#Truman administration

[deadpresidents]

"To hell with them. When history is written they will be the sons of bitches -- not I."

-- President Harry S. Truman, on his political opponents, personal diary entry, December 1, 1952

[dadsinsuits]

Lewis B. Schwellenbach

[todaysdocument]

“Dear President Truman,

I am 9 years old and I think it was a disgrace that in Washington 51 children were not let in to a hotel because 4 children were colored.  The capital is supposed to be for freedom.” May 28, 1948.

Collection HST-OFF: Official Files (Truman Administration)

Series: Official Files

File Unit: Official File 93B

Transcription: 

93-B

May 28, 1948

Dear President Truman,

I am 9 years old and I think it was a disgrace that in Washington 51 children were not let in to a hotel because 4 children were colored.  The capital is supposed to be for freedom.  I am proud to be an american but this makes me feel ashamed because in my own classroom we made up a play on brother hood.

Sincerly,

J. Jagliarin

---

x

[Drawing of 2 children, one with a colored-in face and one with a light face]

[Drawing of a person at a hotel, with words "no room"]

[the-technicolor-whiscash]

I made a trucoop amv because this is my life now. I wanted to channel that mid-aughts naruto amv energy. I'm not proud of how long this took me and how much of that was spent rifling through dvds. Amazing how just some basic level editing and a cascada song can turn twin peaks into gay cinema.

[petsincollections]

W. Averell Harriman With Nikita Khrushchev During 1959 Trip to the Soviet Union

Exterior view believed to have been taken in the gardens of the government's guest dacha Ogarevo located west of Moscow, Russia. Nikita Khrushchev is on the left holding a hedgehog found along the path. W. Averell Harriman is on the right and Frol Kozlov and Yuri Zhukov are in the center looking at the hedgehog. Photograph appeared with Harriman article published in Life Magazine, July 13, 1959. Charles W. Thayer accompanied Harriman as a guide and confidant on the trip which took place May 12 - June 26, 1959. Harriman went as a special foreign correspondent for the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA). Trip visits included Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev, Yalta, etc., as well as areas in Siberia and the Urals, and ended with a meeting with Nikita Khrushchev. There is a 2x2 original negative. Credit: Photographer: Charles W. Thayer

This item was produced or created on June 23, 1959.

The creator compiled or maintained the parent series, Photographs Relating to the Administration, Family, and Personal Life of Harry S. Truman, between 1957–2023.

National Archives and Records Administration. Office of Presidential Libraries. Harry S. Truman Library. (4/1/1985 - 7/31/2011)

[denimbex1986]

'In this opening stanza of one of my favorite poems, “La Jornada” by Antonia Quintana Pigno, the speaker laments the disastrous effects of J. Robert Oppenheimer’s love affair with New Mexico.

She suggests that her own love affair as a brown woman with the white scientist could have stopped the Manhattan Project and the development of the atomic bomb. This poem ran through my mind multiple times as I watched Christopher Nolan’s film Oppenheimer.

Like Nolan’s other films, the depiction of women in Oppenheimer is terrible. In this one, he manages to reduce two scientists—Jean Tatlock, a psychiatrist who was also queer, and Katherine “Kitty” Oppenheimer, a botanist—to a floozy and a drunk who are both in love with Oppie, not to mention that they are two of only four women with significant speaking parts. (The third is also involved in an extra-marital affair with Oppenheimer and the fourth was a Manhattan Project scientist who is depicted as trying to shut down the use of the bomb for war purposes. But I digress.) Quintana Pigno writes lovingly about her “Nuevo Méjico,” but it’s a different love than Oppenheimer had for New Mexico.

Oppenheimer

I could have loved you

wrapped my legs tightly

around your white buttocks

to keep you thinly against me

without desire

for food

for water from mountain streams

for the journey to Jornada del Muerto

for the creation of Trinity

“La Jornada” by Antonia Quintana Pigno

In the summer blockbuster, New Mexico serves as a desolate backdrop to Project Y and the Trinity test. The wind and rain that characterize the wild west that Oppenheimer and other Manhattan Project scientists must tame to build and test the bomb contradicts the querencia most of us have for our high desert homeland, the one that Quintana Pigno writes about. One of my favorite Oppenheimer quotes, which sits as an epigraph to “La Jornada,” features prominently in the film. The original quote, though, is different than the movie version. Oppenheimer once said, “My two great loves are physics and New Mexico. It’s a pity they can’t be combined.” In the film, Oppie says, “When I was a kid, I thought that if I could find a way to combine physics with New Mexico, my life would be perfect.” The truth is that his love for New Mexico, like his other romantic affairs, was disastrous. Who should really be pitied here? The truth is, Oppenheimer knew very little about people in New Mexico because he often went to New Mexico to be alone, that is, until he created a government project that changed the cultural and physical landscape of my ancestors forever.

Those left out of Oppenheimer

With the attention that the film has received, many people have been able to critique how the film leaves out entire populations of people, such as Indigenous communities, downwind communities, and Nuevomexicana/o farmers. It has allowed us to better explain to the world that New Mexico was not uninhabited in the 1940s. In fact, it has been inhabited since time immemorial. In a recent interview, I finally realized that the journalist was unaware of New Mexico’s geography, and I explained to her that Trinity and Los Alamos were 200 miles apart when I finally realized that she did not know this as she asked her questions. Yet another called it “Mexico” but then corrected herself and repeated “New Mexico.” Don’t get me wrong, I’m grateful that we have this chance to explain these things, and I don’t fault people for not knowing the geography of New Mexico. Certainly, the film makes no effort to distinguish the Pajarito Plateau (Los Alamos) from the Tularosa Basin (Trinity site); New Mexico is one amorphous, desolate desert in the film. Nevertheless, this portrayal is just another effect of nuclear colonialism.

