Harry S Truman

THE MALEVOLENT PRESIDENT HARRY S TRUMAN

Harry S Truman has been referred to as “little” but he was not at all short. He has been referred to as “limited” and as “ignorant” although these descriptors do not accurately capture his actual conduct. The key to understanding his character and his conduct, and the key to understanding why it is that he has been referred to as “little,” is to grasp that here we had an utterly malevolent man — someone who took the greatest of delight in the doing of harm to those of whose existence he disapproved, and in general to anyone who sought in any way to oppose his desires. He said to his biographer, David McCullough, “I never gave anybody hell, I just told the truth and they thought it was hell,” and the historian repeated this saying on page 664 in his 2003 Pulitzer-Prize-winning biography TRUMAN exactly as if the making of such an assertion meant that that assertion needed to be the truth. However, when Truman said that to his biographer, he was merely lying — lying again. All he ever knew to do was give people hell, and lie. In fact we can safely assert that this man’s life –like that “S” middle initial– stood for nothing at all. THE PRESIDENTIAL PAPERS

“NARRATIVE HISTORY” AMOUNTS TO FABULATION, THE REAL STUFF BEING MERE CHRONOLOGY

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Harry S Truman HDT WHAT? INDEX

HARRY S TRUMAN PRESIDENT HARRY S TRUMAN

Table of Altitudes

Yoda 2 ' 0 '' Lavinia Warren 2 ' 8 '' Tom Thumb, Jr. 3 ' 4 '' Lucy (Australopithecus Afarensis) 3 ' 8 '' Hervé Villechaize (“Fantasy Island”) 3 ' 11'' Charles Proteus Steinmetz 4 ' 0 '' Mary Moody Emerson per FBS (1) 4 ' 3 '' Alexander Pope 4 ' 6 '' Benjamin Lay 4 ' 7 '' Dr. Ruth Westheimer 4 ' 7 '' Gary Coleman (“Arnold Jackson”) 4 ' 8 '' Edith Piaf 4 ' 8 '' Queen Victoria with osteoporosis 4 ' 8 '' Linda Hunt 4 ' 9 '' Queen Victoria as adult 4 ' 10 '' Mother Teresa 4 ' 10 '' Margaret Mitchell 4 ' 10 '' length of newer military musket 4 ' 10'' Charlotte Brontë 4 ' 10-11'' Tammy Faye Bakker 4 ' 11'' Soviet gymnast Olga Korbut 4 ' 11'' jockey Willie Shoemaker 4 ' 11'' Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec 4 ' 11'' Joan of Arc 4 ' 11'' Bonnie Parker of “Bonnie & Clyde” 4 ' 11'' Harriet Beecher Stowe 4 ' 11'' Laura Ingalls Wilder 4 ' 11'' a rather tall adult Pygmy male 4 ' 11'' Gloria Swanson 4 ' 11''1/2 Clara Barton 5 ' 0 '' Isambard Kingdom Brunel 5 ' 0 '' Andrew Carnegie 5 ' 0 '' Thomas de Quincey 5 ' 0 '' Stephen A. Douglas 5 ' 0 '' HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Danny DeVito 5 ' 0 '' Immanuel Kant 5 ' 0 '' William Wilberforce 5 ' 0 '' Dollie Parton 5 ' 0 '' Mae West 5 ' 0 '' Pia Zadora 5 ' 0 '' Deng Xiaoping 5 ' 0 '' Dred Scott 5 ' 0 '' (±) Captain William Bligh of HMS Bounty 5 ' 0 '' (±) Harriet Tubman 5 ' 0 '' (±) Mary Moody Emerson per FBS (2) 5 ' 0 '' (±) John Brown of Providence, Rhode Island 5 ' 0 '' (+) John Keats 5 ' 3/4 '' Debbie Reynolds (Carrie Fisher’s mother) 5 ' 1 '' Princess Leia (Carrie Fisher) 5 ' 1 '' Bette Midler 5 ' 1 '' Dudley Moore 5 ' 2 '' Paul Simon (of Simon & Garfunkel) 5 ' 2 '' Honore de Balzac 5 ' 2 '' Sally Field 5 ' 2 '' Jemmy Button 5 ' 2 '' Margaret Mead 5 ' 2 '' R. Buckminster “Bucky” Fuller 5 ' 2 '' Yuri Gagarin the astronaut 5 ' 2 '' William Walker 5 ' 2 '' Horatio Alger, Jr. 5 ' 2 '' length of older military musket 5 ' 2 '' 1 the artist formerly known as Prince 5 ' 2 /2'' 1 typical female of Thoreau's period 5 ' 2 /2'' Francis of Assisi 5 ' 3 '' Vol ta i re 5 ' 3 '' Mohandas Gandhi 5 ' 3 '' Sammy Davis, Jr. 5 ' 3 '' Kahlil Gibran 5 ' 3 '' Friend Daniel Ricketson 5 ' 3 '' The Reverend Gilbert White 5 ' 3 '' Nikita Khrushchev 5 ' 3 '' Sammy Davis, Jr. 5 ' 3 '' HDT WHAT? INDEX

HARRY S TRUMAN PRESIDENT HARRY S TRUMAN

Truman Capote 5 ' 3 '' Kim Jong Il (North Korea) 5 ' 3 '' Stephen A. “Little Giant” Douglas 5 ' 4 '' Francisco Franco 5 ' 4 '' President James Madison 5 ' 4 '' Iosef Vissarionovich Dzugashvili “Stalin” 5 ' 4 '' Alan Ladd 5 ' 4 '' Pablo Picasso 5 ' 4 '' Truman Capote 5 ' 4 '' Queen Elizabeth 5 ' 4 '' Ludwig van Beethoven 5 ' 4 '' Typical Homo Erectus 5 ' 4 '' 1 typical Neanderthal adult male 5 ' 4 /2'' 1 Alan Ladd 5 ' 4 /2'' comte de Buffon 5 ' 5 '' (-) Captain Nathaniel Gordon 5 ' 5 '' Charles Manson 5 ' 5 '' Audie Murphy 5 ' 5 '' Harry Houdini 5 ' 5 '' Hung Hsiu-ch'üan 5 ' 5 '' 1 Marilyn Monroe 5 ' 5 /2'' 1 T.E. Lawrence “of Arabia” 5 ' 5 /2'' average runaway male American slave 5 ' 5-6 '' Charles Dickens 5 ' 6? '' President Benjamin Harrison 5 ' 6 '' President Martin Van Buren 5 ' 6 '' James Smithson 5 ' 6 '' Louisa May Alcott 5 ' 6 '' 1 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 5 ' 6 /2'' 1 Napoleon Bonaparte 5 ' 6 /2'' Emily Brontë 5 ' 6-7 '' Henry Wadsworth Longfellow 5 ' ? '' average height, seaman of 1812 5 ' 6.85 '' Oliver Reed Smoot, Jr. 5 ' 7 '' minimum height, British soldier 5 ' 7 '' President John Adams 5 ' 7 '' President John Quincy Adams 5 ' 7 '' President William McKinley 5 ' 7 '' HDT WHAT? INDEX

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“Charley” Parkhurst (a female) 5 ' 7 '' Ulysses S. Grant 5 ' 7 '' Henry Thoreau 5 ' 7 '' 1 the average male of Thoreau's period 5 ' 7 /2 '' Edgar Allan Poe 5 ' 8 '' President Ulysses S. Grant 5 ' 8 '' President William H. Harrison 5 ' 8 '' President James Polk 5 ' 8 '' President Zachary Taylor 5 ' 8 '' average height, soldier of 1812 5 ' 8.35 '' 1 President Rutherford B. Hayes 5 ' 8 /2'' President Millard Fillmore 5 ' 9 '' President Harry S Truman 5 ' 9 '' 1 President Jimmy Carter 5 ' 9 /2'' 3 Herman Melville 5 ' 9 /4'' Calvin Coolidge 5 ' 10'' Andrew Johnson 5 ' 10'' Theodore Roosevelt 5 ' 10'' Thomas Paine 5 ' 10'' Franklin Pierce 5 ' 10'' Abby May Alcott 5 ' 10'' Reverend Henry C. Wright 5 ' 10'' 1 Nathaniel Hawthorne 5 ' 10 /2'' 1 Louis “Deerfoot” Bennett 5 ' 10 /2'' 1 Friend John Greenleaf Whittier 5 ' 10 /2'' 1 President Dwight D. Eisenhower 5 ' 10 /2'' Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots 5 ' 11'' Sojourner Truth 5 ' 11'' President Grover Cleveland 5 ' 11'' President Herbert Hoover 5 ' 11'' President Woodrow Wilson 5 ' 11'' President Jefferson Davis 5 ' 11'' 1 President Richard Milhous Nixon 5 ' 11 /2'' Robert Voorhis the hermit of Rhode Island < 6 ' Frederick Douglass 6 ' (-) Anthony Burns 6 ' 0 '' Waldo Emerson 6 ' 0 '' Joseph Smith, Jr. 6 ' 0 '' HDT WHAT? INDEX

HARRY S TRUMAN PRESIDENT HARRY S TRUMAN

David Walker 6 ' 0 '' Sarah F. Wakefield 6 ' 0 '' Thomas Wentworth Higginson 6 ' 0 '' President James Buchanan 6 ' 0 '' President Gerald R. Ford 6 ' 0 '' President James Garfield 6 ' 0 '' President Warren Harding 6 ' 0 '' President John F. Kennedy 6 ' 0 '' President James Monroe 6 ' 0 '' President William H. Taft 6 ' 0 '' President John Tyler 6 ' 0 '' John Brown 6 ' 0 (+)'' President Andrew Jackson 6 ' 1'' Alfred Russel Wallace 6 ' 1'' President Ronald Reagan 6 ' 1'' 1 Venture Smith 6 ' 1 /2'' John Camel Heenan 6 ' 2 '' Crispus Attucks 6 ' 2 '' President Chester A. Arthur 6 ' 2 '' President George Bush, Senior 6 ' 2 '' President Franklin D. Roosevelt 6 ' 2 '' President George Washington 6 ' 2 '' Gabriel Prosser 6 ' 2 '' Dangerfield Newby 6 ' 2 '' HDT WHAT? INDEX

PRESIDENT HARRY S TRUMAN HARRY S TRUMAN

Charles Augustus Lindbergh 6 ' 2 '' 1 President Bill Clinton 6 ' 2 /2'' 1 President Thomas Jefferson 6 ' 2 /2'' President Lyndon B. Johnson 6 ' 3 '' Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. 6 ' 3 '' 1 Richard “King Dick” Seaver 6 ' 3 /4'' President Abraham Lincoln 6 ' 4 '' Marion Morrison (AKA John Wayne) 6 ' 4 '' Elisha Reynolds Potter, Senior 6 ' 4 '' Thomas Cholmondeley 6 ' 4 '' (?) William Buckley 6 ' 4-7” Franklin Benjamin Sanborn 6 ' 5 '' Peter the Great of Russia 6 ' 7 '' William “Dwarf Billy” Burley 6 ' 7 '' Giovanni Battista Belzoni 6 ' 7 '' Thomas Jefferson (the statue) 7 ' 6'' Jefferson Davis (the statue) 7 ' 7'' 1 Martin Van Buren Bates 7 ' 11 /2'' M. Bihin, a Belgian exhibited in Boston in 1840 8 ' Anna Haining Swan 8 ' 1'' HDT WHAT? INDEX

HARRY S TRUMAN PRESIDENT HARRY S TRUMAN

1840

During the decade of the 1840s the families of Solomon Young and Anderson Shipp Truman moved from Kentucky to the vicinity of Westport, Missouri. They would become grandparents of Harry S Truman. His father John Anderson Truman would be born in 1851, and his mother Martha Ellen Young in 1852. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1884

May 8, Thursday: Harry S Truman was born in Lamar, Missouri. The name he was assigned on his birth certificate by his parents, sounding like “Hairy Ass” (note the use of the familiar “Harry” rather than the more formal “Harold,” and the absence of a period after the middle initial, indicating that this is not an abbreviation for some name such as “Stanley” or “Samuel”) was evidently intended by them to signal that they desired their son to grow up to become a dominant or “Alpha Male” type of no-nonsense, down-to-earth person.

NOBODY COULD GUESS WHAT WOULD HAPPEN NEXT

Harry S Truman “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

HARRY S TRUMAN PRESIDENT HARRY S TRUMAN

1885

The family of origin of the infant Harry S Truman relocated from Lamar, Missouri to a farm near Harrisonville.

NO-ONE’S LIFE IS EVER NOT DRIVEN PRIMARILY BY HAPPENSTANCE

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Harry S Truman HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1887

In about this timeframe the J. Stevens Arms & Tool Company developed the .22 Long Rifle cartridge which would quickly become, for the “let’s kill something” set of underachievers, the most popular rimfire cartridge ever made.

The family of origin of the toddling Harry S Truman relocated from the farm near Harrisonville, Missouri to a farm owned by Solomon Young near present-day Grandview. By this point perhaps one of every ten of the newborn males in the US population were being circumcised, so the question arises, did this Truman family or did it not have their eponymous “hairy ass” toddler circumcised? (Inquiring minds do want to know details of this sort.)

The following remark appeared in Journal of the American Medical Association, in an article about the value of the practice for the cure of enuresis: Hip trouble is from falling down, an accident that children with tight foreskins are especially liable to owing to the weakening of the muscles produced by the condition of the genitals.

In addition, the following remark is to be found on page 421 of a large tome published in Philadelphia during this year, on medical care during childhood: There can be no doubt of [masturbation’s] injurious effect, and of the proneness to practice it on the part of children with defective brains. Circumcision should always be practiced. It may be necessary to make the genitals so sore by blistering fluids that pain results from attempts to rub the parts.

LIFE IS LIVED FORWARD BUT UNDERSTOOD BACKWARD? — NO, THAT’S GIVING TOO MUCH TO THE HISTORIAN’S STORIES. LIFE ISN’T TO BE UNDERSTOOD EITHER FORWARD OR BACKWARD.

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Harry S Truman HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1890

Despite complaints that active sports were too strenuous for girls, games such as field hockey, golf, lacrosse, and tennis were beginning to replace gentle calisthenics at girl’s schools in Britain and North America. The pioneers in this development included Rhoda Anstey and Margaret Stanfeld in Britain, Amy Morris Homans and Senda Berenson in Massachusetts, and Genevra Magee in California.

The Truman family relocated from the farm owned by Solomon Young near present-day Grandview, Missouri to 619 Crysler Street in Independence, where young Harry S Truman met Bess Wallace for the first time, at Sunday School in the First Presbyterian Church.

THE FUTURE IS MOST READILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Harry S Truman HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1892

Young Harry S Truman matriculated at the Noland School, an elementary school in Independence, Missouri. At this point Harry’s classmates would have been discovering that his name could be rhymed with some naughty words, and the lad would have needed to begin his long career of making himself the most pugnacious of men.

The US Army replaced its .45 caliber single-action revolvers with new double-action revolvers chambered for the .38 Long Colt cartridge. The new weapons were unpopular because, in the words of Captain J.M. Munro of the Third United States Cavalry, they were “not only ineffective as to shock [which is to say, they would not reliably incapacitate an attacker within 30 seconds of wounding him], but defective as to mechanism. Not one of these pistols in ten [would deliver a bullet with accuracy]; the mechanism consists of so many delicate parts, especially small springs, that in a single season firing from six to a dozen pistols in a troop go out of action and have to be consigned to the store room. Fully 30 per cent of them ‘shave lead,’ a defect which causes more horses to become incurably gun shy than any other one thing.” –Such complaints would cause the Army to replace the weapons during the 1910s with handguns chambered for the .38 Special cartridge and for the .45 ACP cartridge.

During the initial Gotlandic Pentathlon held at Wisborg, Sweden, the final event was a wrestling match between the leaders. The style was a variation of the old Norse Hryggspena, known as Bondetag in German and Ryggtag in Swedish (both names translate roughly as “Backhold”). The method assumed that the two men had lost their swords and were struggling hand to hand on the battlefield. The loser was whoever’s shoulder first touched the ground. To ensure crowd appeal, matches were limited to 15 minutes. The Swedish heavyweight champion would for many years be Arvid Anderson of Stockholm. Similar wrestling matches are still held during the North and South Uist Highland Games in the Hebrides, where they remain the final event of the games.

THE FUTURE CAN BE EASILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Harry S Truman HDT WHAT? INDEX

HARRY S TRUMAN PRESIDENT HARRY S TRUMAN

1896

The family of origin of Harry S Truman moved from 619 Crysler Street to 909 West Waldo Avenue in Independence, Missouri.

In the course of this year the Duryea Motor Wagon Company of Springfield MA managed to produce and vend a total of 13 automobiles. During this year Henry Ford demolished part of his rented shop to tug out onto the street something he called his “Quadricycle,” a horse buggy frame with gasoline engine which he had modified to be able to steer by means of a tiller. His device had no brakes but turned out to have no immediate need of them — it broke down after a few blocks. (Ford would not offer the Model T until 1908. His peculiar genius was that he did not come along too soon, but got into the business after innovators had lost their shirts trying to cope with unexpected problems in the new transportation technology. (A word to the wise :-)

WHAT I’M WRITING IS TRUE BUT NEVER MIND YOU CAN ALWAYS LIE TO YOURSELF

Harry S Truman “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1900

Harry S Truman, a page at the Democratic National Convention in Kansas City, Missouri, heard William Jennings Bryan on “The Paralyzing Influence of Imperialism.” In this speech Bryan insisted that the imperialism of Great Britain and other European countries should never be accepted as a role model for the United States of America. In particular he opposed the annexation of the Philippines, questioning our need to dominate another culture merely to acquire a military base.

DO I HAVE YOUR ATTENTION? GOOD.

Harry S Truman “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

HARRY S TRUMAN PRESIDENT HARRY S TRUMAN

1901

In the year in which Harry S Truman graduated from Independence High School with 40 other students, his father, John Anderson Truman, was losing his savings in the grain-futures market. He visited aunts in Illinois and St. Louis, and began to attend Spalding’s Business College (he would become our sole president without a college degree).

In this year the Germans were inventing something typically German, the flamethrower, while the British were inventing something typically British, the concentration camp.

From this year into 1903, Ezra Pound would be studying Anglo-Saxon and Romance languages at the University of Pennsylvania, where he would meet Hilda Doolittle and a medical student, William Carlos Williams.

CHANGE IS ETERNITY, STASIS A FIGMENT

Harry S Truman “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1902

Benito Mussolini emigrated to Switzerland but was unable to find a lasting job and was expelled back to Italy, where he enlisted in the military.

Harry S Truman worked for a couple of weeks in the mailing room of the Kansas City Star and then took a job as a timekeeper for L.J. Smith on the Santa Fe Railroad construction project. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HARRY S TRUMAN PRESIDENT HARRY S TRUMAN

1903

For the health of the father, the family of John Robinson Jeffers relocated initially to Long Beach, California, and then to nearby Highland Park, and Manhattan Beach. Since this was very much the usual trajectory at the time for a TB patient (exposure to the breeze in a seaside white tent and all that), we may suspect the father to have been a tuberculosis victim. The 16-year-old entered as a Junior at Occidental College, a Presbyterian institution, where he made himself known to the other students as “Jeff Jeffers.” During the next few years he would be publishing 13 poems.

At the age of 18 Harry S Truman relocated with the Truman family to 902 N. Liberty Street in Independence, Missouri and then to 2108 Park Avenue in Kansas City, Missouri. There he joined the Benton Boulevard Baptist Church. He got a job as a clerk for the National Bank of Commerce in Kansas City. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1905

Due to deficiencies in mathematics, George Smith Patton, Jr. was granted a do-over for his Plebe year at West Point. (Go figure, George.)

Harry S Truman moved to a rooming house at 1314 Troost Avenue in Kansas City, Missouri. He was working as a bookkeeper for the Union National Bank. He enlisted as a private in Battery B of the Missouri National Guard (he would soon be promoted to corporal). HDT WHAT? INDEX

HARRY S TRUMAN PRESIDENT HARRY S TRUMAN

1906

Ezra Pound was awarded the degree of M.A. at the University of Pennsylvania.

Harry S Truman moved from his boardinghouse in Kansas City to the 600-acre family farm near Grandview, Missouri to help his parents, and his brother Vivian, manage and operate it.

Under the “Indians not taxed” exclusion of the civil rights act, members of the native American “domestic dependent nations” (tribes) had needed to get along somehow without any civil rights. In this year the United States of America enabled these people to pay taxes and provide their young men for military service exactly as if they were white, by extending “dual citizenship” to its “wards.” (This granted a few civil rights, but, don’t think that this gave them the right to visit a polling station on election day: to vote you must not only be a citizen of the USA but also a citizen of the state in which you reside — and such natives were definitively still not citizens of the states in which they resided.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1909

Harry S Truman joined the Masonic Order in Lodge No. 450 of Belton, Missouri.

Jack Dempsey would describe his early training as including punching a cloth bag stuffed with sand and sawdust, wrestling on a battered mattress in an abandoned chicken coop, skipping rope, sprinting against horses, and trying to hit broom handles being swung through the air by his brother. He strengthened his jaw by chewing pine gum straight from the trees, and toughened his skin by the application of beef brine. Despite all this inventiveness, Dempsey’s greatest innovation would be a crouching stance, and a shifty movement that would cause his opponents to miss their punches to his head, a technique Dempsey would describe as “bobbing and weaving.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

HARRY S TRUMAN PRESIDENT HARRY S TRUMAN

1910

Harry S Truman1 began courting Bess Wallace.

The poem “Locksley Hall” by Alfred, Lord Tennyson describes the frustrated yearnings of a young man who has been denied a woman he desired. However, the poem contains a phrase

there rain’d a ghastly dew From the nations’ airy navies

ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON

The uneducated Truman would come to consider this frustration poem “Locksley Hall” to constitute a legitimation for whatever viciousness he needed to perpetrate in life. A life agenda, for by this way of consequential, important thinking any act would be legitimate if its result truly were an earth finally at peace:

the war drum throbbed no longer, and the battle flags were furled In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world.

PRESIDENT HARRY S TRUMAN HARRY S TRUMAN

This poem somehow constituted for the young man from Missouri a dip into the future far as human eye could see, something he could hope for and fantasize about and scheme for, a vision of the world and all the wonder that would be.2 A poet had told him that out of the greatest evil, a final good could come. President Truman would pull this creased slip of paper out of his billfold and show it to a reporter, at a signal moment in his life. Taking this creased slip of paper into consideration, the stories that are told about the American decision to drop the atom bomb on Japan are incredible just-so stories. Taking this creased slip of paper into consideration, there is only one explanation that is plausible.

2. NORTON ANTHOLOGY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, 4th Edition, 1979; NY: W.W. Norton & Company, II:1117-23 HDT WHAT? INDEX

HARRY S TRUMAN PRESIDENT HARRY S TRUMAN

in the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki would be, was this one of the occasions on which his staff pulled the wool over his eyes? Or, on the other hand, was this one of the occasions on which he was fully alert, and fully briefed, and directed and led others into the way of wickedness? —I would say that this creased slip of paper that he pulled out of his billfold to show to a reporter establishes, establishes definitively, that there is no excuse to be made for this limited man in this particular regard. For this viciousness he bears a full measure of responsibility.

Nagasaki was the center of Christianity in Japan. On the following screen, at the center left of the photograph, is what we left standing of the Christian Cathedral in Nagasaki: HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1911

Harry S Truman organized the first Masonic lodge in Grandview, Missouri.

Captain Piazza of the Italian army, during its conquest of Libya in this year, dropped some hand-grenades from a Bleriot airplane onto an Ottoman horse remuda. That was a first.

Manhattan Beach was closed to negroes. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PRESIDENT HARRY S TRUMAN HARRY S TRUMAN

1913

Harry S Truman purchased his first automobile, a 1911 Stafford.

Victor Ernest Shelford’s ANIMAL COMMUNITIES IN TEMPERATE AMERICA (later he would help organize the Ecological Society of America). HDT WHAT? INDEX

HARRY S TRUMAN PRESIDENT HARRY S TRUMAN

1914

No Nobel Peace Prize was awarded this year — there seemed no-one to hand it to.

Harry S Truman was appointed road overseer in the southern half of Washington Township, Missouri.

November 2, Monday: Harry S Truman’s father died.

Russia formally declared war upon the Ottoman Empire. ARMENIAN GENOCIDE HDT WHAT? INDEX

PRESIDENT HARRY S TRUMAN HARRY S TRUMAN

1915

The Nobel Peace Prize was not awarded — this year likewise there wasn’t anyone to hand it to.

Professor Bliss Perry’s THOMAS CARLYLE. (NOT WORTH YOUR WHILE)

A revised version of the manifesto of the Vorticist movement, Blast.

Harry S Truman was appointed postmaster in Grandview, Missouri. He suffered losses in an investment in a zinc-mining venture. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HARRY S TRUMAN PRESIDENT HARRY S TRUMAN

1916

To protect their positions from German aerial spotters, British and French artillerists begin covering their firing pits with burlap-festooned fishnets. Thus the beginning of modern military camouflage.

Harry S Truman joined the Grandview Baptist Church in Grandview, Missouri. He helped organize an oil- drilling company that would be named the Morgan Oil and Refining Company, investing $10,000 and becoming its treasurer and managing perhaps to recover his investment before the company was dissolved in 1919.

2d Lieutenant George Smith Patton, Jr. served as aide to General Pershing in the Mexican Punitive Expedition. Riding along was Peggy Hull of the El Paso Times, who is usually regarded as our initial female war correspondent (actually, Margaret Fuller had reported on the Italian Revolution for the New York Herald Tribune, although nobody pays any attention to this). As part of this, Patton commanded the first use of mechanical vehicles in combat (his mechanized vehicles being a couple of Dodge touring cars). He got to use his new Colt .45 pistol to kill “General” Cardenas, head of Villa’s bodyguard — that must have been a real thrill. He carved two notches into the ivory grips of his weapon.

He was promoted to 1st Lieutenant. He wrote some more one-handed poetry: Valor When all the hearts are opened And all the secrets known When guile and lies are banished And subterfuge is gone

When God rolls up the curtain And hidden truths appear When the ghastly light of Judgement Day Brings past and present near.... Then shall we know what once we knew Before wealth dimmed our sight HDT WHAT? INDEX

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That of all the sins, the blackest is The pride which will not fight. The meek and pious have a place And necessary are, But valor pales their puny rays As does the sun a star. What race of man since time began Has ever yet remained Who trusted not its own right hand Or from brave deeds refrained? Yet, spite the fact for ages known And by all lands displayed We still have those who prate of peace And say that war is dead. Yes, vandals rise who seek to snatch The laurels from the brave And dare defame heroic dead Now filling hero graves. They speak of those whose love, Like Christ’s, exceeds the lust of life As murderers slain to no avail A useless sacrifice. With infamy without a name They mock our fighting youth And dare decry great hearts who die Battling for right and truth. Woe to the land which, heeding them, Lets avarice gain the day And trusting gold its rights to hold Lets manly might decay. Let us, while willing yet for peace, Still keep our valor high So when our time of battle comes We shall not fear to die. Make love of life and ease be less Make love of country more So shall our patriotism be More than an empty roar. For death is nothing, comfort less Valor is all in all Base nations who depart from it Shall sure and justly fall.

L’Envoi When the last great battle is finished And the last great general shall fall, When the roar of the mighty guns is dumb As the kiss of the nickeled ball, When the screams of the dying that mixed With the shout that the living give out As they rush on the foe, When the mixed noise of an army in flight HDT WHAT? INDEX

HARRY S TRUMAN PRESIDENT HARRY S TRUMAN

The gasp and the curse and the shouting are low, When soldiers have ceased to struggle, When war is raged with the tongue, When men are praised for cowardice And men for bravery hung, When honor and virtue and courage Are fled like departing day As the cursed shape of eternal peace Comes up on the evening gray, When money is God and Lord of all And liars alone have weight, When the road to heaven is barred with gold And wide yawns Hell’s black gate -- Then those who live in servile chains To filthy lucre slaves Ah, how they will yearn for the soldier’s life And for the hero’s grave, And will say as they sadly think of it: War was a priceless benefit Although a sacrifice. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PRESIDENT HARRY S TRUMAN HARRY S TRUMAN

1917

June: Harry S Truman rejoined the National Guard and was elected first lieutenant of Battery F, 2nd Missouri Artillery. Was it at about this time that he became a swordsman?

Skilled Swordsmen

Saint Ignatius Loyola President Harry S Truman Michel Angelo General George Patton Sir Walter Raleigh Heinrich Himmler René Descartes Hermann Göring John Milton Juan Péron George Frederick Handel Francisco Franco Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Benito Mussolini Karl Marx Oswald Mosley Sir Richard Burton Reinhard Heydrich Aleksandr Pushkin HDT WHAT? INDEX

HARRY S TRUMAN PRESIDENT HARRY S TRUMAN

The Turkish government ordered the Turkification and Islamization of the surviving Armenian Christians.

The appointment of a new German ambassador in Constantinople (Johann Heinrich Count on Bernstorff, former ambassador to Washington — Bernstorff would serve until October 27, 1918). ARMENIAN GENOCIDE

August: Harry S Truman was sworn into regular army service as a member of the 129th Field Artillery regiment. Give ’em hell, Harry. WORLD WAR I

The Sultan of Zanzibar, Sayyid Khalid bin Barghash al Said, described for the record as “Pretender to the Sultanate of Zanzibar,” arrived on St. Helena with a party of 25 mostly consisting of harem members. They would be prisoners, so to speak, in Jamestown at Pilling School on the Military Parade Ground. There would be virtually zero interaction with these folks during the entire sojourn, until in 1921 they would be relocated to the Seychelles Islands (except that some islanders would preserve mental images of beautiful women covered in flowing silk robes).

August 6, Monday: After bogging down in torrential rain, British forces resumed their advance at Ypres.

Having been discharged from the Missouri National Guard, Virgil Thomson enlisted in the regular army, in the 129th Artillery, a regiment that included Harry S Truman.

September: Harry S Truman took up his duties as a canteen officer at Camp Doniphan, Fort Sill, Oklahoma, with Sergeant Edward Jacobson as assistant. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1918

April 13, Saturday: Harry S Truman arrived in Brest, France, on board the USS George Washington. WORLD WAR I

Turkish forces occupied Kars. ARMENIAN GENOCIDE

May: Harry S Truman was promoted to captain, although he would not receive official notification until October.

July 11, Tuesday: Captain Harry S Truman was assigned command of Battery D, 129th Field Artillery regiment, 35th Division. This battery was composed of 188 men, 167 horses, and a complement of French-designed 75mm guns.

September 6, Friday: Captain Harry S Truman was engaged in his initial combat operation in the Vosges Mountains.

November 11, Armistice Day: On the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, an Armistice was signed between the Allies and the Central Powers effectively halting the Great War. (The final treaty would be signed at Versailles on June 28, 1919.)

