 1945–1952, Tru­man was con­fronted by sev­eral cru­cial deci­sions such as drop­ping the atomic bomb, found­ing the United Nations and pass­ing the Tru­man Doctrine.

This was the set up for a pre­sen­ta­tion at the Galion Pub­lic Library on Feb. 11. Ken­neth Ham­mon­tree, from Liv­ing His­tory Pro­duc­tions in Ash­land, por­trayed Harry Truman—wearing the man’s sig­na­ture eye­glasses. He explained that although Tru­man had the low­est pop­u­lar­ity rat­ing of any pres­i­dent when he left office, he is now regarded as one of the top five great­est presidents.

[/media-credit] Ken­neth Ham­mon­tree, por­tray­ing 33rd Pres­i­dent Harry S. Tru­man, presents facts about the man’s life at Galion Pub­lic Library on Feb. 11.

Upon tak­ing office, Tru­man quickly learned about the exis­tence of the Man­hat­tan Project to develop nuclear weapons. While he would ulti­mately give orders to drop two atomic bombs on the Japan­ese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (where more than 200,000 peo­ple died, in addi­tion to thou­sands more who suf­fered from radi­a­tion poi­son­ing) Ham­mon­tree noted that five days before the first drop, Amer­i­can planes dropped thou­sands of pam­phlets over Japan, beg­ging the Japan­ese peo­ple to implore their gov­ern­ment to sur­ren­der. The day before the drop, Amer­i­can offi­cials took to Japan­ese air­waves for one final plea.

“The dev­as­ta­tion was unbe­liev­able,” Ham­mon­tree said of the bomb­ings. How­ever, he said Tru­man gen­uinely believed that close to 2–3 mil­lion peo­ple were saved, both Amer­i­can and Japan­ese, because Japan­ese forces did not con­sider sur­ren­der to be an option: “They would have fought to the last person.”

Fol­low­ing the Japan­ese sur­ren­der, Tru­man was faced with tran­si­tion­ing the Amer­i­can econ­omy away from wartime pro­duc­tion, in addi­tion to Com­mu­nism and evolv­ing weapon tech­nol­ogy threat­en­ing world security.

When Tru­man ran for reelec­tion in 1948 against Demo­c­rat Thomas E. Dewey, he was not expected to win. Owing to his “whis­tle stop” cam­paign, Tru­man went on to win the race. There is a now infa­mous pic­ture of Tru­man hold­ing up a news­pa­per after Elec­tion Day with the head­line “Dewey Defeats Truman.”

The Korean War even­tu­ally broke out dur­ing his sec­ond term, and Ham­mon­tree explained that Tru­man ulti­mately fired Gen­eral MacArthur, which was a very unpop­u­lar deci­sion at the time, in order to pre­vent World War III. While MacArthur wanted to expand the war into China, Tru­man strongly dis­agreed because of the pact the coun­try had with Russia.

After his remarks, Ham­mon­tree allowed the “reporters” in the audi­ence to ask ques­tions. One ques­tion was how Tru­man got involved in politics.

Ham­mon­tree said Tru­man only had a high school edu­ca­tion and worked var­i­ous jobs and had some busi­nesses that failed. “He was a com­mon man.” How­ever, he ran for County Com­mis­sioner in Mis­souri, which led to him run­ning for a seat in the Sen­ate. Then, when Roo­sevelt pre­pared for a fourth term, he essen­tially forced Tru­man to run as Vice President.

When asked what he felt Truman’s great­est suc­cess was, Ham­mon­tree said there were sev­eral. Most notably was the estab­lish­ment of the nation of Israel in 1948, but he also helped estab­lish the United Nations and worked with the Sen­ate to cre­ate the Tru­man Doc­trine and the Mar­shall Plan.

Posted by Matt Echelberry on Feb 15 2013. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.