After two bombs were used to attack Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, in August 1945, news of Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project broke worldwide. Oppie’s face appeared on the November 8, 1948, cover of TIME. As Hollywood magic would have it, Oppenheimer sees his reflection on the magazine cover as he walks into the Oval Office to meet with President Truman in the film. (Oppenheimer resigned from Los Alamos on October 16, 1945, but this inaccuracy with the TIME cover does not actually change much in the film.) It is during this scene that Truman asks Oppenheimer, “I hear you’re leaving Los Alamos. What should we do with it?” To which Oppenheimer responds, “Give it back to the Indians.” Not only is this comment ignorant, but it’s also racist. Oppenheimer and Groves knew who they displaced to institute Project Y; they just didn’t care. Nuevomexicanas/os and Indigenous people, in addition to the Los Alamos Ranch School, were dispossessed from their homes and homelands on the Pajarito Plateau. Not only did they not return the land, but the colonizers never left.

Dealing with the fallout

New Mexicans were left to contend with the lasting effects of the Manhattan Project, including intergenerational trauma, disease and death, contamination, secrecy and obscurity, and environmental racism. In Resolana: Emerging Chicano Dialogues on Community and Globalization by Miguel Montiel, Tomás Atencio, and E.A. “Tony” Mares, Atencio writes about Los Alamos and how northern New Mexico communities have resisted the effects of the Manhattan Project. Atencio writes, “Since the mid-1940s villagers had recognized the dangers of radiation, as men pushing wheelbarrows full of waste in the Los Alamos National Laboratories (LANL) suddenly turned ashen, went home, and died. In the villages, meanwhile, children were dying of leukemia. Despite the evidence from Los Alamos and the knowledge that chemicals, including commercial fertilizer, were polluting the land, we had been told that modern technology would improve nature” (Atencio 27). Stories of family members getting sick or dying because of their work at the Labs are no longer restricted to whispers at kitchen tables, and initiatives to keep traditional knowledge alive and in practice are thriving. Still, other northern New Mexicans, especially, are proud of the work they did and continue to do at the Labs. It’s a conundrum.

In southern New Mexico, the communities surrounding the Trinity site continue to deal with the legacy of illness and death created by the plutonium bomb called the Gadget. New research shows that fallout from the Trinity test reached forty-six states plus Canada and Mexico. A recent New York Times article quotes from the report that “locations in New Mexico where radionuclide deposition reached levels on par with Nevada” from atmospheric nuclear tests conducted at the Nevada Test Site. The new study offers support for the ongoing efforts to amend the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act to include the Trinity downwinders, who are not eligible under the current federal law. Since its establishment in 1990, the RECA fund has paid out over $2 billion; New Mexican downwinders have never been eligible for compensation under RECA.

Our own role in the current nuclear moment

Last week, the US Senate passed a bill to amend the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA). This new amendment would include not only New Mexico downwinders, but also it includes post-1971 uranium workers, other downwinders of the Nevada Test Site atmospheric nuclear tests, and downwinders in Guam from testing in and the Pacific Islands. The House must pass their version of this bill now, which is integral before RECA sunsets in 2024. People can call their US Representatives and ask them to support the RECA amendment.

But there is another conversation that has opened recently in New Mexico around the legacy of the nuclear industrial complex. In January 2022, the Archbishop of the Archdiocese of Santa Fe, John C. Wester, released a Pastoral Letter, “Living in the Light of Christ’s Peace: A Conversation toward Nuclear Disarmament,” which actually calls for the abolition of nuclear weapons. Suddenly, there is a new conversation happening around the present-day role of nuclear science at the National Laboratories in New Mexico, namely Los Alamos. The National Nuclear Security Administration has tasked Los Alamos with producing a minimum of thirty new plutonium pits per year with a goal of eighty new pits per year between LANL and a second location – the Savannah River Site.

At the end of Oppenheimer, viewers are left questioning the guilt the film’s protagonist might have felt unleashing nuclear weapons into the world. But shouldn’t we also question what role the United States and other nuclear weapons-wielding counties have in the future of nuclear weapons? We must consider how future generations will look back on our nuclear policies and the choices we make. Are nuclear weapons and all their inherent risks and public health impacts a legacy that we really want to pass on?'

[tomorrowusa]

Dr. Anthony Fauci voluntarily testified before a House committee and debunked MAGA Republican conspiracy theories regarding the COVID-19 pandemic.

While Donald Trump and his lickspittles were telling Americans to drink bleach, take useless malaria pills, stick ultraviolet lights up their butts, and eat horse paste, Dr. Fauci headed an effort to develop vaccines for COVID-19.

A reminder to people with short memories who view the Trump administration as some sort of bucolic paradise: The last quarter of that administration included the worst government response to an infectious disease outbreak since 1920. Trumpsters who want us to ignore Trump's horribly botched response to the pandemic are like cruise-liner enthusiasts who want us to ignore the last 2% of the voyage of the Titanic.

Economic activity ground to a halt in 2020 as the US slid into a recession. I took this picture of a sign at a dollar store which had been completely closed for almost two months.

The whole Trump clan was disdainful of the sacrifices hundreds of millions of Americans were making.

Why has the U.S. COVID-19 response been so bad? Jared Kushner, Vanity Fair suggests.

At Times Square Jared and Ivanka's contemptuousness was made into an ad before Election Day.

If you are looking for the Original Sin of Trump's pandemic response, it was on January 22nd when he basically told CNBC's Joe Kernen that COVID-19 was nothing to worry about.

Of course it wasn't "just fine".

Trump did not declare a state of emergency for seven weeks. That gave the virus plenty of time for it to spread throughout the US.