There’s no sense in killing people until the very last minute, is there? Captain Harry S Truman’s Battery D fired off its final round at 10:45AM. WORLD WAR I

The Fifth Committee of the Turkish Parliament issued a summons for Talaat Bey, the principle architect of the Armenian genocide, Ismail Enver Pasha, and Ahmed Djemal Pasha, to appear within 10 days for an inquiry. ARMENIAN GENOCIDE

In Duluth, Minnesota, John R. Kellam, son of the pharmacist, formed his 1st long-term memory: I have a pretty good memory for things of long, long ago anyway. My first memory was for something that happened when I was about three and a half weeks more than two years old. Shortly after I was two years old, and that birthday was in late October 1918, the original Armistice Day occurred. Now I wouldn’t have been able to understand the first thing about Armistice Day. But in our neighborhood there was some excitement and something happened so that my father called upstairs from the drugstore — we lived in a flat above— and said that the front of the train is off the tracks over at the station. That was only a half a block away. Lester Park Station in Duluth. This was the train HDT WHAT? INDEX

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headed up toward the Iron Range in Minnesota. Some wheels were off the track. My father said, “Let’s go over and watch it. They’re trying to get it back on.” That’s all he had heard. So we all went across the street, down half a block and into the railroad station and beyond and the train was off the track. The two little wheels under the front cowcatcher of this old steam train had somehow gotten dislodged and this train with extra cars on it full of people was waiting for people working, trying to get this pair of wheels, heavily weighted down by the springs under this cowcatcher, back on the rails. They had iron wedges and iron poles with wedged tips, curved, working. They’d get to a certain place and the engineer would back up a little bit, slowly, and then there’d be a cracking sound and the wheels would slip off of whatever they were on and down on the ties again. Then they’d try it again a different way. I was fascinated by this. Trains were something that always stayed on the tracks, of course! So this was really odd. In my short memory it even seemed unusual, in view of what little I knew about trains. Well, they finally got the flange of one wheel across the rail and the other flange still up enough so that a tire went flack! right into place on top of the rail, both sides at once. After all that struggling they had done, then they were ready to make it go. There was no damage to the railroad, the engine, or any other cars and so they were free to go. The track was all right. There were some ties that had been marked, but pretty soon they got the engine heated up, the steam started to flow and the engine pulled and chugged away until the train was a little speck on the horizon and disappeared. Well, I guess I didn’t think about that very many times, but when I was somewhere around seven or eight years old, we always had dinner together in the evening, with a relief man taking over the drugstore, and this was above the new drugstore that we built a mile away, we were talking about this and that. I said, “I remember a train that went off the track! They were putting it back on!” My dad said, “John, where was that?” I said, “Oh, that was out at the Lester Park station before we moved here.” Dad said, “Well, that’s right! What more do you remember?” I said, “There were so many people watching the workmen trying to get this train back on and so I told you I couldn’t see. So you lifted me up over your head so I was sitting on the back of your neck with my knees along side your ears. I had my hands clasped in front of your forehead. Way up there, where it was higher than you were, Daddy, I was able to see everything! It was wonderful!” (I wouldn’t have been able to see a thing in between the people — I would have moved in too close and been taken away.) “Well,” he said, “John, are you sure you remember this or did somebody tell you about it later?” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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I said, “I haven’t heard anybody say anything about that. I saw it. I was right there!” He said, “The reason why I’m finding it so hard to realize that it’s really your own memory is that that train full of people with wheels off the rails and back on again was on their way to the Iron Range for celebrations of the Armistice on November 11, 1918, when you were too young, I thought, to have remembered the derailing incident.” WORLD WAR I HDT WHAT? INDEX

HARRY S TRUMAN PRESIDENT HARRY S TRUMAN

1919

April 9, Wednesday: Captain Harry S Truman sailed from Brest aboard the liner USS Zeppelin.

May 6, Tuesday: Captain Harry S Truman was discharged from the US Army. WORLD WAR I

The 3rd session of the tribunal on the Ittihad Party revealed that the original Convention of the Ittihad had consisted of merely 300 members. ARMENIAN GENOCIDE

June 28, Saturday: Harry S Truman got married with Elizabeth Virginia Wallace at her Trinity Episcopal Church in Independence, Missouri. The newlyweds would move in with Bess’s mother, Madge Gates Wallace, in her home at 219 N. Delaware Street.

The Versailles Treaty was signed in the Hall of Mirrors. As part of this, the League of Nations came into existence. READ THE FULL TEXT

It may not “be over ’till it’s over,” but –signed, sealed, and delivered– it’s officially over over over: Over there, Over there, It’s so over, It’s so over, Over there... HDT WHAT? INDEX

PRESIDENT HARRY S TRUMAN HARRY S TRUMAN

It was horrible, but thank God — it’s over. It’s officially over. The world is at peace:

The treaty handed to our ally, Japan, the mandate for all the formerly enemy German island possessions in the Central Pacific. That’ll teach Germany not to be an aggressor nation! WORLD WAR I

November: Harry S Truman and Edward Jacobson opened a men’s haberdashery store in partnership, at 104 West 12th Street in Kansas City. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HARRY S TRUMAN PRESIDENT HARRY S TRUMAN

1920

Harry S Truman was appointed as a major of Field Artillery in the Officers Reserve Corps.

When his Tank Corps was dissolved and his tanks assigned to the infantry, George Smith Patton, Jr. was remanded to his pre-war permanent rank of Captain. However, the day after reverting to his pre-war status he received a promotion to the permanent rank of Major and immediately joined the Cavalry. In the peacetime army this fearsome poet was going to play polo with a vengeance.

Fear I am that dreadful, blighting thing Like rat-holes to the flood Like rust that gnaws the faultless blade Like microbes to the blood. I know no mercy and no truth The young I blight, the old I slay Regret stalks darkly in my wake And Ignominy dogs my way. Sometimes in virtuous garb I rove With facile talk of easier way Seducing, where I dare not rape Young manhood from its honor’s sway. Again in awesome guise I rush Stupendous, through the ranks of war Turning to water with my gaze Hearts that before no foe could awe. The maiden who has strayed from right To me must pay the mead of shame The patriot who betrayed his trust To me must own his tarnished name. I spare no class, or cult, or creed HDT WHAT? INDEX

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My course is endless through the year I bow all heads and break all hearts All owe me homage-I am FEAR!

“Fear of Fear” Trope HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1921

Harry S Truman helped form the initial Reserve Officers Association unit in the United States, in Kansas City, Missouri (in 1922 this would become a chapter in the new national association). HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1922

Harry S Truman’s haberdashery business failed, but rather than file a petition of bankruptcy he elected to pay off his share of the partnership’s debts over the ensuing 15 years. With the endorsement of the county Democratic party machine of T.J. Pendergast, he ran and was elected as eastern judge on the Jackson County Court (an executive body that administered affairs of the county). HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1923

For the following period of years, Harry S Truman would be attending the Kansas City School of Law (apparently he would not ever sit for the law exam). HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1924

Harry S Truman was defeated for reelection as eastern judge on the Jackson County Court, by Henry Rummel. He and Spencer Salisbury established the Community Savings and Loan Association in Independence (he would serve as general manager there until 1932).

Mary Margaret Truman was born. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1925

During this year and the following one, Harry S Truman worked as a membership salesman for the Kansas City Automobile Club. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1926

Harry S Truman was elected president of the National Old Trails Association. He was elected presiding judge of the Jackson County Court. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1927

January: Harry S Truman was sworn in as presiding judge of the Jackson County Court (he would serve two four-year terms, 1927-1934). HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1928

Harry S Truman led a successful campaign for approval of a $6,500,000 bond issue, to build 224 miles of paved highways in his county of Missouri, plus additional funds for the erection of a county hospital. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HARRY S TRUMAN PRESIDENT HARRY S TRUMAN

1931

Harry S Truman obtained voter approval of bond issues to complete the road system of his county in Missouri, build a new courthouse and jail in Kansas City, remodel the Independence courthouse, and construct a detention home. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1932

George Smith Patton, Jr. graduated from the US Army War College.

Harry S Truman was promoted to colonel in the Field Artillery Reserve. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HARRY S TRUMAN PRESIDENT HARRY S TRUMAN

1933

Harry S Truman was appointed as federal reemployment director for Missouri. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PRESIDENT HARRY S TRUMAN HARRY S TRUMAN

1934

May: Harry S Truman filed as a Democratic candidate for the United States Senate.

Gertrude Stein plumped for Führer Adolf Hitler to be the recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. “I say that Hitler ought to have the peace prize, because he is removing all the elements of contest and of struggle from Germany,” she wrote in the New York Times Magazine. “By driving out the Jews and the democratic and left element, he is driving out everything that conduces to activity. That means peace.... By suppressing Jews ... he was ending struggle in Germany.” ANTISEMITISM “We have made an end of denials of the Deity and the crying down of religion.” — Adolf Hitler, October 1933 WORLD WAR II GERMANY

August 7, Tuesday: At Adolf Hitler’s insistence, the earthly remains of Reichspresident Paul Anton Hans Ludwig von Beneckendorf und Hindenburg were laid to rest at the scene of his greatest victory, Tannenberg.

In the case of United States vs. One Book Called Ulysses, a federal court of appeals in Washington held that James Joyce’s novel ULYSSES could not be banned as obscene.

Harry S Truman won the Democratic primary election with 276,850 votes (John Cochran received 236,105 and Jacob Milligan 147,614).

November 6, Tuesday: Harry S Truman defeated the Republican incumbent, Senator Roscoe C. Patterson, by 262,000 votes.

December 27, Thursday: Senator Harry S Truman participated in the dedication of new courthouse in Kansas City. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HARRY S TRUMAN PRESIDENT HARRY S TRUMAN

1935

January 3, Thursday: Harry S Truman was sworn in as United States Senator, along with a dozen other new Democratic senators.3

May 15, Wednesday: Senator Harry S Truman introduced his first public bill, “A bill to provide for insurance by the Farm Credit Administration of mortgages on farm property, and for other purposes” (it would die in committee).

3. He would be assigned as a member of the Appropriations Committee and the Interstate Commerce Committee. Also, during this initial term, while he was “paying his dues,” he would serve on Public Buildings and Grounds Committee and the Committee on Printing. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1937

Senator Harry S Truman was named as vice-chairman of a subcommittee of the Interstate Commerce Committee to investigate American railroad finances. During this year he met with Justice Louis D. Brandeis on several social occasions, and discussed transportation regulation.

Brown & Root, a minor company which later would become a division of mighty Halliburton, called upon freshman United States Congressman Lyndon Baines Johnson to procure $10,000,000 in federal funding for its Mansfield Damn project. This guy knew how to haul the freight, on the floor of the federal congress, and eventually would deliver to his industrial lobbyists the necessary authorization and funding for their project. Said project was to become, indeed, the cornerstone of Brown and Root’s financial empire. Herman Brown was an industrialist who knew how to be grateful, and would fund Congressman Johnson’s political rise. LBJ biographer Ronnie Dugger notes that this “was a totally corrupt relationship and it benefited both of them enormously. Brown & Root got rich, and Johnson got power and riches,” adding that the congressman “wouldn’t have been in the running without Brown & Root’s money and airplanes.”4

4. Fast forward, if you please: in the Year of Our Lord 2000, the Bush/Cheney campaign would be relying upon Halliburton’s airplane transportation during the all-important Florida recount, triggering a federal investigation. A spokesperson for the Democratic National Committee would level the accusation that “The Bush administration literally flew into power on Enron’s and Halliburton’s private jets.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1938

Senator Harry S Truman helped draft the Civil Aeronautics Act of 1938.

The 1st Volkswagen was assembled by hand with an air-cooled rear engine in Nazi Germany, and the cornerstone of a new factory was put into position. This people’s car would not go into production for another decade — but eventually, delayed somewhat by a major war, some 18,000,000 would be being driven around.

Time Magazine made Führer Adolf Hitler its “Man of the Year” and wrote an appreciative profile of Der Führer. There was a special performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in honor of Hitler’s birthday. In Britain, the editor of the London Times, Geoffrey Dawson, had no doubt that an Anglo/German deal was vital for world peace. Hitler was presenting his invasions as defensive and humanitarian operations that were being necessitated by the threat posed to the 3rd Reich at home or to ethnic Germans abroad by evil locals in Czechoslovakia, Poland, Norway, etc. Gertrude Stein had been plumping for Hitler to be the recipient. “I say that Hitler ought to have the peace prize, because he is removing all the elements of contest and of struggle from Germany,” she had written in the New York Times Magazine during May 1934. “By driving out the Jews and the democratic and left element, he is driving out everything that conduces to activity. That means peace.... By suppressing Jews ... he was ending struggle in Germany.” ANTISEMITISM

The Nobel Peace Prize committee’s “Short List” for the gold medal was headed by Führer Adolf Hitler as civilization’s bulwark against Bolshevism — and by Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi as the East’s proper response to Western imperialism — but in the end the good folks in Norway would “chicken out” and award their humongous prize less controversially, to the Nansen International Office for Refugees (Office International Nansen pour les Réfugiés), a soon-to-be-dispensed-with agency of the League of Nations.

ALFRED NOBEL HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Pearl “John Hedges” Sydenstricker Buck also received a Nobel. CHINA

Führer Hitler wasn’t the only guy who was doing national unity and the suppression of internal dissent during this period. When, a few years later, German troops would occupy the town of Vinnitsa in Russia, they would find any number of mass graves full of the corpses of Kulaks, small landowners, each one shot in the neck as an “enemy of the people” for not having embraced the collectivization policies of Iosef Vissarionovich Dzugashvili, known as “Stalin.” Local Ukrainians would tell them that from 1938 until their arrival the trucks had been coming and going day and night, bringing these Kulaks from NKVD prisons.

Anne Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s LISTEN! THE WIND. Charles Lindbergh’s Grosskreuz Des Ordens Vom Deutschenadler, presented to him by Hermann Goering at the suggestion of Führer Hitler. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1939

Early in this year Great Britain would begin the mass manufacture of large quantities of stout and impermeable treated-cardboard coffins, and would begin the stockpiling of these grisly objects in case of national need for them. Better safe than sorry.

Éire declared itself neutral. There was an Irish Republican Army campaign in Great Britain. In Éire, army members were interned.

Senators Harry S Truman and Burton Wheeler introduced a bill to reorganize the railroads and place them under the regulation of the Interstate Commerce Commission. During this year, as a member of the Military Subcommittee of the Appropriations Committee, Senator Truman would visit defense installations in the United States, Panama, Cuba, and Puerto Rico. Be prepared. WORLD WAR II HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1940

June 15, Saturday: Senator Harry S Truman launched his reelection campaign at the courthouse in Sedalia, Missouri.

As the French government assembled in Bordeaux, Admiral Darlan proscribed further naval action against Italy.

Germany annexed Alsace and Lorraine.

German troops occupied Verdun.

Soviet forces invaded Lithuania, occupying Kaunas and Vilna. President Smetona fled to East Prussia.

The United States of America declined Finland’s appeal for aid.

Claire Chennault organized the Chinese Air Force American Volunteer Group.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt approved an act to increase US naval aviation to a strength of not more than 10,000 aircraft. WORLD WAR II HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Summer: The mortgage on the Truman family farm near Grandview, Missouri was foreclosed, and Senator Harry S Truman’s widowed mother Martha Ellen Truman and sister Mary Jane moved to town (several years later this farm would be purchased by friends and sold back to the Truman family).

Because it was summer with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology out of session, and because Professor Adams, that university’s Dean of City Planning, took private contracts, John R. Kellam lived in a boardinghouse in Southbridge, Massachusetts while mapping the existing land uses there, and prepared a zoning ordinance and town map. During that summer in Southbridge John was gradually becoming aware that he simply could not be “properly part of any war.” WORLD WAR II

August 6, Tuesday: Harry S Truman won the Democratic senatorial primary election (he obtained 268,557 votes, Lloyd Stark 260,581, and Maurice Milliagn 127,363).

Italian forces captured Oodweyne in British Somaliland.

Estonia was officially annexed by the USSR. WORLD WAR II HDT WHAT? INDEX

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September: Senator Harry S Truman was elevated to Grand Master of the Grand Lodge of Missouri, Masonic Order. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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September 18, Wednesday: Senator Harry S Truman’s Wheeler-Truman Transportation Act of 1940 was signed by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

The Italian advance in Egypt was halted.

The Luftwaffe bombed London by day, losing 31 planes. WORLD WAR II

November 5, Tuesday: President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was re-elected as US president.

Senator Harry S Truman won reelection to the Senate, with 930,773 votes (Manvel Davis received 886,376).

Originally built to carry emigrants to Australia, the Jervis Bay, an Aberdeen and Commonwealth 14,164-ton liner, had been taken over by the British Admiralty in 1939 and converted into an armed merchant cruiser having a crew of 254. This HMS Jervis Bay was the sole escort assigned to convoy HX-84 from Halifax to Britain, consisting of 37 freighters. When the convoy was engaged by the German battleship Admiral Scheer, to enable the convoy to escape the Jervis Bay had to take on the much larger and more powerful Scheer. It took only 22 minutes of shelling, for Captain Fogarty Fegan and most of his officers to go under in their blazing ship. Since the Scheer then sank 6 freighters of the convoy, a total of 438 died on that day in that place.5 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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5. At a first order of approximation there seems to be a remarkable similarity between fighting at sea and feeding fish. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HARRY S TRUMAN PRESIDENT HARRY S TRUMAN

56 floaters were rescued by Captain Sven Olander’s Swedish freighter Stureholm but 3 of these would die of HDT WHAT? INDEX

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their wounds before getting back to Halifax. (Captain Fegan would posthumously receive a Victoria Cross. On December 11, 1940, U96 would sink the Stureholm and its crew would die. On April 9, 1945, while anchored in Kiel, U96 would be sunk by the Royal Air Force. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1941

February 10, Monday: Senator Harry S Truman suggested that the United States Senate should a special committee to investigate defense contracts.

Great Britain severed diplomatic relations with Romania due to the presence of 500,000 German troops in that country.

General Walter G. Krivitsky, once the Red Army Chief of Intelligence for Western Europe, was found dead of a gunshot wound in the Bellevue Hotel of Washington DC. This had been made to appear as if it had been an accident, but Soviet agents were suspected (Krivitsky had broken with Stalin in 1937).

February 13, Thursday: Germans ordered all gentiles to leave Amsterdam’s Jewish Quarter. WORLD WAR II ANTISEMITISM

Senator Harry S Truman proposed that the United States Senate create a special committee to investigate defense contracts.

King Alfonso XIII, in exile in Rome, renounced the throne of Spain in favor of his son, Don Juan.

March 1, Saturday: The United States Senate voted unanimously to create a Special Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program (after Senator Harry S Truman’s appointment as chairman on March 8th, this would be commonly be referred to as the Truman Committee).

As German troops march from Romania into Bulgaria, in Vienna King Boris was signing a protocol of adherence to the Axis “tripartite pact” (it appears he may have been doing this out of necessity).

Free French troops from Chad captured the Al Kufrah Oasis, Libya in the Sahara.

Beginning today, the Italian government reduces rations of olive oil, butter and fat. It banned pastry baked with flour, milk or fat and also banned ice cream.

Heinrich Himmler ordered that a camp be built at Birkenau (this would become Auschwitz II). ANTISEMITISM

Support Force, Atlantic Fleet (Rear Admiral A.L. Bristol), composed of destroyers and patrol plane squadrons, was established for protection of convoys in North Atlantic. Bulgaria joined the Axis as German troops occupied the country. WORLD WAR II HDT WHAT? INDEX

PRESIDENT HARRY S TRUMAN HARRY S TRUMAN

April 15, Tuesday: Germany and Italy recognized the newly proclaimed Croatia.

In a gun battle in Harlan County, Kentucky in the course of a coal strike, four men were killed, among them the president and vice-president of the Fork Ridge Coal Co., a deputy sheriff, and a miner. Twenty-five of the miners were wounded.

The initial hearing of Senator Harry S Truman’s Special “Truman Committee” to Investigate the National Defense Program was conducted, with Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson as the new committee’s initial witness.

Bulgaria severed diplomatic relations with Yugoslavia.

October 23, Thursday: Plain-chant for America for baritone, orchestra and organ by William Grant Still to words of Chapin was performed for the initial time, in Carnegie Hall of New York City (Chapin was the wife of Francis Biddle, the Attorney-General of the United States).

In Flushing Meadows on Paumanok Long Island, Senator Harry S Truman opened the 1st session of the United Nations General Assembly. For a time during the 1940s and 1950s, the Flushing Friends meetinghouse would be a favorite spot for families of the United Nations. A large, active First Day School would evolve and delegates to the UN would frequently attend Flushing Meeting to speak on aspects of their work. Friend Robert Lea, a member of Flushing Meeting, would host many of these delegates in his home. The relaxed atmosphere and hospitality of a home proved to be so attractive that when the United Nations would relocate to their new building on Manhattan Island, New York Yearly Meeting would open “Quaker House” nearby, as a place of quiet refuge in which delegates might meet for private discussion of issues.

Jewish emigration from Germany was prohibited. ANTISEMITISM HDT WHAT? INDEX

HARRY S TRUMAN PRESIDENT HARRY S TRUMAN

1942

January 15, Thursday: Senator Harry S Truman’s Truman Committee presented its 1st Annual Report to the Senate. This would help induce President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to replace his Office of Production Management with a new, more powerful War Production Board.

American-British-Dutch-Australian Supreme Command was established. Field Marshall Sir Archibald Wavell, British Army assumed supreme command of all forces in area, while Admiral T.C. Hart, United States Navy had command of the naval forces under Field Marshall Wavell.

Japanese forces attacked a new Allied (Britain-India-Australia) defense line along the River Muar, Malaya, eventually forcing further retreat.

Jawaharlal Nehru succeeded Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi as head of the All-India Congress Party.

The initial batch of United States servicemen arrived in Britain (“overfed, oversexed and over here”).

Singapore surrendered to the Japanese. The 130,000 British and Indian prisoners of war would be sent to labor on the Burma-Siam railway.

Singapore’s Princess Alexandria Hospital was being guarded by a detachment of Gurkha troops. When commanded by a Japanese officer to lay down their arms, their NCO replied that this was a civilian hospital, not a military target. The Japanese gave an order and his men killed 24 of the Gurkhas. They then entered the hospital and began to slaughter its patients, which included a number of survivors from the Prince of Wales and the Repulse. The doctors and medical orderlies were killed, and the nurses were raped and then killed.

The Japanese made a determined effort to exterminate the entire Chinese population of Singapore, and managed to kill 9,000-12,000. After interrogation by the Kempetai the ethnic Chinese were obliged to hand over all their personal possessions, rings, watches, jewelry, money, etc., before being forced onto captured British lorries and driven to the Tanjong Pagar Wharf and beheaded.

HEADCHOPPING

This went on for 12 days while boats from Singapore Harbour brought more and more Chinese civilians to that execution site. In the Geylang district, 3,600 Chinese were herded into the grounds of the Teluk Kurau English HDT WHAT? INDEX

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School and interrogated by the Kempetai. At the completion of interrogation, in groups of 200, they were taken by truck to the crest of a hill off Siglap Road and shot, beheaded, or bayonetted. One person present within the Teluk Kurau English School grounds that day would survive to tell the tale. In another such action, 700 Chinese were taken to an area just east of Changi where mass graves had already been dug, and the heads of these victims were piled up in a waiting lorry and during that night would be installed on bamboo stakes around and about Singapore. (A British military court would sentence Lieutenant-General Takuma Nishimura, commander of the Japanese troops in Singapore, to life imprisonment, but an Australian Military Court would then try him for other crimes and he would be hanged on June 11, 1951.) WORLD WAR II

In case you wondered, this is what the cross-section of the human neck, revealed by this interesting practice, actually looks like: HDT WHAT? INDEX

HARRY S TRUMAN PRESIDENT HARRY S TRUMAN

1943

February 8, Monday: Savings attributable to the work of the Truman Committee were being estimated in a range up to $11,000,000,000.

Evacuation of over 11,000 Japanese troops from Guadalcanal, Solomon Islands, had been completed.

The Red Army recaptured the city of Kursk in the Soviet Union, or what was left of it. WORLD WAR II HDT WHAT? INDEX

PRESIDENT HARRY S TRUMAN HARRY S TRUMAN

March 8, Monday: German Submarine U-156 was sunk by naval land-based aircraft (VP-53) in the West Indies, at 12 degrees 38 minutes North, 54 degrees 39 minutes West.

Senator Harry S Truman made the cover of TIME Magazine.

WORLD WAR II HDT WHAT? INDEX

HARRY S TRUMAN PRESIDENT HARRY S TRUMAN

1944

January 29, Saturday: Soviet troops occupied Chudovo, 120 kilometers southeast of Leningrad and Novosokolniki, just west of Velekiye Luki.

German bombers attacked London but only 40 tons of bombs reached the city. Meanwhile 800 American bombers attacked Frankfurt-am-Main.

Aircraft from fast carrier force (Read Admiral M.A. Mitscher) began a series of strikes to destroy Japanese air power and shipping in the Marshall Islands (attacks would continue daily until 6 February 1944).

US Submarine Bowfin (SS-287) laid mines off southeastern coast of Borneo.

Harry S Truman spoke at the ceremony launching the battleship USS Missouri. His daughter Margaret Truman then christened the ship with a bottle of champagne.

United States Ocean Tug ATR-1 was damaged by a horizontal bomber off Anzio, Italy, at 41 degrees 27 minutes North, 12 degrees 40 minutes East. WORLD WAR II

May: It was the consideration of the Nazi Burgomeister of the village of Velpke near Helmstedt, Germany, that Polish female slave laborers were spending far too much time attending to their own infants, and not being productive enough at their slave tasks on the local farms as well as in the factories of the area, such as the Volkswagen factory at nearby Wolfsburg. A center was established for these infant charges in an old factory building lacking running water, electric lights, and a telephone connection, and they were forcibly removed from their slave mothers. The Reich labor Office ordered a former teacher, Frau Billien, to take charge of this institution and supervise the four Polish and Russian slave girls who were installed in the building to tend these infants. None of these attendants had ever before cared for an infant. Some months later Volkswagen required possession of the old building, and it would be discovered that 84 of the infants had already died through the disregard of their caretakers and the deprival of mother’s milk. According to the Velpke village register the most common causes of death had been general weakness, dysentery, and intestinal catarrh. (A British Military Court would sentence two of these care providers to death, and three to long terms of imprisonment.) WORLD WAR II

Walter Roy Harding wrote in this notes that “Rather the significant contribution of Thoreau is what might be termed his ‘mind-set.’ We need to produce more citizens who will question things as he did. If we study his pattern, we may learn the secret of producing such men. If we succeed, we will have taken one of the greatest strides toward producing that ideal democracy about which so much is said and so little done these days. For it is only through an enlightened, questioning citizenry that we may achieve such a utopia. Therein lies the HDT WHAT? INDEX

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value of Thoreau.”

In a poll of 52 correspondents conducted by Look Magazine, Senator Harry S Truman was selected as one of the ten most useful officials in Washington DC (it is an interesting comment on the innocence of those times, that anybody would have dared to ask news media people for their judgement about the merits of politicians, or that anybody would have considered such opinions to be of any relevance).

At this point Winston Churchill had received his first small batch of germ bombs from the Indiana Ku Klux Klan in Vigo near Terre Haute, for testing, but construction of the Chemical Warfare Service’s 6,100-acre Vigo Ordinance Plant had only just been completed and American production was far behind schedule.

The plant was supposed to be producing some 50,000 4-pound bombs per month by that summer, out of an order for 500,000 such devices, but there wasn’t a fat chance in hell of that happening.6 There was another plant in Indiana that was due to start production late in 1944 and was to begin producing about 625,000 germ

6.The Ku Klux Klan has been accused of a lot of stuff, but it has never been accused of efficiency. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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bombs monthly, with a portion of this grand supply to be available to the English air force early in 1945, but that was all big talk and at this point they had to confess to a disgruntled Churchill that there would not be enough anthrax bombs for even a “token” destruction of German cities until the end of 1944 at the earliest. What if the wicked Germans had a chance to surrender before we righteous people had a chance to rise up in our wrath and kill them all?7 GERM WARFARE

Here is the matter, as it has been recorded on the Internet by the Vigo County, Indiana people themselves (emphasis supplied; see URL http://web.indstate.edu/community/vchs/thhist.htm): The Second World War created abnormal economic conditions in many cities, but Terre Haute escaped the problem due to its lack of durable goods manufactures. Instead, Terre Haute produced peacetime goods, largely food items, and supplied labor to three nearby ordnance plants. The A and P (Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea) Company’s Quaker Maid plant was said to have been the world’s largest food processing factory under one roof. In one of these plants, the Terre Haute Ordnance Depot, biological agents for antipersonnel bombs would have been produced had the war continued. The city received the nation's 100th United Service organizations (USO) facility in 1943, and it proudly accepted designation as the country's foremost recruitment center of women serving in the navy (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service, or WAVES). In 1945 when the navy launched the SS Terre Haute Victory, a 10,800 ton armed cargo ship, it carried a library and recreational equipment purchased with funds raised in a city campaign. The rousing activities of the war effort — troop send-offs, victory gardens, bond sales, civil defense drills, parades, and ceremonies — only briefly diverted attention from Terre Haute's 7.The German populations that had been selected for extermination had been, in alphabetical order, those of Aachen, Berlin, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Stuttgart, and Wilhelmshafen. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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almost congenital social and economic plight. In all years but two between 1940 and 1961 the city found itself on some form of federal chronic unemployment list. New factories, such as Pfizer Chemical (1948), Allis-Chalmers (1951), Columbia Records (1954), and Anaconda Aluminum (1959), could absorb only a portion of job seekers from folded businesses. Manufacturing establishments declined from 134 in 1947 to 131 twenty years later. The community lost about 6,000 jobs between 1950 and 1960. The census tally that showed an increased of 9,807 residents in the 1940-60 period masked the loss of work places and jobholders. The census figure represented gains through annexations, including the attachment of Harrison Township in 1957, not a net gain of recent arrivals. National magazines and state newspapers persisted in featuring the iniquities of the city. The image of a debauched community plagued local administrators. Successive mayors tried, more or less, to blot out gambling and prostitution, the volume of which, in any case, had decreased significantly from prewar levels. Isolated incidents, such as the 1957 disclosure that Terre Haute was a base for a large gambling syndicated, stoked HDT WHAT? INDEX

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the media's fires. WORLD WAR II

July 21, Friday: At the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Senator Harry S Truman was nominated to run for vice-president.

A naval attack force (Rear Admiral R.L. Conolly) landed Marines (Major General R.S. Geiger, USMC, 3d Marine Division) and Army formations on the island of Guam in the Marianas. The assault was preceded by intensive naval gunfire and attacks by carrier-based aircraft. United States naval vessel damaged: HDT WHAT? INDEX

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• Submarine chaser SC-1316, by Japanese coastal mortar, Marianas area, 13 degrees 24 minutes North, 144 degrees 39 minutes East WORLD WAR II

August 3, Thursday: The Office of the General Counsel of the Navy Department was established (formerly this had been designated the Procurement Legal Division of the Navy Department).

Senator Harry S Truman resigned as chair of the Truman Committee (the committee had at this point funding amounting to some $400,000 and, in addition to the senators who were members, a staff of about 25).

The city of Myitkyina finally, after two and a half months, fell to Allied troops.

August 18, Friday: Senator Harry S Truman had his initial meeting with President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, as his running mate. You’re from, I hear, Missouri? And that middle initial, “S,” actually doesn’t stand for anything?

United States Amphibious Force Flagship Catoctin (AGC-5) was damaged by a horizontal bomber in waters off Southern France, at 43 degrees 17 minutes North, 6 degrees 38 minutes East.