Republicans know that their Dear Leader totally mishandled the pandemic response. That's why they repeatedly try to make Dr. Fauci a type of scapegoat for Trump's horrendous incompetence. Dr. Fauci has spent his entire career fighting disease. Donald Trump has spent his entire career narcissistically promoting himself.

Harry Truman had a sign on his desk saying: "The Buck Stops Here!" If Trump had a sign on his Oval Office desk (which he seldom used except for photo ops) it would be: "It's Everybody's Fault But Mine!"

Don't be hesitant to remind people of how awful 2020 was. And point the finger of blame at the orange blob who was responsible for the catastrophe.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

August 8, 2024

Heather Cox Richardson

Aug 09, 2024

Fifty years ago, on August 9, 1974, Richard M. Nixon became the first president in U.S. history to resign.

The road to that resignation began in 1971, when Daniel Ellsberg, who was at the time an employee of the RAND Corporation and thus had access to a top-secret Pentagon study of the way U.S. leaders had made decisions about the Vietnam War, leaked that study to major U.S. newspapers, including the New York Times and the Washington Post. 

The Pentagon Papers showed that every president from Harry S. Truman to Lyndon B. Johnson had lied to the public about events in Vietnam, and Nixon worried that “enemies” would follow the Pentagon Papers with a leak of information about his own decision-making to destroy his administration and hand the 1972 election to a Democrat. 

The FBI seemed to Nixon reluctant to believe he was being stalked by enemies. So the president organized his own Special Investigations Unit out of the White House to stop leaks. And who stops leaks? Plumbers. 

The plumbers burglarized the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist in California, hoping to find something to discredit him, then moved on to bigger targets. Together with the Committee to Re-elect the President (fittingly dubbed CREEP as its activities became known), they planted fake letters in newspapers declaring support for Nixon and hatred for his opponents, spied on Democrats, and hired vendors for Democratic rallies and then scarpered on the bills. Finally, they set out to wiretap the Washington, D.C., headquarters of the Democratic National Committee, in the fashionable Watergate office complex.

Early in the morning of June 17, 1972, Watergate security guard Frank Wills noticed that a door lock had been taped open. He ripped off the tape and closed the door, but on his next round, he found the door taped open again. Wills called the police, who arrested five men ransacking the DNC’s files. 

The White House immediately denounced what it called a “third-rate burglary attempt,” and the Watergate break-in gained no traction before the 1972 election, which Nixon and Vice-President Spiro Agnew won with an astonishing 60.7% of the popular vote. 

But Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, two young Washington Post reporters, followed the sloppy money trail back to the White House, and by March 1973 the scheme was unraveling. One of the burglars, James W. McCord Jr., wrote a letter to Judge John Sirica before his sentencing claiming he had lied at his trial to protect government officials. Sirica made the letter public, and White House counsel John Dean immediately began cooperating with prosecutors.

In April, three of Nixon’s top advisors resigned, and in May the president was forced to appoint former solicitor general of the United States Archibald Cox as a special prosecutor to investigate the affair. That same month, the Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities, informally known as the Senate Watergate Committee, began nationally televised hearings. The committee’s chair was Sam Ervin (D-NC), a conservative Democrat who would not run for reelection in 1974 and thus was expected to be able to do the job without political grandstanding.

The hearings turned up the explosive testimony of John Dean, who said he had talked to Nixon about covering up the burglary more than 30 times, but there the investigation sat during the hot summer of 1973 as the committee churned through witnesses. And then, on July 13, 1973, deputy assistant to the president Alexander Butterfield revealed the bombshell news that conversations and phone calls in the Oval Office had been taped since 1971.

Nixon refused to provide copies of the tapes either to Cox or to the Senate committee. When Cox subpoenaed a number of the tapes, Nixon ordered Attorney General Elliot Richardson to fire him. In the October 20, 1973, “Saturday Night Massacre,” Richardson and his deputy, William Ruckelshaus, refused to execute Nixon’s order and resigned in protest; it was only the third man at the Justice Department—Solicitor General Robert Bork—who was willing to carry out the order firing Cox.

Popular outrage at the resignations and firing forced Nixon to ask Bork—now acting attorney general—to appoint a new special prosecutor, Leon Jaworski, a Democrat who had voted for Nixon, on November 1. On November 17, Nixon assured the American people that “I am not a crook.”

Like Cox before him, Jaworski was determined to hear the Oval Office tapes. He subpoenaed a number of them. Nixon fought the subpoenas on the grounds of executive privilege. On July 24, 1974, in U.S. v. Nixon, the Supreme Court sided unanimously with the prosecutor, saying that executive privilege “must be considered in light of our historic commitment to the rule of law. This is nowhere more profoundly manifest than in our view that 'the twofold aim (of criminal justice) is that guilt shall not escape or innocence suffer.'... The very integrity of the judicial system and public confidence in the system depend on full disclosure of all the facts….”

Their hand forced, Nixon’s people released transcripts of the tapes. They were damning, not just in content but also in style. Nixon had cultivated an image of himself as a clean family man, but the tapes revealed a mean-spirited, foul-mouthed bully. Aware that the tapes would damage his image, Nixon had his swearing redacted. “[Expletive deleted]” trended.

In late July 1974, the House Committee on the Judiciary passed articles of impeachment, charging the president with obstruction of justice, abuse of power, and contempt of Congress. Each article ended with the same statement: “In all of this, Richard M. Nixon has acted in a manner contrary to his trust as President and subversive of constitutional government, to the great prejudice of the cause of law and justice and to the manifest injury of the people of the United States. Wherefore Richard M. Nixon, by such conduct, warrants impeachment and trial, and removal from office.”