Japanese naval vessels sunk: • Escort Carrier Oraka, by US Submarine Rasher (SS-269), off northwestern Luzon, Philippine Islands 18 degrees 16 minutes North, 120 degrees 20 minutes East •Light Cruiser Natori, by US Submarine Hardhead (SS-365), east of Samar, Philippine Islands 12 degrees 29 minutes North, 128 degrees 49 minutes East WORLD WAR II

August 31, Thursday: Senator Harry S Truman launched his vice-presidential campaign in Lamar, Missouri (his birthplace).

The Soviet army entered Bucharest.

Aircraft from a carrier task group under Rear Admiral R.E. Davison commenced a 3-day attack on Iwo Jima and the Bonin Islands. There would be a bombardment by cruisers and destroyers on September 1st and 2nd to augment these air strikes.

The US submarine Redfin (SS-272) landed supplies and evacuated certain personnel from Palawan Island, Philippine Islands. The Japanese Minelayer Shirataka was sunk by US Submarine Sealion (SS-315) in the Luzon Strait, Philippine Islands, at 21 degrees 5 minutes North, 121 degrees 26 minutes East. WORLD WAR II

September 4, Monday: Senator Harry S Truman delivered Labor Day speeches to AF of L and CIO audiences in Detroit, Michigan.

It seemed like a good idea, so Finland and the Soviet Union agreed to stop shooting at each other. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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October 12, Thursday: Senator Harry S Truman began his official vice-presidential campaign tour, by railroad, with a speech in New Orleans (the railroad car he used was named the “Henry Stanley” and perhaps the joke of the day may have been “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?”).

Carrier-based aircraft from Third Fleet (Admiral W. F. Halsey) commence 5-day attack against enemy shipping, airfield facilities, and industrial plants on Formosa and northern Luzon, Philippine Islands. These strikes meet with intensive counterattacks by Japanese aircraft.

United States naval vessel damaged: • Destroyer Prichett (DD-561), accidentally by United States naval gunfire, Formosa area, 21 degrees 8 minutes North, 123 degrees 19 minutes East WORLD WAR II TIMELINE OF ACCIDENTS

November 7, Tuesday: Americans took Bloody Ridge west of Dagami, Leyte after fierce fighting.

The Greek government ordered the dissolution of the two largest resistance groups.

Voting in the United States ensured the re-election of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to an unprecedented 4th term as president (the parties remained virtually unchanged in the Senate, but Roosevelt’s Democrats made strong gains in the House of Representatives). Senator Harry S Truman was elected as vice-president.

Adam Clayton Powell of New York was elected as the initial African-American Congressman (subsequent to the Reconstruction Era).

United States Patrol Torpedo Boat PT-301 was damaged by accidental explosion in the vicinity of western New Guinea, at 1 degree 15 minutes South, 136 degrees 23 minutes East. WORLD WAR II TIMELINE OF ACCIDENTS HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1945

January 20, Saturday: Senator Harry S Truman was sworn in as Vice-President at the White House. Would you and Bess and Margaret like to maybe see the Lincoln Bedroom before you trot yourselves over to the Naval Observatory?

Chinese forces captured Mu-se, Burma, 290 kilometers northeast of Mandalay.

Soviet troops achieve a breakthrough in East Prussia, capturing Tilsit (Sovetsk, Russia). They also took Bardejov, Presov and Kosice in eastern Czechoslovakia.

The Hungarian provisional government concludes an armistice with the USSR, the United Kingdom and the United States, in Moscow.

German forces in the west were now pushed back to a line roughly equal to that which they held at the beginning of the Ardennes offensive. 40,600 people were killed in the Battle of the Bulge. 75,000 Germans were taken prisoner.

Overture for orchestra by Karel Husa was performed for the initial time, in Prague, conducted by the composer.

Hungary surrendered to the Allies. Armistice Agreement with Hungary. READ THE FULL TEXT

The first 235Uranium was separated at Oak Ridge, Tennessee. ATOM BOMB

Submarine Nautilus (SS-168) landed supplies on south coast of Mindanao, Philippine Islands.

Naval Technical Mission in Europe (Commodore H.A. Schade) was established with headquarters in Paris, France.

Aircraft from fast carrier task force (Vice Admiral J.S. McCain) attack enemy shipping and airfields in Formosa, and Pescadores Islands, and Sakashima Gunto and Okinawa in the Ryukyu Islands. Japanese aircraft make concerted counterattacks on the task force ships.

United States naval vessels damaged, Formosa-Ryukyu Islands area: • Carrier Ticonderoga (CV-14), by Kamikaze suicide plane, 22 degrees 40 minutes North, 122 degrees 57 minutes East • Carrier Hancock (CV-19), by accidental explosion, 22 degrees 40 minutes North, 122 degrees 30 minutes East • Light carrier Langley (CVL-27), by Kamikaze suicide plane, 22 degrees 40 minutes North, 122 degrees 51 minutes East • Destroyer Maddox (DD-731), by Kamikaze suicide plane, 23 degrees 6 minutes North, 122 degrees 43 minutes East HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Japanese naval vessels sunk: • Transport #101, by carrier-based aircraft, Formosa area, 22 degrees 37 minutes North, 120 degrees 15 minutes East • Transport #102, by carrier-based aircraft, Philippine Islands area, 11 degrees 3 minutes North, 123 degrees 5 minutes East WORLD WAR II

January 29, Monday: Vice President Harry S Truman attended the funeral of Thomas J. Pendergast in Kansas City, Missouri.

“The pachinko ball doesn’t want to plonk into the plastic tub before it has accomplished some sort of trajectory.”

— HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Lieutenant Commander M. Johnson’s Liberty Ship USS Serpens had been launched on April 5, 1943 and after its first 17 months of service in the Pacific region, its holds had been converted for the storage of munitions. While loading depth charges at its berth in Linga Roads, Guadalcanal, there was some sort of unfortunate mistake made. Afterward only the bow of the ship was to be found at the scene. The captain and 7 other Coast Guard men had been away at the time. When they attempted a personnel count, only a couple more members of the Coast Guard could be found, and 196 crewmembers and 57 stevedores had gone missing, were utterly unaccounted for, and presumably were in heaven.

Army forces were landed near San Antonio, northwest of Subic Bay, Luzon, Philippine Islands by naval attack group (Rear Admiral A.D. Struble).

King Petar II of Yugoslavia announced he was withdrawing his opposition to a regency for the country, to facilitate an agreement between his government in London and Marshall Tito.

Adagio pour orgue op.201 by Charles Koechlin was performed for the initial time, in Paris.

United States Cargo Ship Serpens (AK-97) sank after an explosion near Guadalcanal, Solomon Islands.

United States naval vessels damaged, Philippine Islands area: • Transport Cavalier (APA-37), by submarine torpedo, 14 degrees 48 minutes North, 119 degrees 18 minutes East • Repair ship Amycus (ARL-2), by Japanese horizontal bomber, 16 degrees 20 minutes North, 120 degrees 10 minutes East WORLD WAR II HDT WHAT? INDEX

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April 12, Thursday: On the island of Okinawa, Japanese defenders began a ground counterattack that would fail. Meanwhile, however 185 Kamikazes (Zero fighters with a bomb in the nose, without landing gear) and eight Okas (rocket-powered bombs steered by humans) attacked American ships in the vicinity, sinking two vessels and damaging twelve.

Indian troops took Kyaukpadaung in Burma, 455 kilometers north of Rangoon.

The US President succumbed to a massive cerebral hemorrhage at Warm Springs, Georgia. His bodily failure had undoubtedly been hastened by smoking and drinking.

The Vice President, Harry S Truman, was of course sworn in as the 33d president of the United States of HDT WHAT? INDEX

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America immediately upon the demise of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.8 In the White House, President Truman’s bathtub would have a hidden message carved in glass on the backside which would read: “In this tub bathes the man whose heart is always clean and serves his people truthfully” (the originator of this sentiment, a glass carver, had been commissioned to design the glass panels of five such tubs).

H.L. Mencken would comment, about the fallen leader, that FDR had possessed every quality that morons esteem in their heroes.

Helen Clarke Grimes the relentless diarist of Spragueville near Smithfield northwest of Providence, Rhode Island made a final note about our World War II leadership, for her diary: I never admired the President when he was alive and will not mourn him at his passing. Frankly, the eulogies make me sick. However, it would have been well if he had lasted out this term for which he strove so hard, as I have no faith in Vice Pres. Truman.

German and Croatian defenses collapsed along the River Sava.

American forces crossed the River Elbe near Magdeburg, 100 kilometers west of Berlin. They occupied Braunschweig, Essen, and Erfurt.

French troops took Baden-Baden.

At his home in Garmisch, Richard Strauss completed the score to his “Metamorphosen.”

The Allies liberated the concentration camps at Buchenwald and Belsen. Wilson in Hell (written in 1942)9 Roosevelt died and met Wilson; who said, “I blundered into it Through honest error, and conscience cut me so deep that I died In the vain effort to prevent future wars. But you 8. For the previous presidential election, Franklin Delano Roosevelt versus Thomas Dewey, the Democrats had accepted their winner Roosevelt for an unprecedented 4th nomination, but had refused Henry Wallace of Iowa as a repeat running mate on account of views that they considered “ultra” liberal. The compromise choice for Veep had settled on a machine politician from a center of corruption in America, Kansas City, Missouri, who had made quite a name for himself by investigating war profiteers. Who could have imagined that a month after this inauguration, Roosevelt would be in the ground and it would be this supremely simpleminded machine politician who would be pushing all the buttons as the President of the United States of America?

9. This poem was entirely suppressed by the publisher, Random House, even after the war was over. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Blew on the coal-bed, and when it kindled you deliberately Sabotaged every fire-wall that even the men who denied My hope had built. You have too much murder on your hands. I will not Speak of the lies and connivings. I cannot understand the Mercy That permits us to meet in the same heaven. — Or is this my hell?” — Robinson Jeffers

Roosevelt died and met Wilson; who said, “I blundered into it Through honest error, and conscience cut me so deep that I died In the vain effort to prevent future wars. But you Blew on the coal-bed, and when it kindled you deliberately Sabotaged every fire-wall that even the men who denied My hope had built. You have too much murder on your hands. I will not Speak of the lies and connivings. I cannot understand the Mercy That permits us to meet in the same heaven. — Or is this my hell?”

United States naval vessels sunk: • Destroyer Mannert L. Abele (DD-733), by piloted bomb, Okinawa area, 27 degrees 25 minutes North, 126 degrees 59 minutes East • LST493, by grounding, off Plymouth, England, 50 degrees 20 minutes North, 4 degrees 9 minutes West

United States naval vessels damaged in operations against Japanese forces in the Okinawa area: • Battleship New Mexico (BB-40), accidentally by United States naval gunfire, 26 degrees 31 minutes North, 127 degrees 37 minutes East • Battleship Idaho (BB-42), by Japanese Kamikaze, 26 degrees 26 minutes North, 127 degrees 32 minutes East • Battleship Tennessee (BB-43), by Japanese Kamikaze, 26 degrees 0 minutes North, 128 degrees 0 minute East • Destroyer Stanly (DD-478), by Japanese Kamikaze piloted bomb, 27 degrees 12 minutes North, 128 degrees 17 minutes East • Destroyer Purdy (DD-734), by Japanese Kamikaze, 27 degrees 16 minutes North, 127 degrees 50 minutes East • Destroyer Zellars (DD-777), by Japanese Kamikaze, 26 degrees 0 minutes North, 128 degrees 0 minute East HDT WHAT? INDEX

HARRY S TRUMAN PRESIDENT HARRY S TRUMAN

• Destroyer Cassin Young (DD-793), by Japanese Kamikaze, 27 degrees 17 minutes North, 127 degrees 50 minutes East • Destroyer escort Riddle (DE-185), by Japanese Kamikaze, 26 degrees 0 minutes North, 128 degrees 0 minute East • Destroyer escort Rall (DE-304), by Japanese Kamikaze, 26 degrees 36 minutes North, 127 degrees 39 minutes East • Destroyer escort Walter G. Wann (DE-412), by Japanese Kamikaze, 26 degrees 17 minutes North, 127 degrees 20 minutes East • Destroyer escort Whitehurst (DE-634), by Japanese Kamikaze 26 degrees 4 minutes North, 127 degrees 12 minutes East • Light minelayer Lindsey (DM-32), by Japanese Kamikaze, 26 degrees 28 minutes North, 127 degrees 15 minutes East • High-speed minesweeper Jeffers (DMS-27), by Japanese Kamikaze plane and piloted bomb, 26 degrees 50 North, 126 degrees 35 minutes East • Minesweeper Gladiator (AM-319), by Japanese Kamikaze, 26 degrees 5 minutes North, 127 degrees 35 minutes East • Gasoline tanker Wabash (AOG-4), by collision, 26 degrees 0 minutes North, 128 degrees 0 minutes East • Attack cargo ship Wyandot (AKA-92), by collision, 26 degrees 21 minutes North, 127 degrees 44 minutes East • LST555, by grounding, 26 degrees 20 minutes North, 127 degrees 45 minutes East WORLD WAR II Famous Last Words:

“What school is more profitably instructive than the death-bed of the righteous, impressing the understanding with a convincing evidence, that they have not followed cunningly devised fables, but solid substantial truth.” — A COLLECTION OF MEMORIALS CONCERNING DIVERS DECEASED MINISTERS, Philadelphia, 1787 “The death bed scenes & observations even of the best & wisest afford but a sorry picture of our humanity. Some men endeavor to live a constrained life — to subject their whole lives to their will as he who said he might give a sign if he were conscious after his head was cut off — but he gave no sign Dwell as near as possible to the channel in which your life flows.” —Thoreau’s JOURNAL, March 12, 1853

1932 George Eastman Suicide note — he shot himself. “My work is done. Why wait?” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1936 George V, King of Eng- It was suggested that he might recuper- “Bugger Bogner.” land ate at Bogner Regis

1945 Franklin Delano Roosevelt having a massive cerebral hemorrhage “I have a terrific headache.”

1945 Adolf Hitler as hypothesized by Kurt Vonnegut “I never asked to be born in the first place.”

1946 Alfred Rosenberg hangman asked if he had last words “No.”

1977 Gary Gilmore being inventively executed “Let’s do it.”

1997 Diana, Princess of Wales per French police records “My God. What’s happened?”

1998 Karla Fay Tucker Governor George W. Bush refused “I am going to be face to face with Jesus requests from Christian organizations now.... I will see you all when you get there. I based upon her alleged conversion will wait for you.” ... other famous last words ...

April 13, Friday: Without the awareness of the Japanese people, Prime Minister Suzuki broadcast condolences to the United States of America in regard to the unexpected demise of their President. Secretary of War Henry Stimson informed new US President Harry S Truman (who had been kept entirely in the dark in regard to a great many things during the hegemony of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, presumably because this aristocrat thought very little of such a person when he thought of him at all) of the existence of the Manhattan Project to develop an atomic bomb.

In a large grain-storage barn in a field on the Isenschnibbe estate near the town of Gardelegen, 30 kilometers north of Magdeburg in Sachsen-Anhalt, Germany, a radical simplification of the human population was underway. Earlier in the day a trainload of slaves being evacuated from camps in the Mittelbau-Dora complex around the town of Nordhausen had arrived at Letzingen railway station some 12 kilometers from Gardelegen. The slaves had marched from there to the military barracks of the Remonte-Schule, a training establishment for cavalry horses on Bismarker Strasse, Gardelegen. Meanwhile a 2nd train had arrived at the small station in nearby Mieste with 1,400 slaves from the “Mittelbau” camps of Rottelberode and Stempeda. As they were being offloaded from the train hundreds were collapsing from hunger and thirst and being shot. (American soldiers would dig up 86 such corpses in the station vicinity.) At the airfield near the town there was a Luftwaffe Paratroop unit, which took control. In a small wood behind the station the Germans executed 104 into three large pits. In the afternoon a group of around 1,050 were marched a couple of kilometers to a brick- walled barn standing in a field. When the prisoners were inside the doors were closed and the SS guards and the Kapos poured gasoline. Hand grenades were thrown in and the barn set on fire. Those who attempted to rush the doors were shot. There are some interesting photos of guys who managed to claw out little holes between the stones of the foundation in order to get a last breath of fresh air while they were burning. When this area would be liberated on the next day by the US 102nd Infantry Division, German men in business suits would be required by the Americans to carry the corpses with their bare hands, with the use of gloves not permitted. Today, at the Gardelegen Memorial Site, there is a brick wall containing the doorway through which the laborers had entered the barn. A memorial plaque commemorates 1,016. Above each grave is a white cross marked “Unbekannt” (Unknown).

American forces on Okinawa reached Hedo Point. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HARRY S TRUMAN PRESIDENT HARRY S TRUMAN

In Manila Bay, American troops landed at Fort Drum, poured 5,000 gallons of fuel into the fortifications, and set them alight — torching the entire Japanese garrison.

After five days of fighting, Soviet forces completed their capture of Vienna.

American troops took Jena and Bamberg.

Grand Duchess Charlotte returned to Luxembourg almost five years after her departure.

United States naval vessel damaged: • Destroyer escort Connolly (DE-306), by Japanese Kamikaze, Okinawa area, 26 degrees 55 minutes North, 126 degrees 46 minutes East WORLD WAR II

April 25, Wednesday: Tema y variaciones op.100 for harp and piano by Joaquín Turina was performed for the initial time, in the Circulo Medina de Madrid.

Secretary of War Henry Stimson and General Leslie Groves presented to President Harry S Truman the details of the Manhattan Project to develop an nuclear weapon. President Truman delivered a radio address from Washington DC, opening a conference being held in San Francisco to create the charter for a new, permanent world organization, a United Nations. READ THE FULL TEXT

Indian troops took Salin, 440 kilometers northwest of Rangoon.

Shortly after noon. A few Soviet and American soldiers meet near the village of Leckwith and then near Stehla.

Shortly after 4 p.m. Large numbers of Soviet (58th Russian Guards Division) and American (69th Division) troops met at Torgau on the River Elbe, cutting the German Army in two.

Soviet forces complete their encirclement of Berlin.

While Allied forces captured Mantua, Parma and Verona, a general uprising of Italian partisans took place behind the German lines, especially in Milan and Genoa. The Gestapo shot six Jews in Cuneo. ANTISEMITISM

Hermann Göring, inspired by several S.S. gun barrels pointed in his direction, resigns all his positions. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PRESIDENT HARRY S TRUMAN HARRY S TRUMAN

Allied bombers destroy Berchtesgaden, Führer Adolf Hitler’s Alpine retreat.

The French begin to uncover mass graves of Jews in Württemberg.

The liberation of Dachau.

Carrier-based aircraft bomb enemy installations on Okino Daito Jima, Ryukyu Islands.

United States naval vessels damaged, Okinawa area: • Escort carrier Steamer Bay (CVE-87), by collision, 24 degrees 48 minutes North, 131 degrees 58 minutes East • Destroyer Hale (DD-642), by collision, 24 degrees 48 minutes North, 131 degrees 58 minutes East

Japanese naval vessels sunk: • Submarine RO-109, by high-speed transport Horace A. Bass (APD-124), Philippine Sea area, 21 degrees 58 minutes North, 129 degrees 35 minutes East • Minesweeper #41, by submarine Cod (SS-224), off China, 25 degrees 53 minutes North, 121 degrees 8 minutes East

German submarine sunk: • U-1107, by naval land-based aircraft (VPB-103), English Channel, 48 degrees 12 minutes North, 5 degrees 42 minutes West WORLD WAR II

May 8, Tuesday: V-E Day. At 9AM President Harry S Truman announced the end of the war in Europe over the radio.

General Alfred Jodl signed the official surrender of Germany. Fraternization was forbidden.

Soviet forces entered Prague.

President Josef Tiso and the Slovakian government surrender to the Allies in Austria.

Germans surrendered at Karlshurst, near Berlin along with those in Latvia and the Dresden-Görlitz area. Continued resistance in Olomouc and Sternbeck, Czechoslovakia was defeated by the Soviets.

Yugoslav partisans took Zagreb. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HARRY S TRUMAN PRESIDENT HARRY S TRUMAN

Germans holding St. Nazaire on the Bay of Biscay, surrendered to the Americans.

Sergeant Joseph Wechsberg, US Army, desiring to see the famous building, walked through the stage door of the Bayreuth Festspielhaus. Finding himself on stage in the set for Die Meistersinger he sat and sang part of the music-drama. A carpenter, alerted by the sound, was his only audience.

The “brownout” of non-essential lighting was ended in the United States.

In Brno, Czechoslovakia, 25,000 German civilian residents had been force-marched at gunpoint to the Austrian border. There the Austrian guards had been refusing to admit them while their Czech guards had been refusing to allow them to return to the city. In an open field, they had been dying by the hundreds from hunger and cold before finally, with the arrival of the US 16th Tank Division on this day, the survivors were rescued. At some point during this timeframe, the last European atrocity of the war in took place in the small town of Ridderkerk, near Rotterdam, during the German evacuation. The Mayor there had ordered the Dutch police to arrest some “Hun girls,” which is to say, Dutch women who had been involved with German soldiers. While a group of these local policemen were standing with three of arrested women, a German officer and his girl friend happened to pass by in a truck. The police saw them and stopped the truck, but then there was a signal from the German officer, and a group of ten drunken German soldiers stormed out of a nearby house and opened fire on the police and their prisoners. The police and the women took refuge in a house and the Germans stormed in, dragging women and children outside. The 11 Dutchmen who were found inside the house were brought outside and stood up against a wall and executed. There was a wounded man behind the sofa who gave himself away by his moans and was likewise executed, but three other hidden men were not detected and would survive.

The submarine Bream (SS-243) was laying mines off the coast of French Indochina.

May 11, Friday: President Harry S Truman was visited at the White House by his mother Martha Ellen and his sister Mary Jane.

Allied forces recaptured Wewak, Northeast New Guinea.

Josef Terboven, Reich Commissioner for Norway, killed himself with a stick of dynamite, in Oslo.

Kaddish op.250 for cantor, chorus and organ by Darius Milhaud was performed for the initial time, in Park Avenue Synagogue, New York. Also premiered was Hashkiveinu for cantor, chorus and organ by Leonard Bernstein, and excerpts from the cantata Yigdal by Stefan Wolpe to words of Maimonedes.

A communication intercept was accomplished on this day that would be studied carefully inside the US government, because it supported the attitude of Deputy Director for the Far East George Edward Taylor of the Office of War Information and others that the Japanese military were ripe for surrender: “Report of peace sentiment in Japanese armed forces: On 5 May the German Naval Attaché in Tokyo dispatched the following HDT WHAT? INDEX

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message to Admiral Doenitz: ‘An influential member of the Admiralty Staff has given me to understand that, since the situation is clearly recognized to be hopeless, large sections of the Japanese armed forces would not regard with disfavor an American request for capitulation even if the terms were hard, provided they were halfway honorable.’” To this communication intercept, someone in US military intelligence would append the following: “Previously noted diplomatic reports have commented on signs of war weariness in official Japanese Navy circles, but have not mentioned such an attitude in Army quarters.” (Neither Franklin Delano Roosevelt nor Truman would prove willing to credit such reports, as both were determined that they were going to indulge themselves in a spasm of civilian-killing with their new A-bomb toy.)

Japanese aircraft made a heavy attack on US shipping in Okinawa area, Ryukyu Islands. United States naval vessels damaged: • Aircraft carrier Bunker Hill (CV-17), by Kamikaze suicide plane, 25 degrees 44 minutes North, 129 degrees 28 minutes East • Destroyer Evans (DD-551), by Kamikaze suicide plane, 26 degrees 58 minutes North, 127 degrees 32 minutes East • Destroyer Hugh W. Hadley (DD-774), by piloted bomb, 26 degrees 59 minutes North, 127 degrees 32 minutes East WORLD WAR II

June 15, Friday: The southern part of Prussian Rheinland and the western part of Hessen were joined to create the province of Rheinland-Hessen-Nassau.

The longest British Parliament since 1679 was dissolved before upcoming elections.

80,000 teamsters were taking a strike vote — US President Harry S Truman ordered seizure of the Chicago trucking industry.

United States Destroyer Escort O’Flaherty (DE-340) was damaged by a collision in Okinawan waters, at 26 degrees 0 minute North, 128 degrees 0 minute East. WORLD WAR II HDT WHAT? INDEX

HARRY S TRUMAN PRESIDENT HARRY S TRUMAN

June 19, Tuesday: President Harry S Truman flew to Washington State, becoming the 1st president in office to use air travel within the national airspace.

American troops took Ilagan in northern Luzon.

British soldiers found Alfred Krupp in Essen and spirited him away to a secret place.

General Dwight D. Eisenhower was given a tumultuous welcome to New York City.

United States naval vessels damaged: • Minesweeper Device (AM-220), by collision, Okinawa area, 26 degrees 0 minute North, 127 degrees 0 minute East • Minesweeper Dour (AM-223), by collision, Okinawa area, 26 degrees 0 minute North, 127 degrees 0 minute East • LST562, by collision, Brunei Bay area, Borneo, 4 degrees 29 minutes North, 114 degrees 1 East

June 26, Tuesday: The United Nations Conference on International Organizations meeting at San Francisco’s War Memorial Opera House adopted the Charter of the United Nations. READ THE FULL TEXT

President Harry S Truman delivered an address at the closing session of the U.N. Charter Conference.

The establishment of the International Court of Justice. READ THE FULL TEXT

All air transport companies in France were nationalized.

Rhapsody in Blue, a film biography of George Gershwin, was released in Hollywood.

Marines were landed on Kume Shima, Ryukyu Islands, by naval task group (Capt. C.A. Buchanan).

United States naval vessels sunk, Balikpapan area, Borneo: • Motor minesweeper YMS-39, by mine, 1 degrees 19 minutes South, 116 degrees 49 minutes East • Motor minesweeper YMS-365, damaged by mine, 1 degrees 18 minutes South, 116 degrees 50 minutes East; sunk by United States forces WORLD WAR II HDT WHAT? INDEX

PRESIDENT HARRY S TRUMAN HARRY S TRUMAN

July: Following the defeat of Nazi Germany, World War II Allies including the US, Britain, and the Soviet Union would hold the Potsdam Conference in Germany to plan the post-war world. Vietnam was considered a minor item on the agenda. In order to disarm the Japanese in Vietnam, the Allies divided the country in half at the 16th parallel. Chinese Nationalists would move in and disarm the Japanese north of the parallel while the British would move in and do the same for the south. During the conference, representatives from France requested the return of all French pre-war colonies in Southeast Asia (Indochina). This request was honored, and in the postwar world, following the removal of the Japanese, Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia would once again become French colonies.

President Harry S Truman, our naïf, would sail home from the conference exclaiming “I like old Joe! He is a decent fellow.” FOR HE’S A DECENT FELLOW, FOR HE’S ... HDT WHAT? INDEX

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July 16, before dawn: Richard Harkey, a little boy, was waiting with his father for the train to arrive in Ancho, near Alamagordo, New Mexico, 200 kilometers south of Albuquerque, when he and his father heard a very, very loud blast. He tells us now that his father suspected that the steam locomotive on the train for which they were waiting had blown up, somewhere down the tracks. But they would find out that nothing ordinary was the reason for this particular very, very loud blast. The first atomic device, known as “The Gadget,” had just been detonated atop a tower at nearby Trinity test site, and a new world had just come into being.10 ATOM BOMB

All life was ended within two kilometers of the gynormous explosion. The temperature at ground zero was three times hotter than the surface of the sun. The steel tower atop which the device had been placed was turned to gas. Windows were blown out at a distance of 320 kilometers. Light from the blast was apparent at a distance of 650 kilometers.

A short while before, when General Leslie R. Groves had briefed President Harry S Truman, he had suggested that if the president now failed to detonate this device which had cost the nation $2 billion (like $26 billion in today’s money) it would “cast a lot of reflection on Mr. Roosevelt,” whose portrait was hanging on the wall.

“He went along for the ride like a little boy on a toboggan,” this fat-assed Atom General reported. Truman would soon be writing in his diary “It may be the fire destruction prophesied in the Euphrates Valley Area, after Noah and his famous Ark.” However, this leader would not get everything he wanted, because he wanted

10. The Manhattan Project yielded three atomic bombs, each of which needed to be tested. The first of these bombs was a device known as “Gadget,” and because the Plutonium239 bomb mechanism was more complicated and failure-prone, was a test model of that device. The next bomb, this time a device meant to be dropped from an aircraft, was know as “Little Boy” and was our Uranium238 model. It would be tested in warfare over the city of Hiroshima, which had purposefully been left untouched so that the bomb damage could be accurately assessed. The U238 bomb did not have a test model not only because it was a very simple design but also because Oak Ridge had not yet enriched enough U238 to create two devices. The third bomb was the Pt239 model know as “Fat Man” and was the same design as the “Gadget” but prepared to be dropped from an aircraft. It would be tested in warfare over the city of Nagasaki, which had purposefully been left untouched so that the bomb damage could be accurately assessed and compared with the bomb damage resulting from our other design. We had to rush to get this one dropped before Japan had a chance to surrender unconditionally, as we simply had to obtain some objective basis for determining which of the two programs, the U238 program or the Pt239 program, should be continued in the postwar world, and which discontinued. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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to drop one of his two remaining A-bombs on Kyoto. If we dropped on an “intellectual center” such as Kyoto

rather than merely on industrial port cities such as Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he felt, the people down there on the ground, being more intelligent, would be “more apt to appreciate the significance” of what had happened to them. The question I would raise, and the reason why I have inserted this material in this database, is, what if General Groves had been attempting to sell this bomb to Henry David Thoreau? (Yeah, I do know that’s ridiculous.) Having, say, refreshed his recollections of WALDEN and “Life without Principle” the night before, what would Groves have felt it appropriate to say to Thoreau, more or less in the vein of his gesturing toward the image of FDR on the wall, the father figure Truman wanted so much not to disappoint? And how would Thoreau have then responded to him? Would the fat-assed Atom General have been able to come out of the cabin and stand in the sunlight by the pond and report to his colleagues “He went along for the ride like a little boy on a toboggan”?

Or would our atomic era, encountered by one man of principle, have ended before it began, with the cork put firmly back in this bottle?

The poem “Locksley Hall” by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, written in 1837-1838,11 describes the frustrated yearnings of a young man who has been denied a woman he desired. The poem contains a phrase

there rain’d a ghastly dew From the nations’ airy navies

In 1910, a Missourian named Harry S Truman had considered that this constituted a legitimation for whatever viciousness he needed to perpetrate in life. A life agenda for a “show me” guy. For the result imagined in

11. NORTON ANTHOLOGY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, 4th Edition, NY 1979, W.W. Norton & Company, II:1117-23. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Tennyson’s poem is an earth finally at peace:

the war drum throbbed no longer, and the battle flags were furled In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world.

This poem somehow constituted for that young man from Missouri a dip into the future far as human eye could see, something he could hope for and fantasize about and scheme for, a vision of the world and all the wonder that would be. A poet had told him that out of the greatest evil, a final good could come. In 1945 President Truman pulled this creased slip of paper out of his billfold and showed it to a reporter, at a signal moment in his life.12 Truman was elated because he was sailing toward Potsdam for the end-of-war conference to decide the global configuration of politics, July 7-August 2, 1945, after having been briefed on a trump card for the negotiations, the Manhattan Project’s development of an ultimate indiscriminate weapon of war, a terror device that could be aimed –aimed only– at cities of workers, women, and children:

“The intent was to terrorize a nation to the maximum extent, and there is nothing like nuking civilians to achieve that effect.”

— William Langewiesche, THE ATOMIC BAZAAR: THE RISE OF THE NUCLEAR POOR, NY: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2007

12. Franklin, H. Bruce, 1989, “Fatal Fiction: A Weapon to End All Wars,” The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 45, Number 9 (November 1989):18-25. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Taking this creased slip of paper into consideration, the stories that are told about the American decision to drop the atom bomb are incredible. Taking this creased slip of paper into consideration, there is only one explanation that is plausible.

Carolyn Eisenberg of Hofstra University, who has had occasion to make careful study of the primary documents of the Truman presidency, including many transcripts of many White House meetings, comments that we should be most careful in condemning this very limited man because “What’s very striking about Truman is that very often he just doesn’t know what’s going on.... He just has no understanding of the policies being made in his name.” Taking that into consideration, what we have to ask ourselves in considering his role in the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki would be, was this one of the occasions on which his staff pulled the wool over his eyes? Or, on the other hand, was this one of the occasions on which he was fully alert, and fully briefed, and directed and led others into the way of wickedness? —I would say that this creased slip of paper that he pulled out of his billfold to show to a reporter establishes, establishes definitively, that there is no excuse to be made for this limited man in this particular regard. For this viciousness he bears a full measure of responsibility.

US warships shelled Muroran on Hokkaido Island.

This day was the first day of the Potsdam Conference. Robinson Jeffers would write the following on the basis of President Truman’s conduct while sailing home from the Potsdam conference: Moment of Glory They have their moments, and if one loved them they ought to die in those moments: but who could love them? Consider Churchill contemplating the ditch where his great enemy’s Body was burned in the roaring ruins of Berlin — and turning away, grinning, making his cockney Victory-gesture. Consider Hitler prancing stiff-legged over fallen France. Consider little Truman, That innocent man sailing home from Potsdam – rejoicing, running about the ship, HDT WHAT? INDEX

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telling all and sundry That the awful power that feeds the life of the stars had been tricked down Into the common stews and shambles.

Contemptible people? Certainly. But how they enjoy their points of glory.13

Our poet was severely persecuted and censored for his attitude toward the Second World War and toward our leaders in it.

Robin Jeffers, our pre-eminent West Coast poet of place, in all his life never read Thoreau, our pre-eminent East Coast poet of place. He also never found out, prior to his death in 1962 in Carmel CA, that while the president he had so savagely criticized for his disgraceful conduct subsequent to the Potsdam conference had been sailing toward that conference, an incident quite as damning had already occurred.

It would be an interesting exercise, to attempt to construct, on the basis of some similar psychology of some similar individuals with whom Thoreau had to deal during the war against Mexico during his lifetime, what Henry David Thoreau would have had to say about all this WWII craziness.

J. Robert Oppenheimer and General Leslie Groves ordered that the gun and bullet components of the atomic bomb to be dropped on Hiroshima, Little Boy, be loaded aboard the newly repaired heavy cruiser USS Indianapolis (CA-35), and Charles Butler McVay III, its captain, received orders to steam at full speed to the island of Tinian where we were establishing a long, heavy airstrip, making “all possible haste.”14 WORLD WAR II

13. THE DOUBLE AXE, page 137. Despite the fact that the war had been over for a couple-three years, this volume of poetry would be heavily censored by Bennett Cerf and Saxe Commins of Random House, and even in its abbreviated condition, with ten poems absent, would be allowed to appear only with a publisher’s disclaimer message in regard to “the political views pronounced by the poet.” In this poem, the publisher objected to “little Truman,” and Jeffers allowed them to alter it to “Harry Truman,” since it really mattered to them, but pointed out to them that the President was “little” only in a historical sense — since in person in physical actuality he was taller than Winston Churchill, and taller than Adolf Hitler. To the publisher’s objection that the poet was too easy on Hitler, the poet responded that the whole world was full of people cursing Hitler — but also the poet would agree that “Hitler deserves worse than he gets.” 14. Initially, J. Robert Oppenheimer would attempt to justify his role in the Manhattan Project on the grounds that this new big bomb might be a deterrent to future warfare, ushering in Immanuel Kant’s era of perpetual peace (perchance he also believed in the tooth fairy). Later on, after this pathetic ploy had been crushed by the weight of history, in 1962, he would attempt a rather more elaborate self-justification according to which he had been just another scientist: “It is a profound and necessary truth, that the deep things in science are not found because they are useful; they are found because it was possible to find them.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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July 17, Tuesday: Aircraft from fast carrier task force (Vice Admiral J.S. McCain) and British fast carrier task force (Vice Admiral H. B. Rawlings, RN) attacked airfields near Tokyo. The British force would continue to operate as part of the United States Third Fleet (Admiral W.F. Halsey) until the termination of hostilities.

Battleships, cruisers, and destroyers (Rear Admiral O.C. Badger) bombarded industrialized Mito-Hitachi area, Honshu, Japan.

US President Harry S Truman, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and Communist Party General Secretary Stalin came together in Potsdam, 16 miles outside Berlin, to discuss the post-war world, in a meeting that would last until August 2d. READ THE FULL TEXT

The Belgian Chamber of Deputies voted to bar the return of King Leopold without their permission. Six cabinet members resigned. The King asserted that he would not abdicate without a popular referendum on the issue. WORLD WAR II

July 18, Wednesday: Australian troops took the Samboja oil fields, which were ablaze.

The Belgian Senate agreed to the action taken on the previous day in the Chamber of Deputies.

The Brazilian Expeditionary Force returned to Rio de Janeiro and was awarded a tumultuous welcome.

US President Harry S Truman made an entry in his handwritten diary, referring to a “telegram from Jap emperor asking for peace.” WORLD WAR II

Tricky Japs — it was all over but the shouting. From this point forward, every American soldier who would have to die in combat, would have to die for US political reasons rather than for any military exigency (just as, at Pearl Harbor and in the Philippines at the beginning of the conflict, they had had to die because first they had been deliberately positioned for entirely political reasons in harm’s way, as bait, and then they could not be alerted to the fact that they were about to be attacked in these exposed positions, because their Commander- in-Chief considered it to be a political imperative that the Japanese be forced by him to remove his ability to make any prompt response in the Pacific theatre of war — and thus allow him the good excuse that he needed before the court of American public opinion, to focus first as he desired upon the European theatre of operations). HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Aircraft from the fast carrier task forces of the Third Fleet (Admiral W.F. Halsey) strike Yokosuka Naval Base and airfields in the Tokyo area.

Cruisers and destroyers (Rear Admiral C.F. Holden) bombarded shore installations at Cape Nojima, Honshu, Japan.

Carrier-based aircraft bombed Wake Island.

United States naval vessel damaged: • Transport George F. Elliott (AP-105), by unknown cause, Okinawa area, 26 degrees 14 minutes North, 127 degrees 50 minutes East

Japanese naval vessel sunk: • Coast defense vessel #112, by submarine Barb (SS-220), off Karafuto, Japan, 46 degrees 3 minutes North, 142 degrees 16 minutes East HDT WHAT? INDEX

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July 24, Tuesday: The USS Underhill, an American Buckley-class escort destroyer of the Pacific Seventh Fleet, was escorting a convoy of a troop carrier, the USS Adria, and 6 LSTs (Landing Ship, Tank). The convoy was carrying what was left of the 96th Infantry Division on its way from Okinawa to the Philippines for the men’s HDT WHAT? INDEX

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R&R (rest and recreation).

About 150 miles northeast of Luzon the convoy was engaged by a Japanese 2-man kaiten suicide sub that had HDT WHAT? INDEX

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recently been launched from its mother ship, Commander Saichi Oba’s I-53 which carried 6 such kaiten.15

The Underhill rammed the kaiten and it went off just forward of the destroyer’s engine room on its starboard side. The forward boilers exploded and the ship split, the bow piece disappearing immediately. The stern piece remained afloat and would need to be sent down by shells from other destroyers.16 (Lieutenant-Commander Robert N. Newcomb would posthumously get a Navy Cross. Each of the 122 floaters would get a Purple Heart. On July 24, 1997 a permanent memorial stone would be dedicated in Arlington National Cemetery, for the 10 American officers and 102 American enlisted men17 without land graves. The two guys on the suicide sub didn’t get markers — that must not have been in their contract.)

Themes for Improvisation for organ by Benjamin Britten was performed for the initial time, over the airwaves of the BBC Home Service.

At Potsdam, US President Harry S Truman informed Soviet leader Stalin of the atomic bomb (he of course already knew).

Former Prime Ministers Paul Reynaud and Edouard Daladier testified against Henri Petain at his trial in Paris.

600 bombers from the fast carrier task forces of the Third Fleet (Admiral W. F. Halsey) launched a 2-day attack on the Inland Sea area, striking Kure Naval Base and airfields at Nagoya, Osaka, and Miho.

United States naval vessel sunk: • Destroyer escort Underhill (DE-682), damaged by piloted torpedo, off Luzon, Philippine Islands 19 degrees 20 minutes North, 126 degrees 42 minutes East,; sunk by United States forces

Japanese naval vessels sunk, Inland Sea area, Japan: 15. Kaiten means “Turning of the Heavens.” The crudely constructed device was a standard torpedo that had been sawn in half to elongate the mid-section to put in a couple of canvas seats. In front of the suicide pilots was the usual 3,300 pounds of high explosive and behind them the propulsion unit. The entry point was a hatch under the torpedo’s belly — once the guys got in there they wouldn’t be concerned about getting out. 16. At a first order of approximation there seems to be a remarkable similarity between fighting at sea and feeding fish.

17. God must love enlisted men: he makes so many of them! HDT WHAT? INDEX

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• Battleship Hyuga, by carrier-based aircraft, 34 degrees 10 minutes North, 132 degrees 33 minutes East • Battleship Ise, by carrier-based aircraft, 34 degrees 12 minutes North, 132 degrees 31 minutes East • Battleship Haruna, by carrier-based aircraft, 34 degrees 15 minutes North, 132 degrees 29 minutes East • Escort carrier Kaiyo, by carrier-based aircraft, Army aircraft and mine, 33 degrees 21 minutes North, 131 degrees 32 minutes East • Heavy cruiser Aoba, by carrier-based aircraft, 34 degrees 13 minutes North, 1332 degrees 31 minutes East/ Old heavy cruiser Iwate, by carrier-based aircraft, 34 degrees 14 minutes North, 132 degrees 30 minutes East WORLD WAR II

July 26, Thursday: The USS Indianapolis (CA-35) arrived at Tinian and the gun and bullet components of the atomic bomb to be dropped over Hiroshima, Little Boy, were off-loaded. Captain Charles B. McVay III received orders to proceed to Guam and then Leyte for gunnery practice on August 2nd with the USS Idaho (BB-42). The message the Idaho received about the Indianapolis was garbled but no request was made for retransmission, so the officers of the Idaho were unaware of the Indianapolis being en route.

The governments of the United States, Great Britain and China demanded the unconditional surrender of Japan. “The alternative for Japan was complete and utter destruction.”

The results of the British general election were promulgated giving the Labour Party a majority in the House of Commons, up 227 seats from the last Parliament. Prime Minister Winston Churchill tendered his resignation. King George VI asked Clement Attlee to form a new government.

The US War Production Board announced that a new insecticide, DDT, would soon be available to the public.

The ballet The Ivory Tower was performed for the initial time, in Oakland. The music was a chamber HDT WHAT? INDEX

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orchestration of Darius Milhaud’s La muse ménagère.

In the port of Cheribon in northern Java, on a day in late July, a Japanese submarine took on its deck 90 European civilian prisoners. The group included women and children. As dusk fell the submarine left port, traveling on the surface. Fearful, many of the women began to sob. After about an hour the submarine began to submerge and they were all swept into the shark-infested seas. There would be a survivor, who would be picked up by three Javanese fishermen minus an arm and a foot. He would, before he bled out, be able to inform these fishermen of what had happened. The fishermen, fearful that the Japanese would kill them, let his body slip back into the sea and for the time being held their tongues. (Soon they would be able to repeat this man’s story to the authorities but, as the Japanese destroyed all their naval files and records of ship movements at the end of the war, the identity of this submarine and its commander would not be ascertained.)

US President Harry S Truman issued the Potsdam Declaration that the Japanese surrender must be unconditional.

United States Destroyer Lowry (DD-770) was damaged by an explosion in the Philippine Sea, at 19 degrees 30 minutes North, 128 degrees 0 minute East. WORLD WAR II

August 2, Thursday: The USS Indianapolis (CA-35) was due to arrive in Leyte that morning. When it failed to arrive it was simply taken off the plotting board and no effort was made to determine what might have happened to it. Fleet Admiral Ernest J. King had left standing orders, that the arrivals of combatant ships in port were not to be reported to him — which was being taken, by his subordinates, to imply that he was likewise uninterested in non-arrivals.

A few miles west of Honshu is Sado, Japan’s 5th largest island. At the Aikawa Ore Mine there, the Japanese had their POW Camp109, holding miscellaneous British, Australians, Dutchmen, and Americans who had been sent there as slave labor. On this morning the camp commandant ordered that the 387 Allied POW slave laborers be herded to the deepest part of the mine, which was some 400 feet beneath the surface. Demolition charges had already been placed the previous night, at depths of 200 and 300 feet. The guards hurriedly departed and at 9:10AM the charges were detonated. As soon as the dust and smoke had settled, they set about HDT WHAT? INDEX

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dismantling the narrow-gauge railway and packing the parts inside the entrance to the mine. They then set off a final detonation at the surface, causing an avalanche of rock and earth to obscure the entrance. During the next few days they would dismantle this entire camp complex and remove all signs of previous occupancy. (Lieutenant Yoshiro Tsuda would offered under interrogation, that he had merely been obeying his orders. He had himself had no misgivings whatsoever about this processing of such a large number of prisoners. As he pointed out, an Imperial Army Extermination Order had directed the swift extermination of all POWs should the islands of Japan be threatened by invasion.)

Ending of the Potsdam Conference (this conference had begun on July 17, 1945). WORLD WAR II HDT WHAT? INDEX

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August 3, Friday: Walter Brown, special assistant to President Harry S Truman’s Secretary of State James F. Byrnes, made an entry in his diary about events aboard the USS Augusta involving his boss, the President, and Admiral William D. Leaky: “Aboard Augusta/President, Leahy, J.F.B. agreed Japs looking for peace.”

Well, first things first, they were looking for it but they weren’t going to get it — until we had first been able to test on them, for military effectiveness, both our new Uranium238 bomb and our new Plutonium239 bomb HDT WHAT? INDEX

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so we would know which one of the two was more worthy. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Lieutenant Wilbur Gwinn, in a Ventura bomber, happened to notice the groups of survivors of the USS Indianapolis (CA-35) and radioed Palau for rescue operations to commence. Lieutenant Adrian Marks landed his PBY in the heavy seas and managed to pick up 56 survivors. When Tom Brophy defied orders to leave his group and attempt to swim to the plane, he was not seen again.

United States naval vessels damaged: • Destroyer escort Earl V. Johnson (DE-702), by explosion, Philippine Sea, 20 degrees 17 minutes North, 128 degrees 7 minutes East HDT WHAT? INDEX

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• Attack cargo ship Seminole (AKA-104), by collision, Okinawa area, 26 degrees 14 minutes North, 127 degrees 50 minutes East WORLD WAR II

August 4, Saturday: Rescue operations for the crew of the USS Indianapolis (CA-35) started in a 50-mile radius. Efforts over several days would save only about a quarter of her nearly 1200-man crew. WORLD WAR II HDT WHAT? INDEX

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August 6, Monday: Major Richard I. Bong, the fighter pilot from Duluth, Minnesota who had shot down 40 Japanese planes and for this had received the Congressional Medal of Honor, died in an explosion shortly after takeoff, above Burbank, California.

This was to be our 1st Hiroshima Day. We prayed for a day that would live in history. We dropped one of our two atomic bomb designs, the uranium one that had not been tested using the gun-type detonation technique that had not been tested, on Hiroshima, Honshu, Japan.

The fissile materials in this bomb consisted of 141 pounds of 90%-enriched 235Uranium of which the design succeeded in converting merely 9.3 to 13.3 grains into energy, the remaining 986,986.7 to 986,990.7 grains of the fissile material (there are 7,000 grains in one pound) becoming part of the radioactive fallout — not very satisfactory from the standpoint of blast, almost a “dirty bomb” in effect, but in spite of the fact that due to a crosswind we missed our aiming point by the entire length of a football field, we did manage to kill some 66,000 people immediately, and injure some 69,000 — almost all of them civilians.18

(Who will ever know what had gone wrong? Perhaps we used too much conventional explosive in driving the HDT WHAT? INDEX

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external rings over the internal plug, and the rings passed over the plug before the criticality stage was complete. Perhaps we used too little conventional explosive and the external rings did not completely cover the internal plug before the criticality stage began. Perhaps there was some minor misalignment and an edge of the external rings caught on the edge of the internal plug. At any rate, this one of our two detonation mechanisms clearly did not function and would need to be totally redesigned. Maybe the other design will work?)

Carrier aircraft from naval task group (Vice Admiral J.B. Oldendorf) struck enemy shipping in Tinghai Harbor, China.

Carrier aircraft bombed Wake Island. WORLD WAR II

President Harry S Truman had instructed that the atomic bomb was to be utilized in such a manner that “military objectives and soldiers and sailors are the target and not women and children…. [Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson] and I are in accord. The target is a purely military one.”19

18. As a veteran of the nuclear power industry I am well aware of the industry’s conventional dismissal of concern over the possibility that a commercial nuclear power plant could go off like an A-bomb. They are trained to regurgitate with disdain the sentence that all memorize, “There is no way that a nuclear power plant could go off like an atomic bomb.” What they neglect to mention, of course, is that their dismissal of concern is accurate only in the sense in which the device we detonated above Hiroshima also failed to “go off like an atomic bomb,” producing merely the effect that a “dirty bomb” or “dud” or “exploding nuclear power plant” might now produce. 19. Actually, President Truman knew very well that the targets for the A-bombs were not military at all, but were instead cities full of civilians, cities that had been selected primarily because so far in the war they had not sustained significant bomb damage. He also knew very well that his Secretary of State, James Byrnes, was very much opposed to this use of the bomb on civilian populations. While he was aboard the USS Augusta waiting for the first bomb to be dropped, therefore, Truman hid out from his Secretary of State in a marathon poker game. Another player in that fateful shipboard game, United Press International reporter Merriam Smith, would report on this, that the President of the United States of America “was running a straight stud filibuster” against his own Cabinet member. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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It Is Not Enough

It is not enough if your name is Harry Truman and you have that sign on your desk saying “The buck stops here” to only take responsibility.

I am sure he did not lay awake at night agonizing over giving the order to obliterate Hiroshima. He was proud to take the responsibility for this action.

But life is so short and the long-term consequences of our nuclear actions Unfold like the growing of a mighty Redwood.

I wonder if Harry was willing to be responsible for the consequences of his actions since they are still unfolding a half a century later?

I wonder if Harry could look at pictures of Hiroshima survivors or the shadow in the concrete of those publicly cremated?

I wonder if he read the reports of the continuing, widespread radiation sickness occurring long after the bomb was only a memory?

I wonder if Harry was warned that cancers traced back to genetic damage or a high incidence of deformed children would be “the rule” and not “the exception” for generations?

Would Harry have been willing to have eternally twisted and torn the genetic matrix of a whole people?

I wonder if Harry was able to envision HDT WHAT? INDEX

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a world where more and more nations possess nuclear capability and terrorist groups will soon be able to buy from those who wish to sell?

Would Harry have been willing to accept these consequences and worse? Would he have been able to watch the Twin Towers fall?

Would Harry have been able to sleep and have sweet dreams knowing the consequences of his actions?

I do not know if there will be a final day of judgment and God will assess what we gave to the world in return for Her giving us life and a free will.

Perhaps when Harry stands alone before God, She will have wept so long and so hard with those killed or worse, over the centuries as a result of his action, that She will just sit in silence as he squirms.

I would not like to be anywhere near that part of the galaxy when that confrontation occurs.

Warning to all heads of state! Do not post signs that you will take responsibility for your decisions unless you are willing to accept responsibility for the long-term consequences as well!

Poor, dumb Harry.

— Harold B. Confer, Finding My Voice Enumclaw WA: Winepress Publishing, 2003 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Subsequent to the explosion of the “Jumbo” tower device at Trinity flats on July 16th, the US had two weapons in its nuclear arsenal, one a trigger-mechanism enriched-Uranium235 bomb named “Little Boy” that had been constructed in the Tennessee Valley facility (on the left below) and the other an implosion-mechanism Plutonium239 bomb named “Fat Man” that had been constructed in the Hanford, Washington facility (on the right below).

This was, therefore, to be the 1st Hiroshima Day. A day that would live in our memory.

Bomber 44-86292, the Enola Gay, piloted by Colonel Paul W. Tibbets, Jr., departed at 2:45AM. He waved from the cockpit as he took off, and you can see from the photo how dark it still was:

At about 8:15AM local time, two silver airplanes were circling over the city of Hiroshima, so high up in the sky as to be almost dots, and a dot invisible from the ground dropped from one of the two planes, and then the HDT WHAT? INDEX

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planes began steep banking turns, one to the left and one to the right. There were at least 15 kilograms of fissile material in the two chunks loaded into the device, since that is the critical amount for Uranium235. Forty-three seconds later, at about 8:16AM local time, this dot which had dropped from the sky fell to within a few thousand feet of its aiming point, a uniquely shaped “T” bridge in the heart of downtown Hiroshima that was 1.7 kilometers distant from the home in which baby Sadako Sasaki lay, and an altitude sensor being triggered, a minute conventional explosion inside this canister propelled a small chunk of U235 into a hole bored in another, slightly larger chunk of U235 beginning a chain nuclear fission reaction which in a fraction of a second went to completion, transforming some of the U235 directly into energy in accordance with the exceedingly HDT WHAT? INDEX

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rough E=mc2 ±10% rule of thumb.20 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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WORLD WAR II

20. Actually, E=mc2 only plus or minus ten percent. The formula has never been either tested or proved — it’s not science, but publicity — it’s a sales pitch. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Approximately 70,000 men, women, and children, most of them noncombatants, either died instantly and painlessly or would, like Sadako Sasaki, die more slowly and horribly. 90% of the 200 doctors were killed or seriously injured. Three of the 55 hospitals were usable. 150 of the 1,780 nurses were able to perform their jobs. Our trigger mechanism and our Uranium235 technology had worked flawlessly. The aircraft crew radioed its success: “CLEAR CUT RESULTS COMMA IN ALL RESPECTS SUCCESSFUL PD EXCEEDED TEST IN VISIBLE EFFECTS PD” The bomber flight returned to Tinian at 2:58PM, twelve hours and thirteen minutes after takeoff. President Truman proceeded to inform a group of Americans that “This is the greatest thing in history” and went off to see a comedy revue. Our president fully understood how important Hiroshima Day would come to be for us. The narrator of Kurt Vonnegut’s 1963 novel CAT’S CRADLE would purport to be engaged in compiling a record of what various Americans were doing at the moment the atomic bomb went off over Hiroshima, and he informs us that at this moment, 8:16AM of August 6, 1945, his character “Dr. Felix Hoenikker, Nobel Prize winner and so-called father of the atomic bomb,” having made a “cat’s cradle” out of a bit of string, had come up unexpectedly and was frightening his young son, by jerking this string back and forth and exclaiming “See the cat! See the cradle!”21

1 21. Austin Meredith cannot remember what he was doing, as he was 7 /2 years old and anyway was not informed of this event until maybe a following day. He was in Brazil, Indiana, at his grandmother’s house, and presumably, as it was growing dark, was getting ready to go upstairs to his and his Uncle Vergilee’s bed, which had a rustley mattress made of corn shucks. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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August 9, Thursday: Soviet forces launched a major offensive against the Japanese in Manchuria, immediately breaching defenses. 1,000,000 Red Army troops were thrown into the battle.

After flying around over another city for half an hour waiting for a break in the clouds, our silver airplane had gone to try to hit one of its secondary targets, the oldest Japanese port city, Nagasaki, with its American POW camp. “Fat Man,” our other atomic bomb, the implosion-mechanism Plutonium239 bomb that had been so eagerly sponsored by John von Neumann, missed its target by 1.9 miles and was utterly inefficient at its task of converting matter into energy, damaging no portion of its target area but detonating directly above the largest Roman Catholic cathedral in the Far East. Oops!

Why, I bet nobody ever told you that! Did anyone tell you that this was another down day for Professor Albert Einstein?

Masahito Hirose was a junior high school student when he watched the white mushroom cloud rise above Nagasaki. He lost a cousin in the blast, and later an aunt would die a slow and painful death while bleeding HDT WHAT? INDEX

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from her nose and gums. Now, in the Year of Our Lord 2011, he is 81 years of age and subsequent to the disaster at Fukushima Daiichi, he has begun to inquire “Is it Japan’s fate to repeatedly serve as a warning to the world about the dangers of radiation?”

I do not know how many grams of Pt239 were packed into the wedges of the Nagasaki bomb, or what the efficiency of the device should have been. All I can tell you is that of the amount used, which at an impossible 100% efficiency could have been as little as 5 kilograms, almost all of it was simply vaporized, and only approximately one gram was converted into the entire energy of the explosion. The energy from conversion of one gram of this matter is, however, equal to the energy released by the explosion of 18,000,000,000 grams (20,000 tons) of ordinary military-grade TNT. The energy from this one gram of Pt239 killed almost instantly about 250 Japanese soldiers, about the same number of American prisoners of war, and approximately 70,000 noncombatant men, women, and children.

Why, I bet nobody ever told you that after the detonation device we had used on the Hiroshima bomb had failed to create more than a flash-bang of radiation, the entirely different detonation device we used on the Nagasaki bomb also failed to create more than a flash-bang of radiation. In neither city did they even so much as leave a hole in the ground. But, of course, as we went back to the drawing boards, our spin-doctors would scream SUCCESS and SUCCESS despite the fact that we had succeeded only in producing something like 1% or less of the slaughter and destruction that we had been scheming! (The initial bomb set off by North Korea well over half a century later would be a squib like this, and we would chortle and mock.)

Flight report and operations order indicate that Bomber 44-86292, the Enola Gay, flew as the weather plane HDT WHAT? INDEX

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on this second atomic mission.

A headline in The New Republic read “Thank God for the Atomic Bomb.” The blast at Nagasaki did not alter the outcome of the war for the Japanese had already determined to surrender, but since we had managed to test both our devices under real war conditions, the US would have a better basis for determining whether to continue production at our Tennessee Valley facility, or at our Hanford facility. General Leslie “Can’t Drive a Spike With a Tackhammer” Groves, facing a congressional committee, would offer that in his opinion dying of radiation poisoning, as was happening in the surviving civilian populations in the Hiroshima and Nagasaki HDT WHAT? INDEX

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areas, must be relatively “a very pleasant way to die.”22The Enola Gay exhibit now provides us with outright

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22. Jonathan Kwitny has raised some hypothetical questions in the pages of the LA Times Book Review section for August 6, 1995 (page 10). What, he asks, would be the impact on us were we to find out certain things about our history as a nation:

But what if Gen. Eisenhower, Gen. MacArthur, Adm. Leahy, Gen. Bradley, and Adm. Nimitz –the top American brass in World War II– had all believed Japan would surrender in mid-1945 without our dropping atom bombs, and without an American invasion of Japan? What if Assistant Secretary of War John McCloy, a Cold War hawk, agreed, and so did hawkish press tycoons Henry Luce and David Lawrence, and even Air Force Gen. Curtis LeMay (of “Bombs Away With Curtis LeMay” fame when he ran for vice president on the George Wallace ticket)? What if a commission to study the bombings appointed by President Harry S Truman1 and directed by cold warrior Paul Nitze also thought the bombing unnecessary to obtain Japanese surrender? What if even President Truman and Secretary of War Henry Stimson in the weeks before the bomb was dropped had embraced in writing every significant argument against the Hiroshima and Nagasaki attacks, and ordered that the bomb not be dropped on civilian populations? What if Gen. Marshall, the future secretary of state, and J. Robert Oppenheimer, who invented the bomb, had said it needn’t be dropped on civilian populations? What if Truman-friendly historian Herbert Feis, who was given exclusive access to the diaries, records and people, concluded that “There can hardly be a well-grounded dissent from the conclusion … Japan would have surrendered if the atomic bombs had not been dropped … and even if no invasion had been planned”?

1. No period after the S because, like “Truman,” it doesn’t stand for anything. See pages 150-151 of Lifton and Mitchell’s HIROSHIMA IN AMERICA: FIFTY YEARS OF DENIAL (NY: E.F.Dutton & Sons, 1995). Kwitny’s recitation of these True Facts ends with the observation that as of the 50th anniversary of our destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki we “might want to ponder whether indiscriminate killing and maiming so many Japanese civilians dishonored rather than honored the brave American servicemen who truly won the war in combat. But until now [with the late publication of THE DECISION TO USE THE ATOMIC BOMB by Gar Alperovitz by Knopf, 847 “exceptionally large” pages, and HIROSHIMA IN AMERICA by Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell, 425 “more imaginative” pages], we haven’t been allowed such luxury.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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half-truths such as that “special leaflets” were “dropped on Japanese cities,” warning their civilians to evacuate. (“Well then, I suppose that if anyone got poisoned by the radiation, it must have been their own fault. Gosh, knowing that makes me feel a whole lot easier about the whole thing.”) This Smithsonian exhibit carefully neglects to inform us that it was only after Tokyo had been destroyed by conventional firestorming, and Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been destroyed by nuclear devices, that we had begun to drop any such leaflets!

Russia of course chose this opportunity to declare war on Japan. What fun! Aircraft from fast carrier task forces of the Third Fleet (Admiral W.F. Halsey) attacked airfields and shipping in northern Honshu and Hokkaido, Japan.

Battleships and cruisers (Rear Admiral J.F. Shafroth) bombarded industrial targets at Kamaishi, Honshu, Japan.

Battleship, cruiser, and destroyers bombarded Wake Island.