And then, on August 5, in response to a subpoena, the White House released a tape recorded on June 23, 1972, just six days after the Watergate break-in, that showed Nixon and his aide H.R. Haldeman plotting to invoke national security to protect the president. Even Republican senators, who had not wanted to convict their president, knew the game was over. A delegation went to the White House to deliver the news to the president that he must resign or be impeached by the full House and convicted by the Senate.

In his resignation speech, Nixon refused to acknowledge that he had done anything wrong. Instead, he told the American people he had to step down because he no longer had the support he needed in Congress to advance the national interest. He blamed the press, whose “leaks and accusations and innuendo” had been designed to destroy him. His disappointed supporters embraced the idea that there was a “liberal” conspiracy, spearheaded by the press, to bring down any Republican president.

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[charlesoberonn]

List of US Presidents and how many future presidents were born during their administrations

Before Independence: 8. Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Quincy Adams, Jackson, William Harrison

Before Presidency: 2. Van Buren, Taylor

Washington: 3. Tyler, Polk, Buchanan

Adams: 1. Fillmore

Jefferson: 3. Pierce, Lincoln, Johnson

Madison: 0.

Monroe: 2. Grant, Hayes

Quincy Adams: 0.

Jackson: 3. Garfield, Arthur, Harrison

Van Buren: 1. Cleveland

Henry Harrison: 0.

Tyler: 1. McKinley

Polk: 0.

Taylor: 0.

Fillmore: 0.

Pierce: 2. Teddy Roosevelt, Wilson

Buchanan: 1. Taft

Lincoln: 0.

Johnson: 1. Harding

Grant: 2. Coolidge, Hoover

Hayes: 0.

Garfield: 0.

Arthur: 2. FDR, Truman

Cleveland: 0.

Harrison: 1. Eisenhower

McKinley: 0.

Teddy Roosevelt: 1. LBJ

Taft: 2. Nixon, Reagan

Wilson: 2. Kennedy, Ford

Harding: 0.

Coolidge: 2. Carter, H.W Bush

Hoover: 0.

FDR: 1. Biden

Truman: 3. Clinton, W. Bush, Trump

Eisenhower: 0.

JFK: 1. Obama

LBJ: 0.

Nixon: 0.

Ford: 0.

Carter: 0.

Reagan: 0.

H.W Bush: 0.

Clinton: 0.

W. Bush: 0.

Obama: 0.

Trump: 0.

Biden: 0.

[findingrome1]

Peace be with you friends.

Today August 6th and later August 9th will mark the 79th anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This event marks the 1st and God willing only time when nuclear weapons were used in history. Since then history was permanently altered for better or for worse.

This choice is argued for as justified for numerous reasons. One of these chief arguments originally coming from the Truman administration is that of a grim calculation. They made the utilitarian argument that if these 2 bombs can end the war in 2 radical new demonstrations of force killing 100s of thousands then it is worth using. Since in November the USA alongside her allies would invade the home islands. This invasion in conservative estimates would lead to millions more war dead since Japan intended to mirror Germany and to fight to the bitter end. Furthermore take a moment and imagine yourself as the Truman administration in winter. You need to justify a draft expansion to a war worry nation for the Japanese meat grinder where millions of young men have already died. I can empathize with this sentiment and see the reasoning but the Magistrium of the Roman Catholic church and a deeper dive into history shows the use of Little Boy and Fat Man were morally grave actions.

I won't go into all details but I shall provide 2 excellent youtube videos covering this topic. One from World War Two (yes that's the name), and one from the Counsel of Trent. Now the utilitarian argument can overlap with the objective moral truths found in Christianity it still is deficient.

The Atomic bombings were unjustifiable. They targeted civilians by dropping on city centers to maximize their deaths. Miles away from significant military assets and factories. What helped to justify is during the course of ww2 both sides experimented with different theories of targeted civilians. This is because the powers involved were in a state of total war. This meant all sides sought to get the most out of their resources so the line between civilian and soldier was murky. Strategic bombing theory which developed in Europe in the 1920s was put into full effect with the UK under Air Marshal Harris against Germany and her allies. The USA from 1943 onwards was around the clock bombing Japan's economy to ruins. Now these were not justified either. This bombings intentionally ruined 100s of thousands of homes, killed 10s of thousands civilians. People who were not soldiers, but mostly women and children.

One final thing I shall note is that the United States and her allies made blunders in negotiations which prolonged the war. Imperial Japan would have been more keen to come to the peace table if they knew the Emperor would be allowed to live and keep his title even as a puppet. We knew about this through spying and backdoor diplomatic channels but still kept ambiguous on this. This isn't the only blunder but this is the most notable in my opinion. Please visit the links those professionals do a way better job than I could on a post I spent a half hour to write and they go into far greater detail than I did. Keep safe and God bless.

https://youtu.be/Y79iz3ufZbg?si=7Us2H3txroG7I1f6

https://youtu.be/6amuetZv-eM?si=bdAJc3bc9KKHEas0

[hussyknee]

I'm blocking ANY American I see pulling this shit from now on. The blood is almost pouring out of our fucking televisions because of Biden. And the Dems. They deserve eternity in Hell. The Republicans are not "worse"- they just have worse manners, they are less polite - that's the only difference.

I have seen more dead children in the last three weeks than I have seen in my entire life. You would think that seeing Biden, Trump, Hillary and Bernie all support "Israel's right to self-defence" for the last solid three weeks would be a wake up call. (Bernie issued a milquetoast statement a few days that maybe this shit should stop, without saying the word "ceasefire" once.)

Imani is a prominent activist on both Black Twitter and Disability Twitter who has been consistently speaking out for all the millions of people continuing to die and become disabled from the Biden Administration's eugenicist COVID policies over the last three years.