United States naval vessels damaged: • Destroyer John W. Weeks (DD-701), accidentally by United States naval gunfire, off Honshu, Japan, 35 degrees 0 minute North, 143 degrees 0 minute East • Destroyer Borie (DD-704), by Japanese Kamikaze, off Honshu, Japan, 37 degrees 21 minutes North, 143 degrees 45 minutes East

Japanese naval vessels sunk: • Minesweeper #33, by carrier-based aircraft, off northern Honshu, Japan, 38 degrees 26 minutes North, 141 degrees 30 minutes East •Frigate Amakusa, by United States and British carrier-based aircraft, off northern Honshu, Japan, 38 degrees 26 minutes North, 141 degrees 30 minutes East HDT WHAT? INDEX

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•Frigate Inagi, by carrier-based aircraft, off northern Honshu, Japan, 38 degrees 26 N, 141 degrees 30 minutes East

The US Army issued General Order #65, honoring a brave, or stupid, 2d Lieutenant for his bravery, or stupidity:

CITATION: 2d Lt. Murphy commanded Company B, which was attacked by 6 tanks and waves of infantry. 2d Lt. Murphy ordered his men to withdraw to prepared positions in a woods, while he remained forward at his command post and continued to give fire directions to the artillery by telephone. Behind him, to his right, 1 of our tank destroyers received a direct hit and began to burn. Its crew withdrew to the woods. 2d Lt. Murphy continued to direct artillery fire which killed large numbers of the advancing enemy infantry. With the enemy tanks abreast of his position, 2d Lt. Murphy climbed on the burning tank destroyer, which was in danger of blowing up at any moment, and employed its .50 caliber machine gun against the enemy. He was alone and exposed to German fire from 3 sides, but his deadly fire killed dozens of Germans and caused their infantry attack to waver. The enemy tanks, losing infantry support, began to fall back. For an hour the Germans tried every available weapon to eliminate 2d Lt. Murphy, but he continued to hold his position and wiped out a squad which was trying to creep up unnoticed on his right flank. Germans reached as close as 10 yards, only to be mowed down by his fire. He received a leg wound, but ignored it and continued the single-handed fight until his ammunition was exhausted. He then made his way to his company, refused medical attention, and organized the company in a counterattack which forced the Germans to withdraw. His directing of artillery fire wiped out many of the enemy; he killed or wounded about 50. 2d Lt. Murphy’s indomitable courage and his refusal to give an inch of ground saved his company from possible encirclement and destruction, and enabled it to hold the woods which had been the enemy’s objective. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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That had happened not recently but near Holtzwihr, France back on January 26th. In March Lieutenant Audie Leon Murphy had been called to Nancy, France by order of the 3rd Infantry Division Commander, Major General John “Iron-Mike” O’Daniel, and put on ice awaiting an appropriate occasion to make use of his record of exploits. On this day, while we were dropping the other shoe on Japan, General O’Daniel presented to 1st Lieutenant Murphy the Distinguished Service Cross and Silver Star. After “Iron Mike” had pinned the medals on Audie’s uniform, he pulled out of his pocket a Medal of Honor. Without handing it over, O’Daniel showed the medal to Audie and advised him that General Alexander Patch, the 7th Army Commander, would soon pin it on his chest at a separate ceremony.23

Somebody please assure me that this was just a coincidence, that it wasn’t intended to distract us from the atrocity against civilians that we had just perpetrated at Nagasaki!

August 11, Saturday: Speaking for the Allies, United States President Harry S Truman responded to the Japanese message of the previous day. They would allow the Emperor to remain on the throne only if he ensured the surrender of all Japanese military forces and then subjected himself to the supreme Allied military commander. The form of the government for Japan would be one that would be chosen by the people themselves. The President ordered a halt to atomic bomb production until further notice.

At a crematorium on Kyushu in Fukuoka, eight US airmen were beheaded.

United States Destroyer Mcdermut (DD-677) was damaged by naval gunfire in the vicinity of the Kurile Islands, at 49 degrees 30 minutes North, 155 degrees 1 minute East. Soviet naval forces bombarded southern Sakhalin Island.

Friend Agnes Carol Zens Kellam wrote from Washington DC to her husband, Friend John R. Kellam, who was being held in a federal penitentiary for having refused to participate in the killing: My Dearest: Still no signs of Junior’s debut. I think he’s waiting till the war’s over and people stop officially murdering each other. I hope that news comes any minute now, although I shan’t celebrate “victory” — It’s been too horribly costly. I don’t know what it will mean to the two of us personally and the others in our positions — that depends, I guess, on how vindictive our government is. Yesterday, the boy next door had his radio on listening to the “man in the street” program, from various large 23. As we probably are all aware, Audie Murphy went on to become a Hollywood star. His first role would come in a film released in 1949 by Allied Artists, titled “Bad Boy.” In 1950 he would sign a star-system contract with Universal-International, and over a 15-year period he would act in 26 Universal Studio films, 23 of them “westerns.” His 1949 autobiography TO HELL AND BACK would of course be a best seller. He would play himself in a film biography released by Universal-International in 1955. “To Hell and Back” would hold the record as that studio’s highest grossing picture, until 1975 when its boxoffice record would be surpassed by the movie “Jaws.” He would earn more than $3,000,000 in those years, in an era in which a million dollars was not small change, but he had drug-dependency problems and loved to play the horses. He would gamble most of the money away. Over Audie’s 25- year period in Hollywood, he would act in a total of 44 feature films. (For some reason, the Oscar would ever elude him.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

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cities all over the U.S., on the Japanese surrender offer. I surely was surprised at the many bloodthirsty people who said we should continue fighting until the “Japs” surrendered unconditionally, or until all were killed, and the emperor bagged for a war criminal. I heard only one lady (I didn’t listen to the whole program) who had a son fighting in the Pacific, say that we should accept the surrender terms, and as for the emperor, why, in the words of Jesus, “What is that to thee? Follow thou me.” ... As I look out of my window and see the beauties of God all around I am made to wonder why is there so much sin in this beautiful land. The tall stately hollyhocks are lovely in all their different colors and the roses have been lovely with their pink, red and yellow clusters and this morning I can see the gladiolus begin to throw out their long spirals in all colors.... Well, darling, I guess thy eyes are getting tired, not to mention the poor censor’s. [This letter amounted to six pages, typed single-space.] If this comes back, I’ll send it to thee piece- meal, unless I’m in the hospital. But I haven’t had any letter- writing instructions from Lewisburg. All my love to thee, Thy Cary WORLD WAR II

August 13, Monday: Aircraft from fast carrier task force (Vice Admiral J.S. McCain) bombed targets in the general metropolitan area of Japan known as “Tokyo” or Eastern Capital.

President Harry S Truman announced the end of the war with Japan at a press conference held at 7 PM (V-J Day).

United States naval vessel damaged: • Attack transport Lagrange (APA-124), by Japanese Kamikaze, Okinawa area, 26 degrees 14 minutes North, 127 degrees 52 minutes East

Japanese naval vessels sunk: • Submarine I-373, by submarine Spikefish (SS-404), off China, 29 degrees 2 minutes North, 123 degrees 53 minutes East • Coast defense vessel #6, by submarine Atule (SS-403), off Hokkaido, Japan, 42 degrees 16 minutes North, 142 degrees 12 minutes East WORLD WAR II HDT WHAT? INDEX

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August 15, Wednesday: The US Navy released information about the sinking of the USS Indianapolis (CA-35). The press began to ask questions, such as why this ship had been sunk without being missed. Eventually the father of Tom Brophy, who had drowned while attempting the swim to the PBY, went to Washington to meet with Captain Charles B. McVay III. According to Mr. D.J. Blum, the father was told to arrange the meeting for the following week because the officer had a prior commitment. When Brophy trailed the captain, he discovered that the “prior commitment” in question was a party. Furious, he contacted a Washington friend of his, President Harry S Truman, who got in touch with Fleet Admiral Ernest J. King, the officer who appointed the members of the court, all of whom depended of course upon this Admiral for their promotions. A court-martial would be scheduled.

Nationalist leader Ho Chi Minh asked the US to declare Vietnam an American protectorate, similar to the Philippines. He would receive no reply.

A Paris court found Marshal Henri-Philippe Petain guilty of intelligence with the enemy and sentenced him to death. His property was confiscated. Marshal Petain would be flown to Portalet Fort in the Pyrenees to there await the pleasure of President de Gaulle.

When Die Dreigroschenoper was performed in the Hebbel-Theater, Berlin, the music of Kurt Weill was heard in Germany for the first time in a dozen years.

The US government ended rationing on gasoline, fuel oil and oil stoves, canned fruits, and vegetables. For the first time the voice of Japanese Emperor Hirohito (recorded) was broadcast over the radio, in an announcement of the intention of his government to surrender. Among other things he asserted that it had been “far from Our thoughts either to infringe upon the sovereignty of other nations or to embark upon territorial aggrandizement,” as if the entire affair had been some sort of lamentable miscommunication. The cabinet resigned.

In the Andaman Islands, a burial detail of Japanese troops went out to the island of Tarmugli where they had conducted the massacre on the previous day, to destroy all traces of this. Within twenty-four hours they would collect all 798 bodies and reduce them in funeral pyres to fragmented bones and ashes. This residue they then buried in deep pits they dug on the beach. (The presiding Japanese officer would be tried by a British Military Court and sentenced to two years imprisonment.) Following the Emperor’s radio broadcast, 16 captured B-29 crewmen on Kyushu Island were trucked to a wooded hill, led into the woods stripped of their clothing, and executed. Before the announcement of the end of hostilities was received by our forces, aircraft from fast carrier task force (Vice Admiral J.S. McCain) raided airfields in the Tokyo area and encountered heavy airborne opposition.

President Truman announced that Japan had unconditionally surrendered (actually, the surrender hadn’t been exactly unconditional as we had promised to allow them their emperor). Anyway, VJ Day was declared. In the course of the war 6,255 Minnesotans had been killed in uniform. In Minnesota, land of euphemism, it was being continuously asserted that what had happened was that our boys had “given their lives for their country.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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The state legislature embraced an official state song, “Hail! Minnesota.” Naval task group (Commodore R. W. Simpson) was established to liberate, evacuate, and extend medical care to Allied prisoners of war in Japan. An agreement divided Korea into US and Soviet occupation zones along the 38th Parallel.24

On this day President Truman authorized a study of war events — when this study would be released more than a year later, it would baldly declare that what his generals and admirals had been insisting to him –that there was no military necessity to drop the atomic bombs– had been entirely accurate, and that his decision to drop the A-bombs and then pronounce that this had been out of military necessity could only have been either a mere cover story intended for domestic political purposes, believed not even by himself, or at best, if he truly himself at the time believed it, a tendentious and devastating error in judgment: [C]ertainly prior to 31 December 1945, and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945 [the date on which the US had planned to launch its major landing of US troops across the beaches of the Japanese home islands], Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.

24. 38th Parallel. Hmm.... HDT WHAT? INDEX

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New research on Hiroshima, Nagasaki Truman was a war criminal

by John Catalinotto Why was Harry Truman’s decision to use atomic weapons against Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, 60 years ago, like George Bush’s decision to invade Iraq in 2003? They were both war crimes, of course. And they were both based on a Big Lie. In Bush’s case the lie was the now-discredited claim that the US had to invade Iraq to stop the use of “weapons of mass destruction.” In Truman’s case, it was that the US had to drop A-bombs to force the Japanese to surrender — or this would require a land invasion that would cost hundreds of thousands of US casualties. With the 60th anniversary of the bombings coming up, it is more than likely that the big lie of 1945 will be repeated ad nauseam by politicians, corporate media and bought-off historians of US academia. There are, however, two historians who are marshaling old and new arguments and facts to expose this lie. They are Peter Kuznick, director of the Nuclear Studies Institute at American University in Washington DC, and Mark Selden, from Cornell University in Ithaca NY. Kuznick and Selden presented their latest findings at a press conference July 21 organized by Greenpeace in London. The Greenpeace site has a video presentation by the two historians. Their findings support an argument made earlier: that the main reason the US used nuclear weapons on Japan was to get a jump start on the war against the Soviet Union. Truman used the bomb in 1945 so the US could threaten to use it against Korea, Vietnam and in many other battles. These new findings reveal that the US officials making the decisions themselves knew and admitted their Big Lie was a lie. The two historians studied the diplomatic archives of the US, Japan and the USSR. They found that on August 3, 1945, three days before Hiroshima, Truman agreed at a meeting that Japan was “looking for peace.” All the U.S. senior generals and admirals, including General Dwight Eisenhower, General Douglas MacArthur and Admiral William Leahy, told him it was unnecessary to use the A-bomb to defeat Japan. “Impressing Russia was more important than ending the war,” Selden says. Kuznick and Selden also show that the Japanese authorities were anxious to avoid a Soviet invasion of the Japanese main islands. The USSR officially entered the Pacific war on August 9, 1945, sweeping through Japanese-occupied China and half of Korea. At the press conference, Kuznick and Selden didn’t discuss in detail why the Japanese imperialists feared a Soviet occupation more than one by the US, when the US posture was so hostile to Japan. The Japanese imperialists’ fear can only be explained by the socialist underpinnings of the USSR, which threatened a change in property relations wherever the Red Army liberated HDT WHAT? INDEX

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territory. This happened, for example, in Eastern Europe and East Germany. On August 15, 1945, Truman ordered a survey of the war events. Published over a year later, it stated: “Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts, and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey’s opinion that certainly prior to 31 December 1945, and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.” November 1 was the date the US had planned the invasion. “A crime against humanity” In Hiroshima, an estimated 80,000 people were killed in a split second on August 6. Some 13 square kilometers of the city were obliterated. By December, at least another 70,000 people had died from radiation and injuries. Three days later, on August 9, the US dropped an A-bomb on Nagasaki, resulting in the deaths of at least 70,000 people before the year was out. About 10 percent of the casualties were Koreans forced to work in Japan at the time. Kuznick and Selden put most of the blame on Truman. “He knew he was beginning the process of annihilation of the species,” says Kuznick, “It was not just a war crime; it was a crime against humanity.” A revealing comment regarding US war crimes came from John Bolton, recently appointed US ambassador to the United Nations. Bolton was arguing in 1998 against the International Criminal Court. “Much of the media attention to the American negotiating position on the ICC concentrated on the risks perceived by the Pentagon to American peacekeepers stationed around the world,” wrote Bolton. ... “[O]ur real concern should be for the president and his top advisers.” Bolton continued: “The definition of ‘war crimes’ includes, for example: ‘intentionally directing attacks against the civilian population as such or against individual civilians not taking direct part in hostilities.’” Bolton wrote that under the ICC rules, US leaders could have been found guilty of a war crime for dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and for all the aerial bombardments of German and Japanese civilian areas. The A-bombs were not the only crimes. US nighttime raids using conventional bombs against residential areas of Tokyo, Osaka and other industrial cities caused hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilian deaths, and Dresden, Germany, was obliterated in early 1945, killing mainly refugees. But Truman’s decision opened the door to massive use of these new terror bombs. Now the Bush administration, fresh from being caught in a series of lies justifying aggression against Iraq, plans to increase the Pentagon’s reliance on a new generation of nuclear weapons. On the 60th anniversary of Hiroshima, it is past time to organize HDT WHAT? INDEX

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to prevent the new crimes US imperialism has in its plans. This article is copyright under a Creative Commons License. Workers World, 55 W. 17 St. NY 10011 WORLD WAR II

August 21, Tuesday: Asiatic Wing, Naval Air Transport Service, was established at Oakland, California.

At Los Alamos, Harry K. Daghlian, Jr. dropped a tungsten carbide brick onto a sphere of plutonium. This was a fatal mistake as the tungsten carbide reflected some of the lump’s neutrons, bringing it unexpectedly to criticality.25

King Mihai of Romania refuses to sign any more laws. The communist government rules by decree.

US President Harry S Truman ended the Lend-Lease program.

Mili Atoll in the Marshall Islands surrendered, the initial Japanese garrison in the Pacific Ocean to capitulate to the Allied forces. The surrender was accepted on board US Destroyer Escort Levy (DE-162). WORLD WAR II

August 31, Friday: Works for piano by Peter Sculthorpe were performed for the initial time, over the local Tasmanian airwaves of the Australian Broadcasting Commission, by the composer: Nocturne, Short Piece for Pianoforte no.1, and Prelude to a Puppet Show.

Cuatro Nocturnos for soprano, alto and orchestra by Carlos Chávez to words of Villaurrutia, were performed for the initial time, in the Palacio de Bellas Artes, Mexico City.

The Chinese Nationalist army took control of Canton.

A government for the Republic of Indonesia was installed with Sukarno as president and Mohammed Hatta as vice-president.

US President Harry S Truman abolished the Office of War Information.

On US Destroyer Bagley (DD-386), the surrender of Marcus Island (Minami Tori Shima) was accepted by Rear Admiral F.E.M. Whiting.

Marines landed at Tateyama Naval Base, Honshu, Japan and accepted its surrender. WORLD WAR II

25. There have been in the nuclear industry, to date, some 70 such criticality excursions and some 21 resultant fatalities, but –so far at least– there hasn’t been a single atomic blast! Cross your fingers. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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September 6, Thursday: Japanese forces in the southwest Pacific surrendered in a ceremony aboard a British ship off Rabaul.

The British occupation government arrested 40 German industrialists in the Ruhr.

Contrary to popular expectations that the policies of the new president, Harry S Truman, would pull back from the liberalism of his predecessor, Roosevelt, a 21-point legislative program was presented to Congress for the reconversion period that amounted to an expansion of the “New Deal.”

September 22, Saturday: In South Vietnam, 1,400 French soldiers released by the British from former Japanese internment camps entered Saigon and went on a deadly rampage, attacking Viet Minh and killing innocent civilians including children — aided in this by French civilians who joined eagerly in the rampage (an estimated 20,000 French civilians were living in Saigon).

Mike Colalillo of Duluth, Minnesota received a Congressional Medal of Honor from President Harry S Truman. Mike had done something that Give-’em-Hell-Harry could recognize as honorable. He had been extraordinary in the offing of enemies. WORLD WAR II

October 8, Monday: Jews in Palestine staged a general strike for five hours to protest British restrictions on Jewish immigration. ANTISEMITISM

President Harry S Truman announced that atomic secrets would be shared only with Canada and Great Britain.

Leonard Bernstein took up duties as director of the New York City Symphony.

The first postwar national elections in Norway resulted in a majority for the Labour Party. No other party came within 50 seats.

Percy L. Spencer applied for a US patent for a microwave oven.

October 23, Tuesday: Concertino for piano and orchestra op.16 by Vincent Persichetti was performed for the initial time, in Rochester, New York, the composer himself at the keyboard.

President Harry S Truman delivered a message to the US federal Congress calling for enactment of a peacetime universal military training program. There’s no such thing as being too ready to go to war! WORLD WAR II MILITARY CONSCRIPTION HDT WHAT? INDEX

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October 27, Saturday: After British planes dropped leaflets on Surabaya demanding the surrender of republican forces, citizens rose up and with Indonesian troops almost wiped out British forces in the city.

President Harry S Truman announced twelve fundamentals of US foreign policy during a New York City address.

November: Robinson Jeffers declined an invitation to represent the Pacific Coast region in the Academy of American Poets. He was elected to membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

There was an epidemic of polio on St. Helena.

President Harry S Truman kicked off his campaign to create Universal Compulsory Military Training, carefully explaining to anyone who would listen that compulsory training to kill is in an entirely different category from compulsory conscription to kill (in such compulsory training to kill, hopefully, if you do it right you don’t need actually to kill anyone, you see, so how could even a pacifist possibly find anything to argue with here). MILITARY CONSCRIPTION WORLD WAR II

November 15, Thursday: Zoltán Tildy replaced Béla Miklós de Dálnok as prime minister of Hungary.

Eight former Finnish leaders went on trial in Helsinki.

Joseph Hoffman, commandant of Maidanek concentration camp, was sentenced to death in Lublin.

The Republic of Venezuela ratified the United Nations Charter.

In The Concord Journal, Mr. William Walker proposed that Concord would be an appropriate location for the United Nations. (This sounds good — but who was this William Walker, and what special standing did he have to issue such a proposal? Was he not a mere private citizen, of the sort that normally find themselves ignored while the influential are being influential? This is obviously neither the influential William Walker of the 19th Century who was a filibuster and was executed, nor the influential William Graham Walker who has recently been a US diplomat in Kosovo! We cannot presume that The Concord Journal was being read by anyone of influence in these matters nor can we presume that this particular Mr. William Walker had the ear of anyone who was of any influence. –It may possibly be that in the end such a local suggestion will not turn into anything, and that instead of being located in Concord the UN will turn out to be located somewhere else, perhaps for instance in beautiful downtown Manhattan. :-)

President Harry S Truman issued a joint statement in Washington DC with Prime Ministers Clement Attlee of Great Britain and Mackenzie King of Canada, calling for a United Nations Atomic Energy Commission. ATOM BOMB HDT WHAT? INDEX

HARRY S TRUMAN PRESIDENT HARRY S TRUMAN

1946

US naval units had been dispatched to Trieste. When Yugoslav forces shot down an unarmed US Army transport as it flew over Venezia Giulia, President Harry S Truman ordered the augmentation of US troops along the zonal occupation line and the reinforcement of air forces in northern Italy. US MILITARY INTERVENTIONS

January 17, Saturday: President Harry S Truman proposed that the dispute between U.S. Steel and the United Steel Workers union be settled by an 18.2¢-per-hour wage increase. A walkout was not prevented but it and most major strikes in 1946 would be settled somehow on the basis of residual patriotism and this 18.2¢.

February 15, Friday: President Harry S Truman accepted the resignation of Harold L. Ickes as Secretary of the Interior. Ickes was leaving the cabinet in protest against the proposed appointment of Edwin W. Pauley as Under- Secretary of the Navy and would on March 18th be replaced, by Julius Krug.

February 20, Wednesday: President Harry S Truman signed the Employment Act of 1946, which established a presidential Council of Economic Advisers. –With wise economists to professionally guide our economy, never again need we succumb to unanticipated economic crisis.

February 21, Thursday: Patricia (“Tricia”) Nixon was born.

President Harry S Truman reestablished an Office of Economic Stabilization, under Chester Bowles, in an attempt to control mounting prices. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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April 19, Friday: The United States recognized the Tito government in Yugoslavia.

The Constituent Assembly in Paris voted 309-249 to adopt a constitution for the Fourth Republic. A referendum was scheduled for May 5th.

Saying that “millions would surely die unless we eat less,” President Harry S Truman asked US citizens to restrict themselves, on two days a week, to a low-calorie European diet.

Sextet for piano, strings and clarinet op.55 by Hans Pfitzner was performed for the initial time, in Berlin.

May 17, Friday: Ion Antonescu, wartime prime minister of Romania, and twelve of his cabinet ministers were sentenced to death by a Bucharest court. Six of the condemned were still at large.

In the face of a threatened strike, President Harry S Truman seized the country’s railroads.

Marc Blitzstein was presented with an award by the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

A general election was held in the Netherlands for the initial time since World War II. The Catholic Peoples Party won the most seats.

May 21, Tuesday: By this point, the Soviet evacuation of Iran was complete.

Almost two months after 400,000 coal miners had gone on strike, President Harry S Truman ordered the seizure of the coal mines.

At Los Alamos, Louis Slotin made a serious mistake in the course of a criticality experiment. His reflexes were swift enough to save the lives of seven nearby colleagues but he himself would die in nine days.26 TIMELINE OF ACCIDENTS

May 23, Thursday: Chinese Nationalists retook Changchun from the Chinese Communists.

250,000 US railroad workers struck over wages and work rules. President Harry S Truman mobilized government resources to make up the deficit.

26. There have been in the nuclear industry, to date, some 70 such criticality excursions and some 21 resultant fatalities, but –so far at least– there hasn’t been a single atomic blast! Cross your fingers.

WALDEN: If we read of one man robbed, or murdered, or killed by accident, or one house burned, or one vessel wrecked, or one steamboat blown up, or one cow run over on the Western Railroad, or one mad dog killed, or one lot of grasshoppers in the winter, –we never need read of another. One is enough. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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May 24, Friday: President Harry S Truman announced he was going to bring the strike of railroad trainmen and engineer brotherhoods, that had begun the day before, to an end by the following day (on the following day the strike would indeed end, through the unions accepting all the president’s recommendations).

May 29, Wednesday: Chinese Nationalist forces captured Kirin.

For their activities at the Dachau Concentration Camp, 14 more Nazis were hanged in Landsberg.

One week after President Harry S Truman seized the coal mines, and two months after the strike began, US coal miners reach a settlement with the government. Workers would receive pay increases and retirement benefits. (On this day he was attending the graduation exercises of his daughter Margaret at George Washington University, and there being awarded the honorary degree of LL.D.)

Haj Amin al-Husseini, Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, leaves his villa near Versailles and, with a fake passport, flies from Paris to Damascus.

July 15, Monday: President Harry S Truman signed a bill authorizing the lending of $3,750,000,000 to Great Britain.

July 25, Thursday: The United States detonated an atomic bomb underwater for the initial time, off Bikini Atoll.

President Harry S Truman signed a new price control act reviving the Office of Price Administration (the previous one had gone out of existence on June 29th when the president had vetoed a compromise price control measure).

At Tanglewood late at night, Bohuslav Martinu accidently fell from a 2d floor balcony. When he was finally discovered, he was rushed to the hospital where he was in a coma for two days from a cracked skull. He would be confined to bed for five weeks, and then convalesce in Vermont. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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August: The British garrison stationed on St. Helena during World War II departed the island — sorry, you’re not an “outpost of empire” anymore, you’re just not, you’re just a spot of dry land that’s all by itself.

The US federal Congress passed the Atomic Energy Act and the FBI acquired “responsibility for determining the loyalty of individuals ... having access to restricted Atomic Energy data” (later, executive orders from Presidents Harry S Truman and Dwight David Eisenhower would make the Bureau responsible to investigate any and all allegations of disloyalty among federal employees).

Tommy is one loyal son-of-a-gun. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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August 1, Thursday: The Salzburg Music Festival opened for the initial time since the Anschluss.

Kurt Weill was elected to the Playwrights’ Company.

The United States Congress passed the Fulbright Act (this would eventually provide the basis for the Fulbright Scholarships).

US President Harry S Truman signs the McMahon Act creating the Atomic Energy Commission to ensure civilian control over energy.

September 20, Friday: A section of the brink collapsed at the Niagara Falls, transforming the American Falls into a horseshoe.

President Harry S Truman requested the resignation of Secretary of Commerce Henry A. Wallace, who on September 12th had publicly criticizing Secretary of State James F. Byrnes and US policy in regard to Russia. He would replace Wallace with W. Averell Harriman.

October 15, Tuesday: President Harry S Truman ended price controls on meat.

In the course of that night the swordsman Hermann Göring, former Reichsmarshall and head of the Luftwaffe, offed himself with a capsule of cyanide a couple of hours before they were to come get him out of his cell for hanging. GERMANY WORLD WAR II War-Guilt Trials27 The mumble-jumble drones on, the hangman waits; the shabby surviving Leaders of Germany are to learn that Vae Victis Means Weh den Gesiegten. This kind of thing may console the distresses Of Europeans, but for us! — Also we’ve caught A poet, a small shrill man like a twilight bat, Accused of being a traitor to his country. I have a bat in my tower That knows more about treason, and about her country. — Robinson Jeffers EZRA POUND

November 5, Tuesday: President Harry S Truman received the usual midterm political setback when, in congressional elections, voters returned Republican majorities to the Senate and House of Representatives.28

27. This poem was entirely suppressed by the publisher, Random House — even after the war was in the history books. 28. It is an aberration of 2-party politics as it is experienced in the USA, that the electorate seems always to vote for the out-of- power party in any midterm election. Consider, for instance, the election of 2010 that gave the Republicans control of the House of Representatives two years into the presidency of Barak Obama, enabling them in their heedless intransigence to time and again hold this nation hostage to their taxes-are-for-the-little-people bootlicking and their lower-rates-produce-higher-revenues delusion and their never-regulate-the-white-collar-criminal pandering to business lobbyists. The syndrome occurs when the Democrats are out of power to the benefit of the Democrats and occurs when the Republicans are out of power to the benefit of the Republicans — and educating the American voter ever to forego these sick excursions would seem an utter impossibility. (Maybe this whole thing about midterm elections amounts to another of the time bombs that our Founding Fathers in their infinite wisdom embedded in their constitutional document?) HDT WHAT? INDEX

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November 9, Saturday: President Harry S Truman signed an executive order ending wage and price controls except for rents, sugar, and rice (prices would rise sharply).

November 21, Thursday: President Harry S Truman ordered contempt proceedings against the union leader John L. Lewis when, defying a government injunction, he called members of the United Mine Workers union out on strike (Harry S liked to play hardball, it made him feel like he was the man; a federal district court would fine Lewis $10,000 and the UMW $3,500,000 and on December 5th the strikers would need to go back to their labors).

November 25, Monday: Under the spur of the Republican triumph in midterm elections three weeks earlier, President Harry S Truman needed to create a President’s Temporary Commission on Employee Loyalty to deal with the accusations they were leveling, of Communist infiltration into the federal government. UNAMERICANISM

In the current strike by hundreds of thousands of miners, a US federal judge ordered the United Mine Workers to stand trial for contempt of court. During the week six states would declare a condition of emergency. Many schools would close.

December 31, Tuesday: President Harry S Truman signed a proclamation declaring the end of hostilities for World War II.

The Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) took over the American nuclear weapons program from the US Army. Swords into ploughshares! Atoms for peace! Excelsior! ATOM BOMB HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1947

Upon his release from federal penitentiary, Bayard Rustin began to direct A. Philip Randolph’s Committee Against Jim Crow in Military Service, which would be instrumental in securing President Harry S Truman’s July 26, 1948 order eliminating racial segregation in the United States Armed Forces and would then change its name to League for Non-Violent Civil Disobedience. He had also of course gotten involved again with the Fellowship of Reconciliation. The 1946 court decision in the case of Irene Morgan had indicated that American black citizens were within their rights in resisting Jim Crow segregation in interstate travel. Early in this year the Congress of Racial Equality therefore sent out nine black/white male teams for a “Freedom Ride” or “Journey of Reconciliation” by public bus conveyance through the states of the upper south, with the black man sitting in a seat reserved for whites at the front of the bus and the white man sitting in a seat reserved for blacks at the back of the bus. Organized by the Reverend George Mills Houser and Friend Bayard, this “Journey of Reconciliation” was to be a two-week pilgrimage by Trailways Bus through Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Kentucky. Thurgood Marshall, head of the legal department of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, warned that a Journey of Reconciliation might result in “wholesale slaughter with no good achieved.” Walter White of the NAACP therefore opposed any such direct action, although during the campaign he would volunteer the service of its southern attorneys. Toward the end of this year and at the beginning of the next, therefore, Friend Bayard and other black protestors would spend 22 days on a chain gang. He would report on this in a series “22 Days on a Chain Gang” in The New York Post. Taken off the Trailways bus with him would be Igal Roodenko, his white teammate. North Carolina Judge Henry Whitfield verified with Roodenko that he was indeed a Jew, and then said: “Well, it’s about time you Jews from New York learned that you can't come down here bringing your nigras with you to upset the customs of the South. Just to teach you a lesson, I gave your HDT WHAT? INDEX

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black boys thirty days, and I give you ninety.”

Bad Nigra = 30 days Bad Jew = 90 days HDT WHAT? INDEX

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In the Durham Monthly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends:

Clerks of Meeting 1943-1947 Edward K. Kraybill 1947-1948 William Van Hoy, Jr. 1949-1949 John de J. Pemberton, Jr. 1950-1951 Harry R. Stevens 1951-1952 John A. Barlow 1952-1957 Susan Gower Smith 1957-1960 Frances C. Jeffers 1960-1961 Cyrus M. Johnson 1961-1965 Peter H. Klopfer 1965-1967 Rebecca W. Fillmore 1967-1968 David Tillerson Smith 1968-1970 Ernest Albert Hartley 1970-1971 John Hunter 1971-1972 John Gamble 1972-1974 Lyle B. Snider (2 terms) 1974-1975 Helen Gardella 1976-1978 Cheryl F. Junk 1978-1980 Alice S. Keighton 1980-1982 John B. Hunter 1982-1984 Edward M. Arnett HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1984-1986 Calhoun D. Geiger 1986-1988 John P. Stratton 1988-1990 J. Robert Passmore 1990-1992 Karen Cole Stewart 1992-1995 Kathleen Davidson March 1995-1998 Nikki Vangsnes 1998-2000 Co-clerks J. Robert Passmore & Karen Cole Stewart 2000-2002 Amy Brannock 2002-2002 Jamie Hysjulien (Acting) 2002-2005 William Thomas O’Connor 2005-2007 Terry Graedon 2007-2009 Anne Akwari 2009-2012 Joe Graedon 2012-2013 Marguerite Dingman 2013- Co-clerks Cathy Bridge & David Bridge

January 7, Tuesday: President Harry S Truman accepted the resignation of his current secretary of state.