There's also this:

This goes all the way back to Harry Truman in 1948 who was almost single-handedly responsible for the colonization of Palestine to creat Israel. But it doesn't mention that the US political establishment was actually against him at the time because they rightly said it would ruin their relations with the Middle East, and Truman's relationship with his own State Department nearly broke down over it. General Marshall, architect of the Marshall Plan, held out until 30 minutes before Britain emancipated Palestine, which was the deadline to claim what would be the initial land for the state of Israel. His decision is said to have been influenced by his Christian upbringing, despite his distaste of both Jews and Zionism.

Now why would an antisemitic white Christian be in favour of herding Jewish war refugees into Israel, where everyone knew they would have to stay fighting Palestine until it was completely defeated, which they couldn't do without relying on the US for help? 🤔 And how would the US government have stayed committed to Israel ever since? Raise your hand if you know the answer!

But no, y'all don't need a system change, just someone who will hold the line at the top against white Christian fundamentalism. There's nothing entrenched here at all. 🙃

Meanwhile:

Adrian Hemond, a Michigan-based Democratic strategist, cautioned that there is a lot of time between now and Election Day in which voters could change their minds as passions cool. And, he said, voters are highly sympathetic to Israel right now, which could benefit Biden politically.

[deadpresidents]

Just saw Oppenheimer and I was a bit disappointed with how they portrayed Truman. He came across pretty poorly IMO. It was only one scene but I wondered what you thought.

I understand your disappointment and it certainly wasn't a very in-depth portrayal of Truman, but according to the book that the movie was largely based on -- American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO) -- the meeting that Oppenheimer had with President Truman went down pretty much as depicted in the film.

As Bird and Sherwin write in American Prometheus:

(O)n October 25, 1945, Oppenheimer was ushered into the Oval Office. President Truman was naturally curious to meet the celebrated physicist, whom he knew by reputation to be an eloquent and charismatic figure. After being introduced by Secretary [of War Robert P.] Patterson, the only other individual in the room, the three men sat down. By one account, Truman opened the conversation by asking for Oppenheimer's help in getting Congress to pass the May-Johnson bill, giving the Army permanent control over atomic energy. "The first thing is to define the national problem," Truman said, "then the international." Oppenheimer let an uncomfortably long silence pass and then said, haltingly, "Perhaps it would be best first to define the international problem." He meant, of course, that the first imperative was to stop the spread of these weapons by placing international controls over all atomic technology. At one point in their conversation, Truman suddenly asked him to guess when the Russians would develop their own atomic bomb. When Oppie replied that he did not know, Truman confidently said he knew the answer: "Never." For Oppenheimer, such foolishness was proof of Truman's limitations. The "incomprehension it showed just knocked the heart out of him," recalled Willie Higinbotham. As for Truman, a man who compensated for his insecurities with calculated displays of decisiveness, Oppenheimer seemed maddeningly tentative, obscure -- and cheerless. Finally, sensing that the President was not comprehending the deadly urgency of his message, Oppenheimer nervously wrung his hands and uttered another of those regrettable remarks that he characteristically made under pressure. "Mr. President," he said quietly, "I feel I have blood on my hands." The comment angered Truman. He later informed David Lilienthal, "I told him the blood was on my hands -- to let me worry about that." But over the years, Truman embellished the story. By one account, he replied, "Never mind, it'll all come out in the wash." In yet another version, he pulled his handkerchief from his breast pocket and offered it to Oppenheimer, saying, "Well, here, would you like to wipe your hands?" An awkward silence followed this exchange, and then Truman stood up to signal that the meeting was over. The two men shook hands, and Truman reportedly said, "Don't worry, we're going to work something out, and you're going to help us." Afterwards, the President was heard to mutter, "Blood on his hands, dammit, he hasn't half as much blood on his hands as I have. You just don't go around bellyaching about it." He later told [Secretary of State] Dean Acheson, "I don't want to see that son-of-a-bitch in this office ever again." Even in May 1946, the encounter still vivid in his mind, he wrote Acheson and described Oppenheimer as a "cry-baby scientist" who had come to "my office some five or six months ago and spent most of his time wringing his hands and telling me they had blood on them because of the discovery of atomic energy."

[todaysdocument]

Letter from Andrew S. Evans to President Harry S. Truman

Collection HST-OFF: Official Files (Truman Administration)Series: Official FilesFile Unit: Segregation, July 1948-June 1949, OF 93b

3228-Hiatt Pl. N.W.

Wash; 10, DC

June 20, 1949

Dear Mr. President,

I live about three yards from a white playground, yet it is a public school playground. I am a colored boy and not allowed to go on it. All the white boys enjoy playing with me. But I am put off by the adult managers. I am writing you for a consideration because my playground is 4 or 5 blocks away. My parents are afraid of me being hit by cars. I am eleven yrs. old. Please answer.

Sincerely,

Andrew S. Evans

[added by hand in pencil "6 child's letter" "93-B" 'X93 miscel"]

[fillejondrette]

trump now referring to himself as “a fine and brilliant young man” you were born during the truman administration

[animentality]

Have you seen Oppenheimer, and if so, should I see it? I, knowing nothing about the movie, just sorta assumed it was either history-related or historical fiction and never learned anything about it or mustered up the give-a-damn to give it a shot (I am not a history buff).

You know...

I saw it...and I generally liked it...but I honestly think that it was kind of messy.

Like here's the thing about historical fiction...most people are not atomic bomb/Oppenheimer experts.

So they don't know most of this stuff by heart.

They remember shit like the Manhatten project and they know jfk and they know truman. They know America dropped atomic bombs on Japan.

But oppenheimer the movie like...throws so much shit at you, without even bothering to give you the context?

Like I say this as someone who has a decent knowledge of American history...there were some parts that were so obscure historically and politically that I honestly didn't know why the fuck I should care.

They would shout out names nonstop, referring to real life people, but these names have no context. Then they'd continue to expound upon the politics of these names...but why would we know who Patton George Lucas and Terry Yasolfis Mayweather and Gary Frederick Friedman are, especially if they were not presidents, senators, or governors?

Like these are random ass administrative assholes and forgotten military figures and obscure political jackals, who weren't well known because they never achieved high offices...

And they were from fifty fucking years ago?

Why would the average film watcher know them unless they fucking studied up?

See I like historical fiction, but it has to make me care!! Give me context!!! Tell me who these people are and show me through drama!!! That's why we're watching a MOVIE and not a documentary or reading a Wikipedia article.

And the main problem is that the movie is 3 hours long and absolutely NOWHERE in it does it EVER give us a fucking year, a location, or even a damn university.

It just throws you at Oppenheimer and says this asshole is sad and he has a lot of sex and he's inventing a bomb.

And it's like...I did enjoy it, when I understood it...but it doesn't let you breathe much.

Like the parts that are great are the parts where you can figure out what's happening.

Oh look they're blowing shit up in the desert.

Or the endless cheating subplots. Or the politics of the classroom and the socialist tendencies right at the height of the McCarthy era.

That stuff was fun.

But the parts that are bad are like...Cillian Murphy talking very quickly about a military prick that he hates while the board that's reviewing his security clearance is talking about people that we never see on screen, who are literally just floating names to memorize.

It was like a pop quiz movie sometimes, and I found that off-putting.

It also flashes between time periods quickly and without easy transitions, just hard cuts, which can be really confusing and odd.

So I would recommend you not see it in theaters if you're not a history buff. Or specifically, a fan of world war 2 and Oppenheimer and know everything about atomic bombs.

Watch it at home so you can Google who Heisenberg is.

[mariacallous]

Over the past three and a half years, U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris has faithfully echoed her boss, U.S. President Joe Biden, by invoking pretty much the same hegemonic worldview that every American president has embraced since World War II. As Harris put it in a 2023 speech—quoting a favorite phrase of Biden’s—“a strong America remains indispensable to the world.”

But the United States may be downgraded to a humbler status if Harris is elected president in November, based on the thinking of her chief advisors.

In their written work, Harris’s national security advisor, Philip Gordon, and deputy national security advisor, Rebecca Lissner, have sketched the outlines of a new worldview in which Washington frankly acknowledges its past excesses and dramatically lowers its ambitions. Or as Lissner put it in An Open World: How America Can Win the Contest for 21st Century Order, the 2020 book she coauthored with another Biden administration official: The United States should give up on strategic primacy and the “increasingly obsolete post-Cold War ‘liberal international order.’”

Instead of seeking to remain the unquestioned hegemon, the United States should seriously downsize its global role, wrote Lissner and her co-author, Mira Rapp-Hooper, who is currently Biden’s National Security Council director for East Asia and Oceania. It’s past time for Washington to discard the “messianic” goal of transforming the world in its image—the United States’ basic policy approach going back to Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Harry Truman. Instead, it should ratchet down to a much narrower role: merely preserving an open global system in which the United States can prosper.

“As the unipolar moment wanes, so too must any illusions of the United States’ ability to craft order unilaterally and universally according to its own liberal preferences,” Lissner and Rapp-Hooper wrote. “Insisting upon the United States’ international leadership role but departing from reliance on primacy as the cornerstone of a messianic liberal mission, a strategy of openness departs from post-Cold War liberal universalism, Cold War-style containment, and the traditional alternative of retrenchment.”

This new approach would mean a lot of accommodation of autocratic and illiberal regimes and a discarding of ideological crusades or containment strategies—all in the pragmatic interest of keeping trade open and bolstering cooperation on critical issues such as climate change, future pandemics, and artificial intelligence regulation. To put it simply, Lissner and Rapp-Hooper argued that policies of containment and hegemony should be supplanted by the far more modest goal of ensuring an “accessible global commons.” The United States has one critical task left as the “indispensable” superpower, they wrote: It is “the only country that can guarantee an open system.”

Gordon would likely agree—at least about leaving behind, at long last, the messianic strain in U.S. foreign policy. His own 2020 book, Losing the Long Game: The False Promise of Regime Change in the Middle East, is a fierce dissection of various failed U.S. efforts in the region dating back 70 years to the CIA-orchestrated ouster of Iranian President Mohammad Mossadegh.

Though he lumped in Afghanistan—which is technically in central Asia—with the failed U.S. interventions in Egypt, Iraq, Iran, Libya, and Syria, Gordon was right to see a common theme: regime change almost never works. And like the proverbial lunatic who tries the same thing over and over thinking he might get a different result, U.S. policymakers never seem to learn the right lessons, he argued.

In every case, from 1953 (Mossadegh), to two disastrous episodes in Afghanistan (the 1980s and post-9/11), to the catastrophic invasion of Iraq in 2003, and to fitful efforts in Egypt, Libya, and Syria after the 2011 Arab Spring, Gordon identified a pattern.

“As different as each episode was, and as varied as were the methods used, the history of regime change in the post-World War II Middle East is a history of repeated patterns,” he wrote, “in which policymakers underestimated the challenges of ousting a regime, overstated the threat faced by the United States, embraced the optimistic narratives of exiles or local actors with little power and vested interests, prematurely declared victory, failed to anticipate the chaos that would inevitably ensue after regime collapse, and ultimately found themselves bearing the costs—in some cases more than a trillion dollars and thousands of American lives—for many years or even decades to come.”