In Maryland, the Spring Grove State Hospital announced that it had been able to release several patients with “incurable” mental disorders into the general population, after subjecting them to prefrontal lobotomies (this was an operation that could be performed by any fool, because basically, they were just sticking a scalpel into the side of a person’s head and then wiggling it back and forth for awhile). Reliance upon this surgical butchery would become widespread.29

January 21, Tuesday: General George C. Marshall, World War II Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army, was sworn in as new Secretary of State for the cabinet of President Harry S Truman.

29. Street, W.R. A CHRONOLOGY OF NOTEWORTHY EVENTS IN AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGY. Washington DC: American Psychological Association, 1994 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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January 22, Wednesday: President Harry S Truman asked former President Herbert Hoover to advise him in regard to critical food problems in Central Europe.

February 2, Sunday: At the request of President Harry S Truman, former President Herbert Hoover embarked from New York City to survey European food problems. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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February 12, Wednesday: The first draft card burning at the White House over the impending peacetime draft.

OHNE MICH!

This would carry no weight with President Harry S Truman, who was loud in his declarations that the proper place for a “draft dodger” was prison.

CONSCIENTIOUS OBJECTION HDT WHAT? INDEX

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February 20, Thursday: British Prime Minister Clement Attlee announced the decision of his government to hand over power to one or more independent Indian governments by June 1948. This action was taken because no agreement has been reached between Hindus and Muslims on what independence should look like. Viscount Mountbatten, a cousin of King George VI, was appointed Viceroy to oversee the end of British rule.

A mistake with a chemical at the O’Connor Electro-Plating Company in Los Angeles causes an explosion killing 17 that produced a 22-foot crater. Four city blocks were devastated, with more than 100 buildings damaged.

City officials in Boston advised Eugene O’Neill that certain changes needed to be made to “The Iceman Cometh” before it might be performed there — the playwright refused to consider any such changes.

The President’s Temporary Commission on Employee Loyalty recommended to President Harry S Truman that the government create a program that would deal with the problem of disloyal federal employees. Unfortunately they found themselves unable to “state with any degree of certainty how far reaching that threat was.” “We’re making it up as we go along — you got a problem with that?” UNAMERICANISM

February 25, Tuesday: Béla Kovács, Secretary of the Hungarian ruling Smallholders Party, was arrested by Soviet authorities on charges of spying.

British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin accused President Harry S Truman of having ruined Palestine negotiations during the previous October, when he had called for 100,000 Jews to be allowed into the mandate. He asserted that Truman’s motivation had been to enable his own domestic success in the US elections.

Prussia was dissolved by the Allied Control Commission.

The French National Assembly voted to continue the cabinet’s wartime powers for another year (they’d have expired on March 1st).

February 26, Wednesday: Divertimento for piano left hand and orchestra by Bohuslav Martinu was performed for the initial time, in Prague.

Irving Fine conducted the first performance of the Kyrie and Gloria from Igor Stravinsky’s Mass for chorus and double wind quintet. The instrumental parts were played on two pianos. Also premiered was Tell This Blood for chorus by Lukas Foss.

President Harry S Truman responded to the accusation of British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin of the previous day by insisting that his remarks should have come to no-one’s surprise since he was merely reiterating a widely-known policy maintained since 1945 by the US federal government. Bevan’s accusation was therefore “most unfortunate and misleading.”30

30. This miscommunication would reinforce the generally held sentiment, that the President was not properly prepared to be a prime time player. (In the President’s defence, he most certainly was quite a bit better prepared than, oh, say, Sarah Palin.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

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March 3, Monday: President Harry S Truman arrived in Mexico on a state visit and, staying on safe ground, reaffirmed his predecessor’s Good Neighbor Policy.

March 12, Wednesday: Works for chorus by Ernst Krenek were performed for the initial time, at Hamline University, St. Paul, Minnesota: the motet Aegrotavit Ezechias and excerpts from Santa Fe Timetable, to words taken from the timetable of the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe Railroad.

A Jewish refugee ship, the Exodus, ran the British blockade and beached itself north of Gaza. Most of the 800 passengers were intercepted by British authorities. ANTISEMITISM

In a speech to a joint session of the federal Congress, President Harry S Truman announced a “Truman Doctrine,” committing the United States to fight the spread of communism in Greece and Turkey. He asks for funding amounting to $400,000,000. READ THE FULL TEXT

(In accordance with the bipartisan foreign policy spirit in effect during most of the Truman administration, this agenda received the backing of most Republican congressmen.)

March 21, Friday: President Harry S Truman ordered that the loyalty of all federal government employees be verified. MCCARTHYISM UNAMERICANISM

March 22, Saturday: Viscount Mountbatten arrived in India to become the final British viceroy.

US President Harry S Truman signed Executive Order 9835 requiring loyalty checks on federal employees and potential employees. Henceforward all federal employees would be obligated to swear allegiance to the United States of America. No employee of the executive branch might belong to, aid, or sympathize with any totalitarian ideology which advocated the overthrow of the federal constitution. MCCARTHYISM UNAMERICANISM HDT WHAT? INDEX

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April 16, Wednesday: British authorities secretly executed four Irgunists in Acre Prison.

Three Hungarians were sentenced to death and ten others to prison, for attempting to overthrow the government and restore Admiral Horthy to power.

A French freighter exploded in the harbor of Texas City, Texas (the blast was so powerful that it registered on a seismograph in Denver). All but three of the crewmen were killed. Docks and oil storage tanks were set ablaze. About 3,500 people would be killed or injured either in the initial blast or in a general conflagration that would during the following three days consume most of the city.

Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission David Lilienthal alerted President Harry S Truman to the fact that there was but one A-bomb in the arsenal of the United States of America, left over from World War II, and that its components had earlier that year been found to be lying unassembled inside an enclosure made of chicken wire in a basement at Los Alamos — the Chairman indicated to the President that it was unknown how long it would take to reconstitute the 24-man team that would be needed to build these components into a functional weapon. The thought became “I wonder if Joe knows.”31

May 22, Thursday: President Harry S Truman approved a bill providing $400,000,000 in assistance to Greece and Turkey.

June 11, Wednesday: President Harry S Truman addressed the Canadian Parliament in Ottawa, outlining US foreign policy.

June 14, Saturday: President Harry S Truman signed peace treaty ratifications with Italy, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria.

June 16, Monday: President Harry S Truman vetoed a $4,000,000,000 income tax reduction bill as unfair to the small taxpayer.

June 20, Friday: President Harry S Truman vetoed the Taft-Hartley Bill (Labor-Management Relations Act of 1947) as discriminatory against labor (Congress would override his veto on June 23d).

31. Joe didn’t know. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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July 21, Monday: The Exodus had been intercepted by British forces and the 4,500 refugees on board, seeking safety in Palestine, were at risk of being taken back to a Europe that would have no place for them. Henry Morgenthau, as the chairman of the United Jewish Appeal, therefore took it upon himself to telephone President Harry S Truman at 6PM, and for ten minutes attempt to persuade our President to rescue these

unfortunates. Our President, who was known to be no softie, blew his former Secretary off: “He’d no business, whatever, to call me,” he confided to his diary. The problem was that he was just another one of these Jews who are forever trying to protect Jews. “The Jews have no sense of proportion.” “The Jews, I find, are very selfish.” There’d be no reason to expect such people to be grateful for being helped out of their difficulty. “I’ve found very, very few who remember their past condition when prosperity comes.” Truman did not like Jews who came to him hat in hand. Truman also did not like Jews who did not come to him with hat in hand. Underdogs are underdogs, and need to be kept in their place lest they become insolent. “Jews are like all underdogs.”

July 25, Friday: Hungarian President Zoltan Tildy dissolved Parliament (with changes in electoral laws and arrests of the opposition, upcoming elections were expected to return communists and their allies).

US President Harry S Truman signed a joint resolution ending 60 wartime emergency laws and placing time limits on 124 others. WORLD WAR II HDT WHAT? INDEX

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July 26, Saturday: President Harry S Truman signed the National Security Act that organized the armed forces under a single Secretary of Defense and established a separate Air Force.

This Act also established the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Council.

July 28, Monday: President Harry S Truman attended the funeral of his mother Martha Ellen Young Truman in Grandview, Missouri.

September 2, Tuesday: President Harry S Truman addressed the final session of the Inter-American Conference for the Maintenance of Continental Peace and Security. The Treaty of Rio de Janeiro was signed.

October 5, Sunday: The Actors’ Studio was founded by Elia Kazan and others in New York.

Concertino for piano, winds and percussion by Hans Werner Henze was performed for the initial time, in Baden-Baden.

Communist Party leaders from nine countries formed the Communist Information Bureau to combat “the imperialistic camp and its directing force, the USA.”

In the 1st televised White House address, President Harry S Truman asked Americans to cut down on their consumption of meat and bread so that more grain might be sent to starving Europeans. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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October 29, Wednesday: The USSR began a purge of non-Communist officials in their German occupation zone. Imagine this, they were at least as worried about covert non-Commies as we were about covert pinkos!

A Civil Rights Commission empaneled by President Harry S Truman reported on its investigation. The year- long careful research of the members of the panel had discovered, alarmingly, that discrimination based on race or religion was widespread throughout every section of our nation.

Emmett Lavery, President of the Screen Writers Guild, denied that he had ever been a Communist, and denied that the Guild was dominated by Communists. The House of Representatives’s Un-American Activities Committee recommended that screen writers Samuel Ornitz, Herbert Biberman, Edward Dmytryk, and Adrian Scott be cited for Contempt of Congress for having refused to answer questions. UNAMERICANISM

November 3, Monday: Stanislaw Mikolajczyk landed in London from the British sector of Berlin after being accused of treason on October 12th. He had fled Warsaw by train on October 20th. Mikolajczyk was the last significant opposition leader in Poland.

As one of the final acts of World War II, four leaders of the SS received death sentences from an American court in Nürnberg, while eleven other defendants received prison terms of from ten years to life.

President Harry S Truman authorized US military officers to advise the Greek army at all levels of operations against leftist rebels.

Trois poèmes op.276 for voice and piano by Darius Milhaud to words of Supervielle was performed for the initial time, in Paris.

Due pezzi per orchestra by Luigi Dallapiccola were performed for the initial time, over the airwaves of the BBC, originating in London. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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November 26, Wednesday: Friends John R. Kellam and Agnes Carol Zens Kellam’s 2d daughter, Wendy Kellam, was born.

The following day would be the 4th Thursday of November and by act of Congress the 4th Thursday of November was to be celebrated as Thanksgiving Day. It was assumed that everyone in America would be sitting down to a traditional turkey dinner, and in fact, on this day Senator Olin Johnson of South Carolina visited President Harry S Truman in the Oval Office in Washington DC, bringing with him with a humongous dressed turkey carcass. In solidarity with the Marshall Plan for the feeding of starving Europeans, however, it seems that the President of the United States of America had subscribed to a no-poultry-or-eggs-on- Thursdays pledge — and so an executive decision was made and said turkey was forwarded directly to the White House oven and the Presidential family would consume their traditional holiday turkey meal one day early.32

32. There is a press tradition that in this year President Truman pardoned a Thanksgiving turkey. According to the Truman Library, that tradition is an urban legend. They point out that there are similar tales about President Lincoln, and about President Reagan. Their research indicates that the initial president to “pardon” a fowl by sending it instead to a petting zoo or a nearby farm was President George. H.W. Bush, and that would not happen until the Year of Our Lord 1989. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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December 19, Friday: The US Congress voted $540,000,000 in stopgap aid to four countries, out of a 4-year $17,000,000,000 recovery program requested by President Harry S Truman.

Incidental music to Sophocles’ (tr. by Obey) play Oedipus by Arthur Honegger was performed for the initial time, in the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, Paris. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1948

January: Random House published Robinson Jeffers’s THE DOUBLE AXE AND OTHER POEMS. In this volume, his 14th to be published by this publisher, the poet wrote the following on the basis of President Harry S Truman’s conduct while sailing home from the Potsdam conference: Moment of Glory They have their moments, and if one loved them they ought to die in those moments: but who could love them? Consider Churchill contemplating the ditch where his great enemy’s Body was burned in the roaring ruins of Berlin — and turning away, grinning, making his cockney Victory-gesture. Consider Hitler prancing stiff-legged over fallen France. Consider little Truman, That innocent man sailing home from Potsdam – rejoicing, running about the ship, telling all and sundry That the awful power that feeds the life of the stars had been tricked down Into the common stews and shambles.

Contemptible people? Certainly. But how they enjoy their points of glory.33

33. Page 137. Despite the fact that the war had been over for a couple-three years, this volume of poetry had been heavily censored by Bennett Cerf and Saxe Commins of Random House, and even in its abbreviated condition, with a new preface and with ten poems absent, had been allowed to appear only with a publisher’s disclaimer message in regard to “the political views pronounced by the poet.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Our poet would never find out that, while our President had been sailing toward the Potsdam conference, an incident quite as damning had already occurred. President Truman was elated because he had just been briefed on a trump card for the negotiations, the Manhattan Project’s development of an ultimate indiscriminate weapon of war, a terror device that could be aimed – aimed only – at cities of workers, women, and children. He was also taking with him an old, stained slip of paper which he had carried in his billfold for most of his life.

The President pulled this slip of paper from his billfold and showed it to a reporter. No, it did not contain the secret of the atom bomb, it contained information on something infinitely worse – a secret of the condition of the human heart.

Mr. Truman had seen, and had been attracted to, and had copied down a snippet from, in 1910 in Missouri, Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s poem “Locksley Hall,” that had been written in 1837-1838 to describe the frustrated yearnings of a young man who has been denied a woman he desires.34 This was functioning as a life agenda, as a dip into the future far as human eye could see, as something Harry could hope for and fantasize about and HDT WHAT? INDEX

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scheme for, as a vision of the world and all the wonder that would be. For in Harry’s simple Missouri mentation, or what passes for mentation, the phrase “there rain’d a ghastly dew / From the nations’ airy navies” constituted a prophesy of and a legitimation for viciousness – his employment of an ultimate aerial weapon. And the result of this deployment of virtually infinite force? The earth would be finally at peace: “the war drum throbbed no longer, and the battle flags were furled / In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world.”35 Taking this creased slip of paper that Harry S was wearing next to his ass into consideration, the stories that are told about his decision to go right ahead and drop the Bomb on Japan simply lack all credibility. Taking this creased slip of paper into consideration, only one explanation for the dropping of the Bomb remains plausible.

“The intent was to terrorize a nation to the maximum extent, and there is nothing like nuking civilians to achieve that effect.”

— William Langewiesche, THE ATOMIC BAZAAR: THE RISE OF THE NUCLEAR POOR, NY: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2007

Here is what Jeffers had wanted to say to the American people, in the preface to his book THE DOUBLE AXE AND OTHER POEMS, that his publishers in their wisdom would not allow us to hear at the time: The waste is enormous. We are able to commit and endure because we are so firmly established on the planet. Life is actually so easy that it requires only a slight fraction of our common energies. The rest we discharge onto each other in conflict and charity, love, jealousy, hatred, competition, government, vanity and cruelty and that puerile passion, the will to power or for amusement. Certain human relationships are necessary and desirable but not to this extent. This is a kind of collective onanism; pathetic and ridiculous or at noblest, tragic incest. And so I have represented it. But we have all this excess energy. What should we do with it? ... Do I really believe that people will be content to take a walk and admire the beauty of things? Certainly not. I’m speaking of a racial disease. It was in the monkey blood we derived from and no doubt it is incurable. But whoever will can minimize it in his own life.

This is the sort of more “philosophical” (or less “in-your-face”) commentary, by way of contrast, that Jeffers’s publisher condescended to allow us to read:

The first part of THE DOUBLE AXE was written during the war and finished a year before the war ended, and it bears the scars; but the poem is not primarily concerned with that grim folly. Its burden, as some previous work of mine, is to present a certain philosophical attitude, which might be called

34. NORTON ANTHOLOGY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, 4th Edition, 1979; NY: W.W. Norton & Company, II:1117-23. You will kindly note that it had been in 1848 that the initial aerial bombing of a civilian population of a city had gone down in human history — the Austrians having in that year used unmanned balloons to drop bombs upon Venice. 35. Franklin, H. Bruce, 1989, “Fatal Fiction: A Weapon to End All Wars,” The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 45, No.9 (November 1989):18-25 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Inhumanism, a shifting of emphasis and significance from man to not-man, the rejection of human solipsism and recognition of the transhuman magnificence. It seems time that our race began to think as an adult does, rather than like an egocentric baby or insane person. This manner of thought and feeling is neither misanthropic nor pessimist, though two or three people have said so and may again. It involves no falsehoods, and is a means of maintaining sanity in slippery times, it has objective truth and human value. It offers a reasonable detachment as rule of conduct, instead of love, hate and envy. It neutralizes fanaticism and wild hopes; but it provides magnificence for the religious instinct, and satisfies our need to admire greatness and beauty.

In publishing the poems, even with alterations such as “Harry Truman” for “little Truman,”36 the editor omitted ten that were found too utterly offensive: “Miching Mallecho,” “Fantasy,” “The Blood-Guilt,” “Wilson in Hell,” “What Odd Expedients,” “Ordinary Newscaster,” “Staggering Back Toward Life,” “Curb Science,” “War-Guilt Trials,” and “Porvou Que Ca Doure.”

Although he was not aware of this fact, would never become aware of this fact, there was nothing new about Jeffers’s inhumanist stance:

“It appears to me that to one standing on the heights of philosophy mankind & the works of man will have sunk out of sight altogether. Man is altogether too much insisted on. The poet says the proper study of mankind is man– I say study to forget all that –take wider views of the universe– That is the egotism of the race. What is this our childish gossipping social literature – mainly in the hands of the publishers? When the poet says the world is too much with us –he means of course that man is too much with us– In the promulgated views of man –in institutions –in the common sense there is narrowness & delusion. It is our weakness that so exaggerates the virtues of philanthropy & charity & makes it the highest human attribute– The world will sooner or later tire of philanthropy –and all religions based on it mainly. They cannot long sustain my spirit. In order to avoid delusions I would fain let man go by & behold a universe in ROBINSON JEFFERS which man is but as a grain of sand– I am sure that my thoughts which consist or are contemporaneous with social personal connections – however humane are not the wisest & widest –most universal– What is the village –city state –nation –aye the civilized world – that it should so concern a man? It is a comfortable place to nestle no doubt & we have friends – some sympathizing ones it may be, & a

36. This poem was entirely suppressed by the publisher, Random House, even after the war was over. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HARRY S TRUMAN PRESIDENT HARRY S TRUMAN

hearth, there – but I have only to get up at midnight – aye to soar – or wander a little in my thought by day – to find them all slumbering– Look at our literature what a poor puny social thing seeking sympathy– The author troubles himself about his readers – would fain have one before he dies.– not satisfied with defiling one another in this world, we would all go to heaven together.– To be a good man (that is a good neighbor in the widest sense) is but little more than to be a good citizen. Mankind is a gigantic institution – it is a community to which most men belong. It is a test I would apply to my companion – can he forget man? Can he see this world slumbering? I do not value any view of the universe into which man & the institutions of man enter very largely & absorb much of the attention– Man is but the place where I stand & the prospect (thence) hence is infinite. it is not a chamber of mirrors which reflect me –when I reflect myself –I find that there is other than me. man is a past phenomenon to philosophy – the universe is larger than enough for man’s abode. Some rarely go outdoors – most are always at home at night – very few indeed have stayed out all night once in their lives – fewer still have gone behind the world of humanity –seen his institutions like toad-stools by the way-side. Now the author stands too near his printer. He corrects the proofs.” –Thoreau’s JOURNAL, April 2, 1852

February 2, Monday: The Indian government outlawed all communal organizations and private armies.

President Harry S Truman sent a message to the federal congress, asking for civil rights legislation to secure the rights of the country’s minority groups, and proposing a ten-point civil rights program.

February 3, Tuesday: Arabs attacked the Central Prison in Jerusalem but were repulsed by guards.

About 1,500,000 German workers struck in Baden-Württemberg, Hanover, and Hamburg against food shortages.

The US Congress responded to President Harry S Truman’s civil rights proposals, accusing him of “stabbing the south in the back” and “kissing the feet of minorities.”

The Supreme Court of Chile ruled that Senator Pablo Neruda must stand trial for criticizing the government. He would disappear on the following day. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PRESIDENT HARRY S TRUMAN HARRY S TRUMAN

February 12, Thursday: At the end of a 13-day mourning period in India and Pakistan, the ashes of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi were given to the Ganges in a ceremony at Allahabad.

Robinson Jeffers’s editor at Random House, Saxe Commins, again wrote the poet, when he received the new version of the manuscript that was to become THE DOUBLE AXE AND OTHER POEMS. He pointed out that to alter the line about FDR, “to feed the vanity of a paralytic,” into “to feed the power hunger of a paralyzed man,” was hardly a change at all. He wanted the line changed to “to feed the power hungry.” He also objected to the characterization of President Harry S Truman as “little.”

February 19, Thursday: Robinson Jeffers responded to the concerns of his editor at Random House, Saxe Commins, about THE DOUBLE AXE AND OTHER POEMS, allowing the substitution of “to feed the power-hunger of a politician” for “to feed the power hunger of a paralyzed man.” He pointed out that to characterizing President Harry S Truman as “little” could not possibly be a reference to his height since in fact the President was not only taller than Winston Churchill, but also taller than Führer Adolf Hitler.

March 6, Saturday: Convention of the Intergovernmental Maritime Consultative Organization. READ THE FULL TEXT

1,000 British troops, 500 policemen, and 300 dependents departed from Haifa.

The Birmingham, Alabama Board of Education banned Scholastic Magazine because it approved of President Harry S Truman’s civil rights program.

Two Shorts and a Long for piano by Kenneth Gaburo was performed for the initial time, at the Eastman School of Music, Rochester, New York.

March 19, Friday: The United States Ambassador to the United Nations, to the shock of President Harry S Truman and the rest of the world, made a speech calling partition of Palestine untenable and supporting trusteeship (this being a complete reversal of the official US position). Scurry around, diplomats of the Statement Department, get your ducks in a row! HDT WHAT? INDEX

HARRY S TRUMAN PRESIDENT HARRY S TRUMAN HDT WHAT? INDEX

PRESIDENT HARRY S TRUMAN HARRY S TRUMAN

March 25, Thursday: The United States Ambassador to the United Nations having, to the shock of just everyone in Washington DC as well as in the rest of the world, on March 19th made a speech calling partition of Palestine untenable and supporting trusteeship, President Harry S Truman issued a statement qualifying those statements of March 19th. Damage control.

Nicaragua formally ended its aid to the Costa Rican government and withdrew its troops from the country.

April 1, Thursday: President Harry S Truman vetoed an income tax reduction bill (on the following day the federal congress would override this veto).

April 3, Saturday: Jews captured Kastel, west of Jerusalem.

After the federal Congress had debated the issue for three months, US President Harry S Truman signed the Foreign Assistance Act of 1948 creating European Recovery Program (ERP) to implement the Marshall Plan for U.S. aid to European recovery. Most of the appropriation was $5,300,000,000 for the Marshall Plan for European recovery. This also included military aid for China, Greece, and Turkey, non-military aid for China, and money for UNICEF.

John Cage made his first visit to Black Mountain College in North Carolina. There he would perform music to accompany dances by Merce Cunningham.

April 8, Thursday: On orders from President Harry S Truman, US troops began to pull out of Korea.

May 10, Monday: Koreans residing in the US occupation zone went to the polls to elect a Korean National Assembly. This was their initial election by universal adult suffrage and their initial use of the secret ballot. Syngman Rhee, who would later be President, would serve as Chairman of the Assembly.

The Communist Party in North Korea, led by Kim Il Sung, formed the People’s Republic of North Korea.

Jews began an all-out attack against Arab positions in Safed (Zefat). After fierce fighting, the Arabs fled.

22 hours before a scheduled nationwide strike, President Harry S Truman seized the railroads and the strike was called off. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HARRY S TRUMAN PRESIDENT HARRY S TRUMAN

May 14, Friday: Israel was established, under Ben-Gurion. READ ABOUT IT

President Harry S Truman recognized the new state of Israel.

June 3, Thursday: President Harry S Truman began a “non-political” speaking tour, by train to the West Coast.

June 24, Thursday: Soviet authorities banned all shipments of any kind between the west German occupation zones and Berlin. They also cut off all power to the western sectors of Berlin. Great Britain retaliated by ending shipments of coal and steel from the Ruhr to the Soviet occupation zone.

The Roman Catholic Church in Hungary excommunicated all members of the National Assembly who had voted to nationalize Catholic schools.

President Harry S Truman signed a bill reintroducing conscription.37

Oliver Twist, a film with music by Arnold Bax was shown for the initial time, in the Odeon Theater, Marble Arch, London. (When the film would be shown in Berlin during the following February, the showing would be halted by Polish Jews who experienced the character of Fagin as anti-Semitic.)

June 25, Friday: President Harry S Truman signed the Displaced Persons Act, authorizing admission into the United States of 205,000 European displaced persons during the following two years.

June 26, Saturday: President Harry S Truman ordered that all airplanes available to the European command be pressed into service to airlift vital supplies to the city of Berlin, now effectively blockaded by the Soviets (the blockade would continue until May 12, 1949).

[There are two things you need to understand if you are going to understand this “Berlin Airlift” period. 1st, the airlift was economically feasible because of all the leftover obsolete airframes from the WWII period which otherwise would have been merely parked in storage in the middle of some desert somewhere. 2d, the airlift was geopolitically feasible because the US had a “Plan Trojan” as backup in which 30 Soviet cities were being targeted for a nuclear attack against which, in that timeframe, the USSR had no effective defense.]

37. Bear in mind, Truman’s considered opinion was that prison was the only place for any conscientious objector. You were either willing to kill our nation’s selected enemies — or you were a criminal with no rights whatever. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PRESIDENT HARRY S TRUMAN HARRY S TRUMAN

June 28, Monday: A series of earthquakes and fire destroyed most of the city of Fukui, Japan. More than 3,000 were killed.

The Cominform made charges against Yugoslavia and its leader, Josip Broz Tito, in an article in Rude Pravo, Prague. They accused Tito of retreating from Marxism-Leninism and following a nationalistic, anti-Soviet line. The Cominform expelled Yugoslavia and called on Yugoslav communists to overthrow Tito.

A state of emergency was declared in Great Britain in the face of a wildcat strike by 19,000 dock workers.

President Harry S Truman signed a bill making available $6,030,710,228 in foreign aid, most of which would go to the European Recovery Program (the Marshall Plan).

July 2, Friday: President Harry S Truman signed the Japanese American Evacuation Claims Act, a measure to compensate Japanese Americans for certain economic losses attributable to their forced evacuation. Although some $38 million would be paid out through provisions of the act, it would prove largely ineffective even on the limited scope within which it was operating. WORLD WAR II

The Japanese Peruvians who had been being kept in concentration camps in Texas were, of course, excluded from this largesse. Never mind that at this point they had become permanent residents in the US. Never mind that they were in need. Never mind that they had been abused. Just forget the whole thing. “Look straight into the blue light —FLASH!— now that wasn’t so difficult, was it?”

July 15, Thursday: President Harry S Truman was nominated as the Democratic candidate for president on the initial ballot at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, after 35 delegates from Alabama and Mississippi had walked out in protest against the strong civil rights plank in the party platform. Senator Alben W. Barkley of Kentucky was chosen as the vice-presidential candidate. The President called the federal Congress to come into special session on July 26th to act on housing, civil rights, and price controls (that congress would adjourn on August 7th with no such accomplishment on its record). HDT WHAT? INDEX

HARRY S TRUMAN PRESIDENT HARRY S TRUMAN

July 17, Saturday: After the Israeli capture of Nazareth, the Arabs retreated toward the east, abandoning central Galilee. Israeli troops assaulted the Old City of Jerusalem, blowing their way through the New Gate, but then were forced to withdraw.

President José Figueres of Costa Rica outlawed the Communist Party.

A convention of southern Democrats meeting in Birmingham, Alabama nominated Senator J. Strom Thurmond and Governor Fielding L. Wright as candidates for president and vice-president. One speaker criticized President Harry S Truman’s civil rights program for threatening “to make Southerners into a mongrel, inferior race by forced intermingling with Negroes.”

July 26, Monday: Mississippi for chorus and piano by William Grant Still to words of Arvey was performed for the initial time, over the airwaves of the ABC radio network.

Magdalena, a musical comedy by Heitor Villa Lobos to words of Forrest and Wright, was performed for the initial time, in Los Angeles.

President Harry S Truman signed Executive Order No. 9981, and another executive order, supposedly announcing an end to racial segregation in the Armed Forces of the United States of America. It is hereby declared to be the policy of the President that there shall be equality of treatment and opportunity for all persons in the armed services without regard to race, color, religion, or national origin.

Hey, didn’t that have an immediate disastrous impact upon combat effectiveness? –No, because boots on the ground there was instant massive noncompliance by white staff officers throughout all branches of service. The Commander in Chief would be forced to sit and seethe in the White House for, literally, years, pretending not to notice. What would eventually bring an end to our racially segregated formations would be devastating defeats during our retreat down the Korean peninsula in 1950, with battlefield commingling of personnel into a “Pusan perimeter,” and sea evacuation of these newly racially integrated formations back to Japan.

KOREAN WAR The US Congress convened in Washington DC, having been summoned back into session by the President. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PRESIDENT HARRY S TRUMAN HARRY S TRUMAN

July 27, Tuesday: André Marie replaced Robert Schuman as prime minister of France.

In a speech to the US Congress, President Harry S Truman challenged it to act on 11 bills still pending from the regular session.

July 31, Saturday: President Harry S Truman dedicated New York’s Idlewild, largest commercial airport in the world (since renamed in honor of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy).

In a US court in Nürnberg, Germany, 6 of the 12 former directors of Krupp munitions manufacturers were found guilty of having resorted to slave labor and of having plundered occupied countries. Another 5 were found guilty on the slave labor counts only (one director being acquitted). The sentences ranged from two years, ten months to twelve years.

Testifying before the House of Representatives’s Un-American Activities Committee, American Communist spy Elizabeth Terrill Bentley, known to her Soviet handlers as “Miss Wise,” accused Lauchlin Currie and Harry Dexter White of furnishing Communist spy rings with information during the war. Curry had been an administrative assistant in the White House from 1939 to 1945 and White had worked his way up in the Treasury Department, becoming an Assistant Secretary of the Treasury. (Beginning as a Fascist, Bentley had been converted by a lover to Communism; she had gone to the FBI only when she began to fear –realistically– that due to her drunkenness and depression and the decline in her usefulness, her Soviet contacts were intending to “get rid of her.” On November 6, 1945 she had gone to a FBI office and defected, and they would assign her the code name “Gregory” in hope of being able to use her as a double agent. Bentley told her new FBI handlers about Nathan Gregory Silvermaster, a former employee at three government agencies, describing him as an NKVD agent in charge of a spy ring. She named Victor Perlo of the War Production Board as a Communist who had provided her with information. She went on to name other government employees who, she claimed, were Communists or provided information. However, over time it would become clear to her new American handlers that she was developing a tendency to embellish and exaggerate her achievements during her undercover career. As the years went and she drifted from secretarial work into a variety of low-status teaching jobs, she would keep on discovering new items to add to previous accomplishments, and her testimony would become less and less useful. Eventually she would convert to Roman Catholicism and build a new career of delivering anti-Communist lectures to church audiences for a $300 fee.)

August 5, Thursday: Israel proposed direct negotiations between itself and the Arab countries presently invading the Holy Land.

US Representative Richard Milhous Nixon summoned Roosevelt administration State Department official Alger Hiss to the witness stand as an accused spy for our nation’s Communist enemies. Hiss denied before the House of Representatives’s Un-American Activities Committee that he was ever a Communist or had ever (to the best of his knowledge) so much as met Whittaker Chambers.

President Harry S Truman told newsmen that he believed the investigations of the Un-American Activities Committee of the House of Representatives “serve no useful purpose… They were slandering a lot of people who don’t deserve it.” He asserted that they had turned up no information not already known to the FBI and termed them a “red herring,” intended only to divert attention from a “do-nothing” Republican Congress. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HARRY S TRUMAN PRESIDENT HARRY S TRUMAN

August 7, Saturday: The US Congress adjourned after passing only three pieces of legislation of the eleven demanded by President Harry S Truman when he had called them back. The White House denounced two of the bills that had been passed.

September 1, Wednesday: North Shensi Radio announced that a North China Peoples Government had been constituted in an undisclosed location. It consisted of a 528 member assembly and 39 peoples commissars.

An assembly convened in Bonn to draft a constitution for western Germany. Konrad Adenauer, the former mayor of Cologne, was elected president of the assembly.

In an official effort to end “formalism” in Soviet music, Dmitri Shostakovich was removed from his positions at the Leningrad and Moscow Conservatories effective today.

As part of the US presidential campaign, Republican challenger Thomas Dewey declared that President Harry S Truman had allowed Communists to gain high positions of power in the government (my mother as a staunch lifelong Indiana Republican would have voted for Dewey, except for that cute little line mustache which inclined her to stay home on voting day).

September 6, Monday: William “Red” Hill, Jr. made his 2d trip through the rapids of the Niagara River, this time inside a barrel weighing about 1,000 pounds. His trip started the same way, with the barrel being tossed approximately 40 feet in the air by a wave at the start of the descent. This time it took 5 minutes for the barrel to make its way through the rapids and into the Whirlpool, and there it spun ’round and ’round for more than an hour, occasionally disappearing totally into the vortex and then bobbing back up. Again a brother pulled the barrel to shore. Junior had received some bad bruises, but there were no broken bones. He bailed water out of his barrel for an hour and then clambered back in to complete the descent to Queenston. He arrived at the Queenston dock after four and a half hours on the river.

From this day to October 30th, President Harry S Truman would be making several extensive campaign trips, traveling through all sections of the country except the South. Calling it a “whistle stop” campaign, he would make 275 speeches, centering his attack upon the record of the “do nothing 80th Congress,” traveling in all about 22,000 miles.

September 25, Saturday: From Jewish Folk Poetry, a cycle for three solo voices and piano by Dmitri Shostakovich was performed for the initial time, privately, at a party celebrating his 42nd birthday. A public performance was unlikely in the current official mood of anti-Semitism. ANTISEMITISM

Just weeks before the US national elections, the House of Representatives’s Un-American Activities Committee promised that its final report would show that Soviet agents were able to gain atomic secrets, and that Democratic Presidents Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry S Truman, and Attorney General Tom Clark, had known of this — and done nothing about it. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PRESIDENT HARRY S TRUMAN HARRY S TRUMAN

September 27, Monday: The House of Representatives’s Un-American Activities Committee released its 18,000-word report. This named Soviet agents and their US contacts and accused Democratic Presidents Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry S Truman of doing nothing (everyone named in the report denied all the accusations).

November 2, Tuesday: The Romanian government nationalized the film industry.

National elections in the United States delivered a surprise reelection for a 2d term to President Harry S Truman. His Democratic Party gained nine seats in the Senate and 75 in the House of Representatives, winning control of both. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HARRY S TRUMAN PRESIDENT HARRY S TRUMAN

1949

January 5, Wednesday: President Harry S Truman delivered a State of the Union message asking for a strengthened liberal program characterized as the “Fair Deal.”

January 20, Thursday: Marshall resigned as secretary of state (Dean Acheson would succeed him on the following day).

President Harry S Truman was inaugurated for a 2d term. His in inaugural address called for a “bold new program” to help the underprivileged of the earth (this was to be his “Point IV” program).

March 14, Monday: Rationing of clothing ended in Great Britain.

470,000 US coal miners east of the Mississippi walked out for two weeks to protest the appointment of James Boyd as Director of Mines by President Harry S Truman.

June 6, Monday: The Reverend Frederick Ernest Charles, Lord Byron died. His cousin Rupert Frederick George Byron became the 11th Baron Byron of Rochdale.

President Harry S Truman signed an executive order establishing the office of U.S. High Commissioner in Germany, as a step in replacing army control with civilian supervision.

July 15, Friday: President Harry S Truman signed Housing Act established a national housing policy and providing for federal aid to slum clearance programs and low-cost housing projects.

August 10, Wednesday: President Harry S Truman signed a National Security Act amendment establishing a unified Department of Defense. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PRESIDENT HARRY S TRUMAN HARRY S TRUMAN

August 29, Monday: President Harry S Truman proclaimed the North Atlantic Pact, as signed by twelve nations in Washington on April 4th, to be in effect. Implementation of this pact was entrusted to a North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). On December 19th of the following year, General Dwight D. Eisenhower would be appointed commander of the combined forces, being designated Supreme Allied Commander, Europe.

Hommage à Chopin for piano by Heitor Villa-Lobos was performed for the initial time. The work was commissioned by UNESCO to mark the centennial of the death of Chopin.

First Soviet detonation of a nuclear device, at Semipaltinsk, Kazakhstan in the Ustyurt desert.

This was “Joe One.” (The bomb was named after the infamous Cold Warrior, Uncle Iosef Vissarionovich Dzugashvili — the above is merely a computer printout of everyone’s favorite pinup, another Cold Warrior, Johnny Von Neumann.) John von Neumann would begin immediately to speak in favor of a pre-emptive atomic strike: “If you say why not bomb them tomorrow, I say why not today? If you say today at five o’clock, I say why not one o’clock?” (In the Kremlin, “Stalin” would be thinking in exactly the same way, speculating about the possibility of a quick nuclear war in which he might seize the West Coast of the USA.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

HARRY S TRUMAN PRESIDENT HARRY S TRUMAN

Norbert Wiener was just horrified that the inventor of game theory, someone who supposedly knew how to think, could take such an irrational attitude. Who would have imagined that Dr. Strangelove had gone insane? Wiener pointed out with plain common sense what rationality actually would consist of in such a situation: “When war becomes a form of mutual suicide, you don’t want to win the game. You want to get out of the game.”

Stop the world ...

Norbert would add that while one of the basic immutable presumptions of game theory was that everyone was going to be perfectly rational, in this real world “Where knaves assemble, there will always be fools.”

September 20, Tuesday: The CIA estimated, for the benefit of the American government decisionmakers in general, confidentially of course, that the USSR would first be able to test an A-bomb at about the midpoint of the year 1953. (Of course, we know now that Joe had already exploded one, but at that point our snoops were just clueless.)

JOE ONE HDT WHAT? INDEX

PRESIDENT HARRY S TRUMAN HARRY S TRUMAN

September 23, Friday: President Harry S Truman finally released the old news to the American people that a radioactive cloud that had come drifting eastward out of Siberia had not been the result of some accident at some nuclear reactor, but had been from the “Joe One” nuclear weapon test — Iosef Vissarionovich “Pay Attention to Seriously Short People” Dzugashvili’s wake-up call to the world. The argument began to be advanced in Washington DC that we ought to modify our Golden Rule into “Do It Unto Others Before They Have A Chance To Do It Unto Us.”38 ATOM BOMB

That bracelet inscribed “WWJD” might for the occasion be taken to pose this poser: WHAT WOULD JOE “STALIN” DO?

September 25, Sunday: Ningsia Province surrendered to Chinese Communists.

The Soviet news agency TASS announced the successful test of a Soviet atomic bomb.

Aaron Copland’s response to Arnold Schoenberg’s letter published September 11 appeared in the New York Herald-Tribune. He denied that he ever attempted to suppress Schoenberg’s music and heaped praise upon him. Copland then chided Virgil Thomson, for defending him so weakly.

October 6, Thursday: President Harry S Truman signed a Mutual Defense Assistance Act authorizing appropriation of funds for military assistance to nations signing the North Atlantic Pact.

38. Does it surprise you that our religiosity is entirely superficial? HDT WHAT? INDEX

HARRY S TRUMAN PRESIDENT HARRY S TRUMAN

1950

January 5, Thursday: President Harry S Truman announced that the United States would take no overt steps to defend Chiang Kai-shek on Taiwan.

January 31, Tuesday: The USSR recognized the Viet Minh regime of Ho Chi Minh as the legitimate government of Vietnam.

President Harry S Truman announced his decision to proceed with the development of the H-bomb — there was no halfway, for this guy! ATOM BOMB

February 6, Monday: President Harry S Truman invoked the Taft-Hartley law in the national coal strike. He appointed a three-man fact finding board to report to him by February 13th.

The Oboe Concerto of Lukas Foss was performed for the initial time, in a broadcast concert.

February 13, Monday: President Harry S Truman’s fact-finding board found both sides at fault in the national coal strike.

Aaron Copland wrote a conciliatory letter to Arnold Schoenberg.

Duo for viola and cello by Walter Piston was performed for the initial time, in Los Angeles. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PRESIDENT HARRY S TRUMAN HARRY S TRUMAN

March 30, Thursday: Senator Joseph R. McCarthy reiterated his charges against the Sinology Professor Owen Lattimore at Johns Hopkins University, and this time he claimed to have six affidavits attesting to his communist activities. Although he refused to hand these affidavits over to the committee investigating the claims, he allowed that he would be willing to turn them over to the FBI. In Key West, President Harry S Truman characterized this Senator as “the greatest asset the Kremlin has.”

Bell Telephone Laboratories of Murray Hill, New Jersey announced that Dr. Northrup Shive had invented a “phototransistor” (that is, a transistor that was activated not by electricity but by light).

May 4, Thursday: The USSR announced that it had completed its program of repatriating all German POWs being held in custody, almost two million souls in all. West German officials pointed out that there were hundreds of thousands who remained unaccounted for.

President Harry S Truman allowed the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to re-inspect loyalty files on 81 government employees who had been charged by Senator Joseph R. McCarthy with being Communists. All the files had already been inspected by four congressional committees, in 1947/1948, and all had been cleared. UNAMERICANISM

In the United States Embassy in Paris, France, Seconde Sonate pour piano and Barcarolles for piano by Ned Rorem were performed for the initial time.

In the Teatro alla Scala of Milan, Italy, L’allegra brigata, an opera by Gian Francesco Malipiero to his own words after Sacchetti, was performed for the initial time.

May 10, Wednesday: A bill creating the National Science Foundation was signed by President Harry S Truman.

Over the previous two days, a committee of the California State Senate had heard testimony that Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer, leader of the Manhattan Project to build the atomic bomb, had in 1941 attended Communist meetings. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HARRY S TRUMAN PRESIDENT HARRY S TRUMAN

June 26, Monday: President Harry S Truman ordered US air and sea forces to aid South Korean troops in resisting the Communist forces of North Korea, which had on the previous day invaded South Korea.

KOREAN WAR

Mexico City television station XHTV turned on its transmitter. Mexico was to be the 1st Spanish-speaking country to inaugurate television service.

June 27, Tuesday: For the 4th time the US State Department Loyalty Security Board cleared John S. Service of any suspicion (Senator Joseph R. McCarthy had been accusing Service of being a commie symp pinko something). UNAMERICANISM

The United Nations Security Council (the USSR boycotting) named North Korea as the aggressor, imposed military sanctions, and asked member nations to carry out its plan to defend the Republic of Korea. The Republic of Korea Army abandoned Seoul. President Harry S Truman announced US intervention and ordered in American air and naval forces, under the command of General Douglas MacArthur. The British House of Commons cheered upon hearing of President Truman’s announcement. All necessary measures were to be taken to prevent any attack upon Taiwan. A 35-man military advisory team was dispatched to aid the French in their attempt to control their colony in Indochina.

All non-Korean civilians were evacuated from Inchon by air and sea and from Pusan (women and children only) by sea to Japan. One hundred American civilian workers asked to stay in Pusan and await the arrival of American troops. KOREAN WAR HDT WHAT? INDEX

PRESIDENT HARRY S TRUMAN HARRY S TRUMAN

June 30, Friday: Henri Queuille replaced Georges Bidault as prime minister of France.

The Duke Ellington band returned to New York aboard the Ile de France after a three month tour of Europe.

Following Communist North Korea’s invasion of the South, President Harry S Truman ordered the US Navy to blockade the Korean coast. He ordered US ground forces stationed in Japan into Korea and authorized the bombing of North Korea by the US Air Force. The US President’s “No More Mr. Nice Guy” policy was backed by the UN Security Council. General Douglas MacArthur, the American commander in Japan, was put in charge of all UN troops in the area, which included forces from other nations. In his message to the American people, the President described the invasion as Moscow-backed and as an attack by “monolithic world Communism.”

KOREAN WAR

July 8, Saturday: At the request of the United Nations, President Harry S Truman designated an overall commander in the defense of South Korea: General Douglas MacArthur. KOREAN WAR HDT WHAT? INDEX

HARRY S TRUMAN PRESIDENT HARRY S TRUMAN

July 9, Sunday: The US Joint Chiefs of Staff began to consider giving control over some atomic bombs to General Douglas MacArthur. They felt they might be able to spare him some 10 to 20.

Ten or twenty oughta do the trick.

The 25th Infantry Division began to arrive, and would all be in Korea by the 18th. KOREAN WAR

July 19, Wednesday: President Harry S Truman sent a message to the US Congress asking for supplemental appropriation to support a “police action” in Korea, and for measures to control the country’s economy. KOREAN WAR HDT WHAT? INDEX

PRESIDENT HARRY S TRUMAN HARRY S TRUMAN

July 19, Wednesday to 22, Saturday: The battle for Taejon. US troops retreated. Major General William F. Dean was captured by North Koreans. 34th Infantry Regiment, 24th Division, 8th Army reduced to paper status and its few remaining troops and equipment went to the 19th Infantry Regiment. There were not enough men left in the 34th to make a full size Company. KOREAN WAR

July 26, Wednesday: United States military involvement in Vietnam began as President Harry S Truman authorized $15,000,000 in military aid to these gallant white men.

American military advisors would accompany this flow of US tanks, planes, artillery, and other supplies. Over the following four years, the US would expend not mere millions but all of $3,000,000,000 on the French war, and by 1954 would be providing 80% of the war supplies being used by the French.

July 29, Saturday: General Walton H. Walker sternly ordered that there were to be no more retreats down the Korean peninsula. KOREAN WAR HDT WHAT? INDEX

HARRY S TRUMAN PRESIDENT HARRY S TRUMAN

July 31, Monday: Arrival of 5th RCT in Korea from Hawaii.

North Koreans took Chinju, 70 kilometers west of Pusan.

President Harry S Truman began calling National Guard units to active service. KOREAN WAR

August 1, Tuesday: President Harry S Truman signed a bill granting limited self-government and United States citizenship to the residents of Guam.

King Leopold III of Belgium worked out an agreement with Parliament that he would abdicate in favor of his son when his son reaches his 21st birthday (on September 7, 1951).

The Soviet delegation returned to the Security Council after a six-and-a-half month boycott.

UN forces counterattacked between Masan and Chinju west of Pusan, driving ahead 15 kilometers. In the north, North Koreans took Yechon and Andong. During this day and the following two, US Eighth Army and Republic of Korea troops established defensive position at the Naktong. KOREAN WAR

August 25, Friday: Akira Kurosawa’s film “Rashomon” was released in Japan.

President Harry S Truman ordered the US Army to seize the nation’s railroads on August 27th, to prevent a national strike that the unions were planning for August 28th. The unions involved would announce that they were going to cooperate with the government, and postponed the strike.

The Board of Regents of the University of California sacked 31 professors for refusing to affix their signatures to attestations that they had never been communists (any commie would, of course, pleasantly sign an entire stack of such putrid documents, since commie doctrine offers nothing except praise for the ability to lie successfully to further the eventual triumph of their grand cause; these terminated professors were, therefore, if anything, giving us firm assurance of the fact that they had no sympathy whatever with communism).

September 8, Friday: President Harry S Truman signed a Defense Production Act establishing priorities, price and wage stabilization program, and limiting installment buying.

September 12, Tuesday: President Harry S Truman accepted the resignation of Louis A. Johnson as Secretary of Defense (Johnson would be succeeded by General George C. Marshall on September 21st). HDT WHAT? INDEX

PRESIDENT HARRY S TRUMAN HARRY S TRUMAN

September 23, Saturday: The United States Congress overrode President Harry S Truman’s veto of the McCarran Act, which provided for restrictions over political groups disliked by the state. The President signed the Revenue Act of 1950 increasing corporation and income taxes. UNAMERICANISM MCCARTHYISM

September 29, Friday: Duke Ellington met with President Harry S Truman at the White House and presented him with a manuscript copy of his “Harlem.”

UN Commander General Douglas MacArthur and South Korean President Syngman Rhee entered Seoul to reconstitute the government there. KOREAN WAR

Why did they call him “Dugout Doug”? HDT WHAT? INDEX

HARRY S TRUMAN PRESIDENT HARRY S TRUMAN

October 15, Sunday: Meeting of President Harry S Truman and General Douglas MacArthur on Wake Island. KOREAN WAR

A strong man stabbed in the back by politicians? HDT WHAT? INDEX

PRESIDENT HARRY S TRUMAN HARRY S TRUMAN

November 1, Wednesday: Chinese Communist Forces attacked in force in the area near Unsan. General Chinese Communist offensive into Korea through massive troop attacks. KOREAN WAR

Electricity was restored to Seoul for the initial time in four months.

Pope Pius XII pronounced dogma on the bodily Assumption of the Virgin.

The UN General Assembly voted to extend the term of Secretary-General Trygve Lie for three years.

Two Puerto Rican nationalists attacked Blair House, the temporary presidential quarters, in Washington, in an attempt to assassinate President Harry S Truman. The attackers killed a guard and wounded two before one attacker was killed. The other attacker was then captured. The president had not been harmed. In Puerto Rico, the revolt they had been backing up was effectively over, with 31 deaths. and leading members of the Nationalist and Communist Parties were being arrested.

La Fraîcheur et le feu, a cycle for voice and piano by Francis Poulenc to words of Eluard, was performed for the initial time, in Birmingham, the composer himself at the keyboard.

November 7, Tuesday: In Congressional elections in the United States, the Democratic Party of President Harry S Truman lost five seats in the Senate and 28 in the House of Representatives, but held onto control of both. One of the Senate seats that had been gained by the Republicans went to a lawyer by the name of Richard Milhous Nixon, who would serve part of one term. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HARRY S TRUMAN PRESIDENT HARRY S TRUMAN

November 29, Wednesday: President Harry S Truman warned the world that the US might use any weapon in its arsenal, obviously referring not to the new conventional weapon napalm that had been invented at Harvard University and was already in extensive application but to our nuclear/biological/chemical capability. CHINA KOREA

November 30, Thursday: President Harry S Truman, in a press conference, used the atom bomb by threatening to detonate it. (So, let’s us not say that we have refrained from using atomic bombs after WWII: the threatening of deadly force definitively constitutes a use in exactly the same manner as waving a pistol during an armed robbery of a liquor store constitutes a use.)

General Stratemeyer put the US Strategic Air Command on warning to be ready to send B29s with atomic capability to the Far East. According to General Curtis LeMay, it was understood at this time that there was nothing left of North Korea worth expending an atomic weapon upon, and that such special weaponry would more likely be useful as part of “an overall atomic campaign against Red China.” At this point the US had about 450 such devices and the Soviets perhaps 25 — but their threat was not real as they still lacked any delivery device such as the B29 with which they might expend them onto 25 American cities. KOREAN WAR HDT WHAT? INDEX

PRESIDENT HARRY S TRUMAN HARRY S TRUMAN

December: A news item relating to the development of ELECTRIC WALDEN technology: • Douglas Engelbart had his flash of intuition, that the human situation was getting out of control because of rapidly increasing complexity, but that with the assistance of some sort of tightly coupled personal computer device “beginning from memories of the radar-screen consoles I used to service,” the complexity of it all might be still be reducible to manageable proportions. In half an hour he was drawing sketches of a new kind of computer desk with a console upon which he could interact by the use of symbols.

(Former President Herbert Hoover, whom some Quakers allege without much foundation was a closet Friend, seems to have been in sad need of some sort of personal computer as above, to help him out in his thought processes. He was in this month being quoted in the New York Times as backing up President Harry S Truman’s discourse about “Genghis Khan and Tamerlane, the greatest murderers in the history of the world,” while adding his own racist remarks about “Asiatic hordes” and characterizing the Sino-Soviet empire as being but “a congeries of thirty different races” —not at all like the people of the Free World but mere “cannon fodder”— an interracial conglomeration which “will someday go to pieces.”39) CHINA KOREA RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS

39. Why wait out the inevitable? —Let’s blow ’em to pieces right now! —Hoobert Heeverize ’em! HDT WHAT? INDEX

HARRY S TRUMAN PRESIDENT HARRY S TRUMAN

December 4, Monday: Chinese forces retook Pyongyang, abandoned by the UN.

Five people, including atomic scientists, were indicted by federal grand juries in Washington on charges of contempt of Congress for failing to respond to questions about communism.

From this day until the 8th, President Harry S Truman would be meeting with British Prime Minister Attlee, after which Britain would abandon its position that Taiwan should be returned to Red China. KOREAN WAR

December 6, Wednesday: UN forces created a new defensive line south of Pyongyang. KOREAN WAR

After reading a negative review in the Washington Post of a song recital by his daughter Margaret, President Harry S Truman wrote to the reviewer, Paul Hume. “Mr. Hume: I have just read your lousy review of Margaret’s concert. I’ve come to the conclusion that you were an eight-ulcer man on four-ulcer pay... Some day I hope to meet you. When that happens, you’ll need a new nose, a lot of beefsteak for black eyes, and perhaps a supporter below.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

PRESIDENT HARRY S TRUMAN HARRY S TRUMAN

December 9, Saturday: General Douglas MacArthur requested that civilian control over the use of atomic weaponry be foregone in favor of a scheme he termed “commander’s discretion.” President Harry S Truman wrote “it looks like World War III is here.” CHINA KOREAN WAR HDT WHAT? INDEX

HARRY S TRUMAN PRESIDENT HARRY S TRUMAN

“Trust me.”

December 16, Saturday: UN forces evacuated Hamhung as their perimeter around the evacuation port of Hungnam shrank.

Chinese representatives at the UN rejected a cease-fire proposal.

President Harry S Truman announced the existence of a “national emergency” as a result of events in Korea and “the increasing menace of Communist aggression.” He declared a three-day wildcat rail strike “unlawful” and ordered the strikers to return to work immediately. He reimposed price controls on some items.

All mainland Chinese assets in the US were frozen. All trade with mainland China was prohibited by the US government.

December 27, Wednesday: President Harry S Truman appointed a new ambassador to Spain. This was the 1st person in that position in 5 years, a result of the removal of Spain from the UN diplomatic black list. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PRESIDENT HARRY S TRUMAN HARRY S TRUMAN

1951

January 11, Thursday: President Harry S Truman appointed a mission headed by John Foster Dulles to go to Japan to confer with MacArthur and Japanese leaders in regard to a Japanese peace treaty. Said treaty would be signed in San Francisco on September 8th by delegates from 48 countries, Russia and her satellites refusing to participate.

March 7, Wednesday: UN troops in Korea launched operation “Ripper.” The 8th Army recrossed the Han River and established a bridgehead south of Seoul. KOREAN WAR

While attending a funeral in a Teheran mosque, Premier Ali Razmara of Iran was gunned down by Khalil Tahamsebi (Tahamsebi was captured).

Oscar Collazo, a Puerto Rican nationalist, was convicted of the murder of a Blair House guard. He was the surviving member of the 2-man hit team that had broken into Blair House in Washington DC and attempted to assassinate President Harry S Truman.

The Un-American Activities Committee of the US House of Representatives released a list of 624 organizations and 204 publications, cited as supposedly subversive.

March 26, Monday: President Harry S Truman opened the 4th meeting of the foreign ministers of the 21 American republics in Constitution Hall, Washington DC. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HARRY S TRUMAN PRESIDENT HARRY S TRUMAN

April 11, Wednesday: Three Glasgow University students handed over the Stone of Scone to Arbroath Abbey in Scotland, on the promise they would not be prosecuted. In two days, police would return the stone to Westminster Abbey, from whence it had been spirited the previous December.

Screen writer Robert Lees and actor Will Geer refused to tell the House of Representatives’s Un-American Activities Committee whether they have ever been Communists.

President Harry S Truman removed General Douglas MacArthur from command of United Nations forces in Korea for his repeated public calls for a larger war against China, in spite of administration policy to the contrary.

BEFORE AFTER General Matthew B. Ridgway took over command of the FECOM. KOREAN WAR HDT WHAT? INDEX

PRESIDENT HARRY S TRUMAN HARRY S TRUMAN

April 12, Thursday: Variations for piano by Morton Feldman was performed for the first time, for a dance by Merce Cunningham in Seattle.

Iranian troops fired on striking oil workers in Abadan. The workers had been protesting the British-owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. Three Britons and eight Iranians were killed.

The Congress of Argentina voted to expropriate the opposition newspaper La Prensa.

Western Union reported that 125,000 telegrams have been delivered to President Harry S Truman in the White House, and to members of the federal Congress, over the Douglas MacArthur firing. KOREAN WAR

June 15, Friday: President Harry S Truman signed India Emergency Food Aid Act, lending $190,000,000 to India to buy up to 2,000,000 tons of grain.

June 28, Thursday: Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh appealed to President Harry S Truman for support in his nationalization of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Co.

A British warship arrived at Abadan to oversee the evacuation of 3,000 British employees of the Ango-Iranian Oil Co.

Archbishop József Grösz was convicted of conspiring to overthrow the government of Hungary, and sentenced to 15 years imprisonment. Ferenc Vecer, a Paulician prior, was sentenced to death for having killed a Soviet soldier. Seven other defendants received sentences from 8 to 14 years.

August 1, Wednesday: President Harry S Truman proclaimed a suspension of any and all tariff reductions enjoyed by the Soviet Russia, the People’s Republic of China, or any other Communist country.

The forces of the United Nations would be launching limited attacks to consolidate their lines in Korea, from this point until the end of October. Bloody Ridge would become the go-to place for continuous slaughter. KOREAN WAR HDT WHAT? INDEX

HARRY S TRUMAN PRESIDENT HARRY S TRUMAN

September 4, Tuesday: A conference of 52 nations opens in the War Memorial Opera House, San Francisco to conclude a peace treaty with Japan.

The National Broadcasting Company expands to 61 stations in the first coast-to-coast television network in the United States. President Harry S Truman makes the first coast-to-coast telecast across North America. Speaking from the War Memorial Opera House in San Francisco he discusses the Japanese Peace Treaty.

September 23, Sunday: United Nations forces captured Heartbreak Ridge north of Yanggu, Korea. They would lose it on the following day.

Doctors performed an operation on King George VI at Buckingham Palace, removing part of a lung.

General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny, the French High Commissioner for Indo-China, completed a week of meetings in Washington. He had been promised the 2d highest amount of US military aid to East Asia, 2d only to Korea.

President Harry S Truman released three secret reports made by then Vice-President Henry Wallace to President Roosevelt after his 1944 mission to China. Wallace had urged Roosevelt to support Chiang Kai-shek. Truman was releasing the documents in order to counter charges before a Senate committee that Wallace had been under the influence of Communists in the State Department.

October 10, Wednesday: President Harry S Truman signed Mutual Security Act authorizing $7,483,100,000 for foreign economic, military, and technical aid and establishing the Mutual Security Agency.

October 19, Friday: The Board of Regents of the University of California voted to rescind the Loyalty Oath requirement. In the two years since its adoption 56 faculty had refused to sign, 8 of them having been sacked (this decision would not, however, be made retroactive, so nobody would need to be reinstated). UNAMERICANISM

Great Britain, France and the United States agreed to allow West Germany to control foreign trade and govern its constitutional affairs.

President Harry S Truman signed a congressional resolution that the state of war with Germany was ended (to take effect October 24th).

CBS agreed to postpone color TV after a request from the Defense Mobilization director to use strategic materials only for defense (television manufacturers would agree on October 25th).

The first two movements of Gian-Carlo Menotti’s symphonic poem Apocalypse were performed for the initial time, in the Oakland Civic Center, Pittsburgh.

Cumberland Concerto for orchestra by Roy Harris was performed for the initial time, in the Music Hall, Cincinnati. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PRESIDENT HARRY S TRUMAN HARRY S TRUMAN

October 20, Saturday: On a train between Amboise and Paris, in the “fog of a headache,” Pierre Schaeffer worked out his ideas for Symphonie pour un homme seul.

President Harry S Truman nominated General Mark W. Clark to be Ambassador to the Vatican. This was the initial time a US envoy would be resident at the Vatican, would be a precedent. US Protestant leaders of course protested and Congress would fail to act on the appointment (on January 13th of the following year the White House would announce that at Clark’s request his nomination would not be resubmitted).

October 24, Wednesday: President Harry S Truman proclaimed that the state of war with Germany had come officially to an end as of the 19th of October.

November 17, Saturday: 17 people would be killed over the following 2 days in fighting between British troops and Egyptian police in Isamailiya.

President Harry S Truman allowed Jean Sibelius to renew US copyrights on his music which had lapsed during World War II.

Fantasia for saxophone (soprano or tenor) by Heitor Villa-Lobos was performed for the initial time, in the Auditório do Ministério da Educação e Cultura, with the composer conducting. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HARRY S TRUMAN PRESIDENT HARRY S TRUMAN

1952

Professor Selman Waksman was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Here you can see Professor Waksman hard at work in 23-year-old grad student Albert Schatz’s basement lab (a dangerous place the good professor had never visited), actively pretending to discover Streptomycin, the 1st HDT WHAT? INDEX

PRESIDENT HARRY S TRUMAN HARRY S TRUMAN

antibiotic active against the terrifying Mycobacterium tuberculosis.

In this year Senator Joseph Raymond McCarthy would refer to Secretary of Defense George Catlett Marshall, who would be awarded a Nobel Peace Prize, as a traitor for having “lost China,” and call for the impeachment of President Harry S Truman as not only a “son-of-a-bitch” but also an inebriate. He would aver, falsely, that Democratic candidate Adlai Stevenson had been endorsed by the American Communist newspaper, the Daily Worker. By claiming, falsely, that he had flown 32 missions during World War II, the Senator would collect HDT WHAT? INDEX

HARRY S TRUMAN PRESIDENT HARRY S TRUMAN

for himself a Distinguished Flying Cross.40

Senator McCarthy’s MCCARTHYISM, THE FIGHT FOR AMERICA, which was largely composed by his bride Jean Kerr McCarthy with the help of J.B. Matthews and Ruth Matthews.

Reinhold Niebuhr’s THE IRONY OF AMERICAN HISTORY (Charles Scribner’s Sons).