Gordon noted that critics, especially the few remaining neoconservatives in Washington, would argue that in some cases regime change had worked very well. This is most notably true in the case of postwar Germany and Japan. But he argued persuasively that these were unique circumstances: two highly advanced countries after a devastating world war. And had it not been for the strange annealing effect of the subsequent 40-year-long Cold War, even the successful transformations of Germany and Japan might not have worked as completely as they did because U.S. patience would have grown thin very quickly—as it has in subsequent cases. A faster U.S. withdrawal from Europe and Japan might well have undercut the effort to fundamentally change Berlin and Tokyo.

Grim and exhaustive as Gordon’s assessment is, it actually understates the case for change. That’s because, added all together, these failed U.S. attempts at transformation contributed mightily to the growing obsolescence of the current liberal international order that so concerns Lissner and Rapp-Hooper.

The history that Gordon recounts is a history that keeps on giving. Today the number-one menace keeping the United States tied down in the Middle East is the very same Islamic Republic of Iran that rose to power fueled by its opposition to the American “Great Satan,” produced by the 1953 coup and empowered by the 2003 invasion of Iraq. In fact, a U.S. Army study completed in 2018 found that “an emboldened and expansionist Iran appears to be the only victor” in George W. Bush’s Iraq war—the exact opposite of what Bush and his neoconservatives sought.

The vicious spiral set in motion by these misguided policy choices undermined U.S. legitimacy—or its primacy, to use Lissner’s and Rapp-Hooper’s term—as global overseer. The unnecessary and fraudulently justified invasion of Iraq, and the drain on U.S. resources and attention that resulted, laid the groundwork for Washington’s 20-year failure in Afghanistan (which led to Biden’s declaration in August 2021 that he was putting an end to “major military operations to remake other countries,” which of course put the president in accord with Gordon’s advice). The Iraq catastrophe also exposed U.S. military vulnerabilities on the ground in the worst way, tutoring Russia, China, and the rest of the world in how to outmaneuver and fight what was once considered an unassailable superpower. Moreover, the Iraq and Afghanistan debacles projected an image of panicky U.S. retreat, from which Russian President Vladimir Putin may have drawn encouragement to invade Ukraine. (Putin also invoked the unilateral U.S. invasion of Iraq to justify his own aggression in Ukraine.)

As counterinsurgency expert David Kilcullen wrote in his book, The Dragons and the Snakes: How the Rest Learned to Fight the West, also released in 2020, the rising challenge to U.S. hegemony from countries such as China and Russia is linked to the United States’ “repeated failure to convert battlefield victory into strategic success or to translate that success into a better peace.” Over the past two decades, the lone superpower has allowed itself to get bogged down in a “seemingly endless string of continuous, inconclusive wars that have sapped [its] energy while [its] rivals prospered,” Kilcullen wrote.

And so the postwar international system, at least as once conceived, went down the tube as Beijing and Moscow began to declare that U.S. hegemony was no longer acceptable to them.

Beyond that, these failures helped to create the deep divisions in the American polity that led Lissner and Rapp-Hooper to conclude that traditional U.S. leadership is no longer tenable. Together these titanic errors of policy also helped to discredit the political establishment in Washington and open the way for former U.S. President Donald Trump and his “America First” neo-isolationism.

There were, to be sure, other U.S. failures that undermined U.S. legitimacy as global leader, Lissner and Rapp-Hooper wrote—especially the 2008 financial disaster generated by Wall Street greed and the fecklessness of Washington regulators. But it’s clear that—far more than any fundamental flaws within the international system itself—it was largely the excesses of America’s postwar agenda and the arrogance with which it was pursued that squandered the world’s trust.

Gordon didn’t go quite as far as Lissner and Rapp-Hooper in his conclusions. Known as a passionate trans-Atlanticist—he served as assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs in the Obama administration—Gordon acknowledged that “the regime change temptation will never go away.” He wrote: “The bias of American political culture, resulting from the country’s record of achievement and belief in its own exceptionalism, is to believe every problem has a solution.” Rather than reconfiguring U.S. policy entirely, he suggested that in most cases when it comes to rogue regimes “the best alternative to regime change looks a lot like the Containment strategy that won the Cold War.”

So where does this all leave us? There’s no use trying to unwind history and restore the old system. In many ways, despite their different conclusions, Gordon’s and Lissner’s books fit together like two big pieces of a puzzle: Thanks to the policy disasters detailed by Gordon (in which he took part, as a National Security Council official under then-President Barack Obama), some sort of humbler approach, along the lines proposed by Lissner and Rapp-Hooper, may be needed. And this strategy will likely be bipartisan to some degree.

Indeed, in their writings there is little doubt that Gordon and Lissner—the two chief foreign policy advisors to the woman who could soon be the next U.S. president—are in the process of codifying, perhaps for decades to come, the anti-interventionist impulse becoming ingrained in both political parties.

If Trump is elected instead of Harris, of course, he’s unlikely to embrace Lissner’s strategy of openness—at least not openly. (Trump continues to rhetorically demean U.S. allies and tout new tariffs as his main foreign-policy instrument.) What Trump is likely to do, however, is to continue to downgrade the United States’ global policeman role. Trump was instrumental in setting in motion the withdrawal from Afghanistan and, as Gordon wrote, also eager to pull out of Syria. Indeed, it is striking that after five years of dithering by Obama over whether to help the Syrian rebels, it was Trump who best put his finger on the problem. He questioned why the United States was helping to topple Syria’s dictatorial leader, Bashar al-Assad, when, as Gordon quoted Trump as saying, “Syria was fighting ISIS, and you have to get rid of ISIS. … Now we’re backing rebels against Syria, and we have no idea who these people are.”

Lissner and Rapp-Hooper’s prescriptions may be ambitious, but at the same time they are refreshingly modest in scope. Nothing has gotten Washington into more trouble over the decades than its continuing eruptions of hubristic policy. These extended from Wilson’s quixotic desire to make the world “safe for democracy” after World War I to then-Defense Department official Paul Wolfowitz’s uber-hawkish defense policy guidance from 1992, which embraced a frank post-Cold War policy of preventing the rise of rival military powers. It was this sort of thinking by Wolfowitz and his fellow neoconservatives that later helped justify the Iraq War.

Lissner and Rapp-Hooper’s open world concept also jibes with the changing calculus of our times: In economic terms, the divide between left and right wing is all but gone; instead, as Fareed Zakaria wrote in his 2024 book, Age of Revolutions, for the two political parties the old left versus right divide has been replaced by a struggle between those who want to keep the United States open to the world versus those who want to close it down more than ever. It is no accident that trade skeptics on the progressive left in the United States have come to lionize Trump’s former trade representative, Robert Lighthizer, for his tariff policies. (In his 2023 book, No Trade is Free, Lighthizer makes a point of thanking U.S. union leaders and acknowledging Lori Wallach—a progressive trade expert—as “a longtime friend and co-conspirator.”)

So Lissner and Rapp-Hooper may have chosen just the right battlefield to die on—or not. If we can salvage some degree of openness, we can save something of the old system. As they wrote: “Openness does not, of course, incorporate the totality of American strategic objectives. Other threats, like nuclear proliferation, disease, or terrorism, may menace vital U.S. interests. Yet closed spheres of influence—whether exercised regionally or in particular domains—present the greatest danger to the United States’ security and prosperity” because they preclude necessary international cooperation.

Another fundamental problem that Lissner and Rapp-Hooper hint at is that the United States may no longer be up to the task of fully managing the international system it created. There is a growing mismatch between the complexity of this world system and the level of knowledge in the U.S. populace because of laggard education and dysfunctional political systems. Americans may simply no longer understand the system—how global free trade works, how military alliances keep them safe—well enough to maintain it. At the very least, Americans now have very little sympathy for that system.

The United States’ domestic polarization may also wreak havoc on some of the solutions Lissner and Rapp-Hooper propose. The authors propose a plan to “harness the private sector for national advantage” and bring the tech sector and Washington closer together. “The next administration should consider elevating the Office of Science and Technology Policy to a National Emerging Technology Council (NETC) on par with the National Security Council and National Economic Council,” they write. Yet the leaders of the United States’ tech sector have long tried to keep their distance from Washington—especially on defense policy–except for a few oddball pairings such as Elon Musk and Donald Trump.

Perhaps the most fundamental question is whether the international system is really as obsolete as Lissner and Rapp-Hooper suggested. Yes, many problems the duo analyzed four years ago remain, including the increasing irrelevance of the World Trade Organization. But some of their views are dated. Lissner and Rapp-Hooper tended to echo the fears of Biden’s national security advisor, Jake Sullivan, and Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell, who warned in a 2019 essay in Foreign Affairs, “Competition Without Catastrophe,” of the menace of “China’s fusion of authoritarian capitalism and digital surveillance.” Similarly, Lissner and Rapp-Hooper wrote that “China is at the forefront of a new model of ‘techno-authoritarianism’ that could confer considerable competitive advantages.” Yet in the four years since the book’s publication, it’s become far clearer that China under President Xi Jinping has only fallen behind thanks to this new model, with its economy seriously stagnating and Xi pleading for more foreign investment.

Moreover, in the wake of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Washington has been forced to revert, to some extent, to its old role of global enforcer. This has proved especially true as the European Union has fallen behind the U.S. economically. As the Carnegie Endowment concludes in a new report that highlights how difficult it is to bring about strategic change in U.S. foreign policy, “the administration’s response to that crisis has been to expand America’s security role in Europe and thereby create a new status quo.” Much the same can be said of the United States’ role in the Middle East following Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel, as Biden found himself sending carriers and submarines to the Mediterranean and forced to defend Israel from the air.

Yet we are also clearly moving into some kind of a new anti-interventionist era wherein Washington’s default mode—regardless of who occupies the White House—will be to stay out of global conflicts wherever and however possible. And it seems likely that if Harris wins, Gordon and Lissner will be major players. Gordon, to be sure, is more of a traditionalist who would be reluctant to tamper too much with the United States’ global security role. But it’s noteworthy that Lissner had a significant role drafting Biden’s national security strategy—and yet she chose to join the vice president’s staff in 2022 to influence policy for the next generation.

Asked whether Harris embraces Gordon’s and Lissner’s views, an aide to the vice president said only that Harris “is advised by a range of people with diverse views, and their previous writings reflect their personal views. Anyone looking to understand the vice president’s worldview should look at what she has said and done on the world stage.”

As for Harris’s current superior, perhaps Biden’s most enduring legacy—one that a President Harris would surely continue—will be that he sought to conduct a sort of halfway-house foreign policy that bridges the global policeman era and this new era of restraint. Biden has also attempted to find a workable compromise between the old consensus on globalization and the emerging cross-party consensus in favor of protectionism and industrial policy. As foreign-policy expert Jessica T. Mathews argued in Foreign Affairs, Biden has “unambiguously left behind the hubris of the ‘unipolar moment’ that followed the Cold War, proving that the United States can be deeply engaged in the world without military action or the taint of hegemony.”

At the same time, however, since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Hamas’s attack on Israel, Biden has often gone back to invoking the old postwar view of the United States’ role, calling the United States the “arsenal of democracy” (FDR’s phrase) and declaring that “American leadership is what holds the world together.”

And given the ongoing crises around the world—especially in Europe, the Middle East, and possibly East Asia if the Taiwan issue heats up—it’s highly questionable whether the United States can adjust downward when there is no other major power that even comes close to approaching Washington’s global sway. If it can, then maintaining global openness may be a worthy—and perhaps achievable—goal.