“A too confident sense of justice always leads to injustice.” — Reinhold Niebuhr, THE IRONY OF AMERICAN HISTORY Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1952, Chapter 7 READ THE FULL TEXT 40. This medal has been awarded some 83 times, to folks such as Charles Lindbergh. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PRESIDENT HARRY S TRUMAN HARRY S TRUMAN

January 2, Wednesday: President Harry S Truman submitted a plan to the federal Congress to reorganize his Bureau of Internal Revenue, in response to charges that that agency was not only inefficient but also corrupt. The President’s plan, which called for replacing 64 politically appointed collectors with 25 district commissioners hired under Civil Service rules, would receive Senate approval and become effective on March 15th.

The United Nations proposed a POW exchange with the Chinese and the North Koreans. KOREAN WAR

January 9, Wednesday: Egyptians attacked a British army convoy near Suez. Two people were killed.

The US Army’s Clinical Psychology Officer Course began at the Medical Field Service School, Fort Sam Houston, Texas. Officers completing the course would receive the “MOS,” military occupational specialty, of Psychological Assistant.41

For several days President Harry S Truman had been conferring in Washington DC with Winston Churchill, recently reelected prime minister of Great Britain, and other British and American officials, concerning common problems in Europe and the Middle and Far East.

January 31, Thursday: President Harry S Truman termed Senator Joseph R. McCarthy pathological, untruthful, and a character assassin.

US immigration officials announced that they had intercepted Paul Robeson attempting to cross the border into Canada.

Sinfonia by Leon Kirchner was performed for the initial time, in New York.

March 27, Thursday: President Harry S Truman reestablished residence in the White House after living in Blair House, the official government guest house, since November 1948, while the White House was being rebuilt and renovated.

41. Please don’t shoot at the Psychological Assistant. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HARRY S TRUMAN PRESIDENT HARRY S TRUMAN

March 29, Saturday: Anti-US rioters attacked the US Information Service library in Teheran.

President Harry S Truman announced at a Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner that he would not be a candidate for reelection.

April 8, Tuesday: The official bulletin of the Catholic Clergy of Rome described psychoanalysis as a mortal sin.

President Harry S Truman signed an executive order directing Secretary of Commerce Charles Sawyer to seize 92 steel mills to prevent strike by 650,000 steel workers. He blamed the companies for the impasse in negotiations (on June 2d by a vote of 6 over 3, this seizure would be declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court).

Youth for chorus by György Ligeti was performed for the initial time, in Budapest.

Cuatro estampas andaluzas for piano by Joaquín Rodrigo were performed for the initial time, in Valencia.

April 15, Tuesday: President Harry S Truman signed to ratify a peace treaty with Japan, and defense treaties with Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and the Philippines.

For the 14th time, a nuclear weapon was tested at Yucca Flat, Nevada.

Partita in A for violin and piano by Ulysses Kay was performed for the first time, at the American Academy in Rome.

Verna Arvey heard from State Department official Wilson Compton that recordings of her husband William Grant Still’s music had been withdrawn by the State Department, although this had ostensibly been done not for musical reasons but due to the quality of the recording.

May 23, Friday: All railroads in the United States are returned to their owners by order of President Harry S Truman. The US Army ran the railroads during a 21-month labor dispute.

Masquerage, a film with music by Pierre Schaeffer, is shown for the first time, at Cannes.

Three works for tape by Pierre Henry are performed for the first time, n the Salle de l’Ancien Conservatoire, Paris: Microphone bien tempéré, Musique sans titre, and Concerto des ambiguïtés.

May 29, Thursday: President Harry S Truman vetoed a joint resolution of Congress confirming state claims to submerged lands below the low water mark (this was the so-called “tidelands” dispute). HDT WHAT? INDEX

PRESIDENT HARRY S TRUMAN HARRY S TRUMAN

June 2, Monday: Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej replaced Petru Groza as Chairman of the Council of Ministers of Romania.

In the case of Youngstown v. Sawyer, the US Supreme Court ruled that President Harry S Truman’s seizure of the steel industry was unconstitutional. The president immediately ordered the steel industry returned to its owners and steel workers immediately went on strike.

Dr. Harry Grundfest of Columbia University, Chairman of the American Medical Advisory Board to Hebrew University and the Hadassah Medical School, was denied a passport to travel to Israel because that “would not be in the best interests of the US.”

For the 5th time in the history of our nuclear program, at the Argonne National Laboratory some fissile material went beyond criticality into prompt-criticality, the final stage before an atomic explosion.

TIMELINE OF ACCIDENTS

Although this was the second one in the same year, to date there have been only a couple of dozen such incidents. Not to worry, we are told — a full A-bomb nuclear-weapon-like blast is a real engineering success story and very difficult to create, and therefore it is really really unlikely that any such prompt-criticality incident will ever produce a full A-bomb nuclear weapon-like blast without our really having intended for that to happen (even at Chernobyl the molten “corium” stuff failed to go off like a bomb). Just about the worst thing that might happen in a prompt-criticality situation is that the nuclear material in question goes off like what one might term a big “dirty” bomb –which is not at all in the same ballpark in terms of blast-effect although it is in the same ballpark in terms of contamination-effect– except that we must bear in mind that at the Fukushima Daiichi site, unfortunately, there are some 2,000 tons of such materials available within a few thousands of yards, in the six reactor cores and seven cooling pools.

HARRY S TRUMAN PRESIDENT HARRY S TRUMAN

June 14, Saturday: At Groton, Connecticut, President Harry S Truman ceremonially laid the keel of the world’s 1st atomic powered submarine, USS Nautilus.

June 25, Wednesday: As South Korean President Syngman Rhee was speaking in Pusan on the 2d anniversary of the beginning of the Korean War, nationalist Ryu Shi Tai pointed a gun at him from a distance of only 1.5 meters. The gun failed to go off and the would-be assassin, a member of a nationalist organization, was subdued by a couple of US Army officers.

President Harry S Truman vetoed the revised McCarran-Walter Act, alleging that it would “intensify the repressive and inhumane aspects of our immigration procedure.” The bill’s author, Senator McCarran, deemed the veto “one of the most un-American acts I have witnessed in my public career” and suggested that it would find favor, among Communists.

National elections in the Netherlands left the Catholic Peoples Party and the Labor Party each with 30 seats out of 100. Willem Drees of the Labor Party would continue as Prime Minister.

Ouverture de l’homme tel for orchestra by Heitor Villa-Lobos was performed for the initial time, in Lisbon, conducted by the composer.

June 27, Friday: Kim Si Hyon, leader of the Korean Nationalist Party, was arrested for complicity in the assassination attempt of June 25th.

The United States Congress overrode President Harry S Truman’s veto of the McCarran-Walter Act that provided for the exclusion or deportation of aliens belonging to political groups disliked by the government.

July 3, Thursday: President Harry S Truman signed legislation approving a new charter for Puerto Rico, provided certain changes are made.

The SS United States departed New York on its maiden voyage.

July 24, Thursday: The strike of steelworkers in the United States was settled.

President Harry S Truman commuted the death sentence of Oscar Collazo to life in prison (Collazo, a Puerto Rican nationalist, had killed a guard in the process of attempting to assassinate Truman in 1950).

The movie “High Noon” was released in the United States.

August 14, Thursday: President Harry S Truman appointed his former Ambassador to Moscow, Alan G. Kirk, to head a Psychological Strategy Board that was to coordinate US efforts to best the Soviets at the propaganda game in service to the truth.42

42. Street, W.R. A CHRONOLOGY OF NOTEWORTHY EVENTS IN AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGY. Washington DC: American Psychological Association, 1994 HDT WHAT? INDEX

PRESIDENT HARRY S TRUMAN HARRY S TRUMAN

September 2, Tuesday-November 1, Saturday: President Harry S Truman made 5 campaign speaking tours on behalf of Adlai Stevenson, Democratic candidate for President.

November 4, Tuesday: General Dwight David Eisenhower was elected in a landslide to be President of the United States of America, with Richard Milhous Nixon to serve as his Vice President.43

On a campaign swing through Wisconsin, the General had chickened out on delivering the speech he had prepared, that was critical of the methods employed by Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, and then in addition allowed himself to be photographed shaking hands with that Senator — this left outgoing President Harry STruman shaking his head in disbelief and commenting that Eisenhower had “betrayed almost everything I thought he stood for.”

43. This would result in one of the funniest jokes on record: A guy had an accident and was in a coma for years, waking up finally in 1969. Of course he needed to know what had happened while he had been out, and so the attending physician commented that at the Walter Reed Army Hospital in Washington DC, Dwight David Eisenhower had just died. “Oh, no!” the guy exclaimed, “Oh, no!” “Well,” the attending physician reassured him, “you’ve been unconscious for many years — Eisenhower had a good long retirement and died at an advanced age.” “What a relief!” the patient exclaimed. “I thought for a moment you were trying to tell me that son of a bitch Nixon had become President of the United States of America.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

HARRY S TRUMAN PRESIDENT HARRY S TRUMAN

The election was a Republican landslide and this Republican Senator from Wisconsin was also re-elected, so he would be promoted from his exile in the District of Columbia Committee to the chairmanship of the Senate Committee on Government Operations and its Subcommittee on Investigations.

November 5, Wednesday: President Harry S Truman invited president-elect General Dwight D. Eisenhower to come to the White House to discuss problems of transition (this would take place on November 19th). HDT WHAT? INDEX

PRESIDENT HARRY S TRUMAN HARRY S TRUMAN

1953

January 7, Wednesday: René Mayer replaced Antoine Pinay as prime minister of France.

President Harry S Truman announced that the United States had developed a hydrogen bomb.

January 20, Tuesday: The initial modern translation of the Bible into Korean was published in Tokyo.

1,300 East Germans fled to West Berlin by elevated train just before the East German government closed the line.

Todor Stoyanov Christov was sentenced to death in Sofia for espionage. Nine other defendants received prison terms of from six months to twenty years.

Dwight David Eisenhower, former 5-star Army general and Allied commander in Europe during World War II, replaced Harry S Truman as 34th President of the United States. Tradition had it that the two Presidents would visit inside the White House and then ride together to the inauguration ceremony, but Eisenhower remained for a long time in his limousine in the driveway of the White House, fuming, reluctant to come inside and greet Truman and unsure that he could force himself to ride next to him in the official open Lincoln limousine, while Harry and Bess were waiting for Dwight and Mamie to join them in the Red Room for coffee.

After the inauguration ceremony former President Truman and his family departed by train for Independence, Missouri.

During his term, to prevent a Communist victory, the new President would greatly increase US military aid to HDT WHAT? INDEX

HARRY S TRUMAN PRESIDENT HARRY S TRUMAN

the French in Vietnam. US military advisors would continue to accompany American supplies sent to Vietnam. To justify America’s financial commitment, Eisenhower would cite a “Domino Theory” in which a Communist victory in Vietnam would result in surrounding countries going down “like a falling row of dominoes.” To the best of my knowledge, no experiments would be conducted to determine what similarities a line of dominoes standing on edge on a planar surface has or does not have with a series of nations geographically arranged around a global surface, but this Domino Theory will be used by a succession of Presidents and their advisors to justify our ever-deepening involvement in the Vietnam quagmire.

At some point during this year, in a press conference, President Eisenhower would indicate that although he was in favor of military aid to prevent a Communist victory in Vietnam, he was opposed to having a war to prevent that Communist victory: “All of us have heard this term ‘preventive war’ since the earliest days of Hitler. I recall that is about the first time I heard it. In this day and time ... I don’t believe there is such a thing; and, frankly, I wouldn’t even listen to anyone seriously that came in and talked about such a thing.” — President Dwight David Eisenhower, 1953, upon being presented with plans to wage a preventive war against the USSR ADOLF HITLER

From this year into 1955, Former President Harry S Truman would be working on his memoirs, the 1st volume of which, YEAR OF DECISIONS, would be published during November 1955 (the 2d volume, YEARS OF TRIAL AND HOPE, would appear during the following year). HDT WHAT? INDEX

PRESIDENT HARRY S TRUMAN HARRY S TRUMAN

October 23, Friday: The US government announced that 1,456 federal workers had been purged in the four months since the new administration’s security program had gone into effect. All but five had been appointed during the Truman administration.44

Duo Sonata for clarinet and bass clarinet by Gunther Schuller was performed for the first time, in McMillan Theater of Columbia University. Also premiered was Schuller’s Recitative and Rondo for violin and piano.

Television broadcasting began in the Philippines, on DZAQ-TV.

The Kingdom of Laos declared itself independent from France under King Sisavang Vong and Prime Minister Prince Souvanna Phouma.

The constitution of the Central African Federation went into effect.

November 6, Friday: Three days of rioting by Italians in Trieste were halted by the appearance of US and UK troops. Seven people had been killed and about 60 injured. The rioters had been demanded reunion with Italy.

US Attorney General Herbert Brownell accused Former President Harry S Truman of having been aware that the late Harry Dexter White had been “a Russian spy” when he had appointed him as executive director of the International Monetary Fund (Truman controverted this).

November 11, Wednesday: US Attorney General Herbert Brownell modified his charge of November 6th that the promotion of economist Harry Dexter White had been a lapse of judgment on the part of the previous administration, by explaining he had had “no intention of impugning the loyalty of any high official.” Senator Joseph R. McCarthy called Former President Harry S Truman a liar, saying that “he deliberately, knowingly and without regard for the interests of the country appointed, promoted and advanced a Communist.” UNAMERICANISM

The head of a virus laboratory of the University of California at Berkeley informed a medical conference in Boston that its researchers, Dr. Howard Bachrach and Dr. Carleton Schwerdt, had isolated and photographed the pure virus of human poliomyelitis.

44. We now know that the largest single group of citizens impacted by these anti-pinko purges was the non-heterosexual group. My memory is that the most profound argument of the time went as follows: “Because of prejudice they must keep their sex life a secret, because of the need to live hidden they must fear exposure, any person who fears exposure is liable to blackmail –blackmail by communists– and because they are liable to blackmail they cannot be trusted. We may be entirely mistaken about their having communist sympathies, but that doesn’t matter so long as we fear that they might be bent to serve the communist cause.” Reduced to its essential impact, as a first-order approximation, McCarthyism was homophobia run wild. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HARRY S TRUMAN PRESIDENT HARRY S TRUMAN

November 16, Monday: Former President Harry S Truman made a nationwide radio and television address defending his promotion of Harry Dexter White, an alleged Communist, to the International Monetary Fund. He characterized the November 6th charges of Attorney General Herbert Brownell as politically motivated lies. He said it had become “now evident that the present administration has fully embraced, for political advantage, ‘McCarthyism,’ the corruption of truth, the abandonment of … fair play [and] due process of law … the use of the big lie and the unfounded accusation … in the name of Americanism and security.” UNAMERICANISM

Symphony no.5 by Darius Milhaud was performed for the initial time, over the airwaves of Italian Radio, originating in Turin, with the composer conducting.

Hymn and Fuguing Tune no.9 for cello and piano by Henry Cowell was performed for the initial time, at the New School, New York.

November 17, Tuesday: Sakari Severi Tuomioja replaced Urho Kekkonen as prime minister of Finland.

US Attorney General Herbert Brownell and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover testified before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee and provided a view of the case of the economist Harry Dexter White differing from that being offered by Former President Harry S Truman. The Subcommittee indicated that it would expand its investigation to include eight associates of this economist. UNAMERICANISM

November 24, Tuesday: Tod Machover was born in Mount Vernon, New York, the son of a computer graphics expert and a pianist.

Senator Joseph R. McCarthy made a nationwide radio and television address, answering the criticisms that Former President Harry S Truman had made on November 16th. He suggested that Truman’s definition of “McCarthyism” was identical with that of the Daily Worker, a Communist newspaper. He charged that the Truman administration had been “crawling with Communists.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

PRESIDENT HARRY S TRUMAN HARRY S TRUMAN

1954

April 5, Monday: President Dwight David Eisenhower declared that our nation would never be the 1st to use the hydrogen bomb.

Music for Five Instruments for flute, clarinet, trumpet, trombone and piano by Kenneth Gaburo was performed for the initial time, at the University of Texas in Austin.

April 6, Tuesday: Senator Joseph R. McCarthy appeared on television to answer charges made against him by Edward R. Murrow on March 9th.

He offered that this news broadcaster had been “engaged in propaganda for Communist causes” for at least the past two decades. He questioned whether “traitors in our government” were responsible for an 18-month “deliberate delay [in] research on the hydrogen bomb.” “Our nation may well die because of that …delay” (both Presidents Truman and Eisenhower would state on the following day that they were aware of no such delay in research on the hydrogen bomb).

Fantasy for cello and piano by Ernst Krenek was performed for the initial time, in Lucerne, with the composer at the keyboard. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HARRY S TRUMAN PRESIDENT HARRY S TRUMAN

1955

January 14, Friday: The government of South Africa announced that it was going to forcibly remove 178,000 blacks from Western Cape Province.

US Senator Joseph R. McCarthy asserted on the floor of the Senate that although there were some Democrats who were patriotic, the “Truman-Acheson branch of the party certainly has coddled, covered up and nurtured treason.”

Two works by Heitor Villa-Lobos were performed for the initial time, in Philadelphia, the composer conducting: Symphony no.8, and Concerto for harp and orchestra.

May 8, Sunday: On his 71st birthday Former President Harry S Truman broke ground for the construction of a privately financed Presidential Library building.

August 12, Friday: The Presidential Libraries Act was signed, authorizing the General Services Administration to accept the papers of US presidents, and the land, buildings, and equipment that are offered, for a “Presidential archival depository.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

PRESIDENT HARRY S TRUMAN HARRY S TRUMAN

1956

April 21, Saturday: Former President Harry S Truman attended the wedding of his daughter Mary Margaret Truman with E. Clifton Daniel, Jr., newspaperman, at Trinity Episcopal Church, Independence, Missouri (grandsons would be born in 1957, 1959, 1963, and 1966).

May 11, Friday-July 3, Tuesday: Former President Harry S Truman and Bess Truman toured historical sites in Europe, meeting with a number of European potentates such as Winston Churchill and Pope Pius XII.

June 20, Wednesday: Former President Harry S Truman received an honorary degree from Oxford University.

August: John von Neumann was informed that he had terminal cancer. He would find this information difficult to deal with as he could not understand why a superior consciousness such as his would have to cease.

Britain’s initial commercial-electric-power-generating nuclear reactor, Calder Hall Unit 1 on the coast at Seascale, Cumbria, came online.

Former President Harry S Truman announced support for Governor Averell Harriman for the Democratic party’s nominee for the presidency (after the party’s national convention he would campaign on behalf of nominee Adlai Stevenson).

December: On St. Helena, Ovenstone’s fish factory opened (during November 1957 it would close).

Former President Harry S Truman signed an agreement with the National American Newspaper Alliance to write a series of articles for publication in newspapers around the country (the initial such contribution would appear during January 1957).

George Hendrick’s “The Influence of Thoreau’s ‘Civil Disobedience’ on Gandhi’s Satyagraha,” in The New England Quarterly, Volume 29, Number 4. READ THE FULL TEXT HDT WHAT? INDEX

HARRY S TRUMAN PRESIDENT HARRY S TRUMAN

1957

February: Former President Harry S Truman was interviewed by Edward R. Murrow of CBS for a “See It Now” program that would be aired one year later.

Edward Teller proposed that we either explode an atomic bomb in space some distance from the lunar surface in order to observe any fluorescence this might induce in the lunar surface, or explode one directly on the surface to observe what kind of disturbance this might cause.

July 5, Friday: Former President Harry S Truman presided over the initial meeting of the Board of Directors of the Harry S Truman Institute for National and International Affairs.

July 6, Saturday: Former President Harry S Truman participated in the dedication of the Harry S Truman Library in Independence, Missouri (this was the 2d presidential library to become part of the National Archives and Records Service). HDT WHAT? INDEX

PRESIDENT HARRY S TRUMAN HARRY S TRUMAN

1958

June: A coordinated command structure was created by the Communists of the Mekong Delta of South Vietnam and 37 armed companies began to organize themselves there.

With wife Bess and the Samuel Rosenmans, Former President Harry S Truman made his 2d trip to Europe in this postpresidential period. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HARRY S TRUMAN PRESIDENT HARRY S TRUMAN

1959

April 19, Saturday: Former President Harry S Truman participated in the dedication of his birthplace home in Lamar, Missouri, that had been purchased and restored by the United Auto Workers and then accepted by the state as a gift.

September 3, Thursday: Former President Harry S Truman extended the facilities of the Truman Library to comedian Jack Benny in the filming of an episode of the Benny TV program (this would be telecast on October 19th). HDT WHAT? INDEX

PRESIDENT HARRY S TRUMAN HARRY S TRUMAN

1960

Charles Ephraim Burchfield completed work on a painting that he had begun in 1949 in which he had been attempting, fantastically, to merge the four seasons of the year:

Former President Harry S Truman published MR. CITIZEN, a book about his postpresidential experiences.

August 20, Saturday: Former President Harry S Truman, who had been supporting the Presidential candidacy of Stuart Symington, held a press conference to announce his decision to support Senator John F. Kennedy (who had won the nomination at the Democratic party’s national convention).

October 8, Saturday-November 4, Friday: Former President Harry S Truman spoke across the nation on behalf of the Democratic candidate for President, Senator John F. Kennedy. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HARRY S TRUMAN PRESIDENT HARRY S TRUMAN

1961

January 20, Saturday: The Chinese government announced that the “Great Leap Forward” in industrial output needed for the time being to be put aside in favor of greater agricultural production. Food shortages and famine were to be anticipated.

The Museu Villa-Lobos opened in Rio de Janeiro.

Gloria for soprano, chorus and orchestra by Francis Poulenc was performed for the initial time, in Boston.

John Fitzgerald Kennedy replaced Dwight David Eisenhower as President of the United States of America and declared that “...we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, to insure the survival and the success of liberty.” Privately, outgoing President Dwight David Eisenhower told him he thought “you’re going to have to send troops” to Southeast Asia. This new Kennedy administration was youthfully inexperienced in matters relating to the long-drawn-out conflict of Southeast Asia. When, during this month, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev pledged his support for “wars of national liberation” throughout the world, this statement encouraged the followers of Ho Chi Minh to escalate their struggle to unify their nation.

With wife Bess and daughter Margaret, Former President Harry S Truman was a guest in the White House on inauguration day — their first visit there in eight years.

Over the next several years Kennedy’s Secretary of Defense, 44-year-old Robert Strange McNamara from the world of commerce, along with his civilian planners recruited largely from the academic community, a bunch of whiz kids still wet behind the ears and marked by their complete infatuation with themselves, would play a HDT WHAT? INDEX

PRESIDENT HARRY S TRUMAN HARRY S TRUMAN

crucial role in determining the White House strategy for managing the conflict in Vietnam. Under their leadership the United States would be waging a limited war with the intention of forcing a political settlement, but unfortunately the US would have as its adversary an enemy with no interest whatever in any partial settlement of the issues at hand, as stated by Ho Chi Minh, “...whatever the sacrifices, however long the struggle...until Vietnam is fully independent and reunified.”

Meanwhile, back home in the land of the free and the home of the brave, this would be the year of the Young Freedom riders, lead by the World War II pacifist James Farmer who had been one of the founders of CORE. After a bus would be burned in Alabama, and after riders would be attacked in Birmingham and would spend 40-60 days in jail in Jackson, Mississippi, our Interstate Commerce Commission would ban racial segregation on buses and trains.

March 9, Wednesday: Former President Harry S Truman participated in the 20th anniversary reunion of his wartime Senate investigating committee.

June: Former President Harry S Truman signed with Talent Associates-Paramount, Ltd. for a TV series on his presidency (these rights would be purchased later by Screen Gems, Inc.). The series title was to be DECISION: THE CONFLICTS OF HARRY S TRUMAN and the initial one of the 26 half-hour episodes would be telecast during November 1964. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HARRY S TRUMAN PRESIDENT HARRY S TRUMAN

November 10, Thursday: Five battalions of paratroopers began a coup against the government of Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam.

When a summit of communist party leaders from 81 countries convened in Beijing, Chairman Mao Tsetung did not attend.

At a segregated lunch counter in Nashville, Black civil disobedience sit-in demonstrators were sprayed with water, powder, and insecticide.

A federal judge prohibited implementation of school segregation laws in Louisiana. The New Orleans School Board approved a plan to admit 5 black children to white schools.

Former President Harry S Truman hosted former President Dwight David Eisenhower on the latter’s initial visit to the Truman Library. (Presumably they had an opportunity to discuss what had happened on January 20, 1953, when tradition had it that the two Presidents were to visit inside the White House and then ride together to the inauguration ceremony, but Eisenhower had remained for a long time in his limousine in the driveway of the White House, fuming, reluctant to come inside and greet Truman and unsure that he could force himself to ride next to him in the official open Lincoln limousine, while Harry and Bess were waiting for Dwight and Mamie to join them in the Red Room for coffee.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

PRESIDENT HARRY S TRUMAN HARRY S TRUMAN

1961

November 18, Saturday: Former President Harry S Truman joined President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, former President Dwight David Eisenhower, and Vice-President Lyndon Baines Johnson in attending funeral services in Bonham, Texas for former House Speaker Sam Rayburn. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HARRY S TRUMAN PRESIDENT HARRY S TRUMAN

1962

August 10, Friday: Former President Harry S Truman participated in the dedication of the Herbert Hoover Library in West Branch, Iowa. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PRESIDENT HARRY S TRUMAN HARRY S TRUMAN

1963

May 29, Wednesday: A windstorm over the past two days in East Pakistan (Bangladesh) killed 22,000 people.

Businesses in Charlotte, North Carolina agreed to desegregate.

Virtutes, a cycle of nine songs and melodramas for speaker, chorus and players by Alexander Goehr to words of Humphreys after the Bible, was performed for the initial time, at King Edward’s School, Whitley, Surrey.

Three Pieces for orchestra by Ross Lee Finney was performed for the initial time, in McMillin Theater of Columbia University.

A 12-foot bronze statue of Harry S Truman, unveiled in Athens, described the former president as one of Greece’s “greatest benefactors.” (In the subsequent half century this statue has been regularly bombed, toppled, and splattered with paint during various protests.)

June: June: An endowed Harry S Truman Chair in American History was established at Westminster College, Fulton, Missouri.45

November 25, Monday: As the nation watched on television, the casket of John Fitzgerald Kennedy was positioned at Arlington National Cemetery. The ceremonies were attended by dignitaries from 92 countries, including heads of state and government.

November 26, Tuesday: After attending the funeral of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Former President Harry S Truman and Former President Dwight David Eisenhower effected for media purposes a “reconciliation.”

45. Not bad, for a guy whose only college experience was a few classes at a business school! HDT WHAT? INDEX

PRESIDENT HARRY S TRUMAN HARRY S TRUMAN

1964

March 13, Friday: Former President Harry S Truman had been attending the funeral of King Paul I in Athens, Greece as the representative of President Lyndon Baines Johnson.

When Kitty Genovese was murdered in New York, the press would have a field day fabricating a crowdpleasing/troubling media message that 38 witnesses might have come to her rescue but had instead ignored her in her plight.

Our national birthday, Saturday the 4th of July: Shortly after former President Harry S Truman addressed a crowd of a couple of hundred citizens at the Truman Presidential Library in Independence, Missouri, black citizens from the Congress of Racial Equality organization began their own protest event.

In Prescott, Arizona, for the annual Frontier Days Rodeo parade, Senator Barry Goldwater rode a horse. CELEBRATING OUR B-DAY HDT WHAT? INDEX

PRESIDENT HARRY S TRUMAN HARRY S TRUMAN

1965

March: Former President Harry S Truman received award as “The Outstanding Television Personality of the Year” from the American Cinema Editors Association.

Former President Truman was not a person known for changing his mind about much of anything, and there is no reason to suspect that he no longer harbored the sympathy that all draft dodgers belonged in prison as criminals all the time. However, during this year the US law of military conscription was being amplified in the cases “US v. Seeger 380 US 163” and “380 US 163.” US v. Seeger had been heard in October 1964 and during this month the decision was announced — before the Vietnam War was expanded and the draft became a source of strain and division.

In this Seeger case, the central question was whether the claims of a conscientious objector could be recognized even if said Difficult Person didn’t believe in a Higher Being as required by law, as for instance in the case of an agnostic member of the Religious Society of Friends who was an adherent of the Quaker Peace Testimony.

OHNE MICH!

THE QUAKER PEACE TESTIMONY

The administration suggested that such people simply could not be recognized but Seeger was arguing that theology was irrelevant and his claim for objector status should not be denied so long as his religious beliefs led him sincerely to object to participation in all wars — and the Supremes, taking notice of the fact that eminent theologians of the day were unsure what role a Supreme Being played in religious belief and doctrine, agreed with him. It would be enough, the justices would hold in this case, “that the beliefs which prompted [Seeger’s] objection occupy the same place in his life as the belief in a traditional deity holds in the lives of his friends, the Quakers.” MILITARY CONSCRIPTION HDT WHAT? INDEX

PRESIDENT HARRY S TRUMAN HARRY S TRUMAN

May 8, Saturday: Former President Harry S Truman became the initial former president to address the federal Senate while it was in formal session (the body was honoring him on his 80th birthday).

June 25, Friday: Former President Harry S Truman received from the South Korean ambassador to the United States his republic’s highest honor, the “Order of Merit for the National Foundation Joongjang.”

July 8, Thursday: Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge was reappointed as US ambassador to South Vietnam.

Former President Harry S Truman’s brother Vivian died.

July 30, Friday: Demonstrators attacked the United States consulate in Medan, Indonesia.

President Lyndon Baines Johnson signed Medicare into law in Independence, Missouri at the library of and in the presence of the initial president to propose this sort of legislation, Harry S Truman. The measure provided health care for the elderly. Truman described this as a “profound personal experience for me.” (During January 1966, Mr. and Mrs. Truman would be assigned Medicare registration cards numbers 1 and 2.)

The initial public performance of Ballade of London Nights for piano by John Ireland took place over the airwaves of the BBC Third Programme, 35 years after it had been composed. This was a recording, made the previous June 6th.

Orchestral and Electronic Exchanges for orchestra and synthesized sound by Charles Wuorinen was performed for the initial time, in Lincoln Center, New York.

The suite The Golden Broom and the Green Apple for jazz rhythm section and orchestra by Duke Ellington was performed for the initial time, in Philharmonic Hall, New York. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PRESIDENT HARRY S TRUMAN HARRY S TRUMAN

1966

January 20, Thursday: Former President Harry S Truman announced the founding of the Harry S Truman Center for the Advancement of Peace, which was to be constructed in Jerusalem.

Our national birthday, Monday the 4th of July: At the 8th annual 4th-of-July celebration on the Truman Library grounds, former president Harry S Truman made a final appearance as a speaker (he was simply getting too old for the trips to his office there).

In Salem, North Carolina, they re-enacted the celebration that had occurred there in 1783.

At Knott’s Berry Farm in Buena Park, California, an exact reconstruction of the Independence Hall in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania opened to the public.

President Lyndon Johnson signed the Freedom of Information Act. President Johnson signed the Freedom of Information Act. FBI records would eventually become subject to disclosure under this Act — however, the government interpretation of the Act would eventually come to be that it covered only paper records, and thus the Act would be evadable simply by converting such records into one or another electronic form. CELEBRATING OUR B-DAY HDT WHAT? INDEX

PRESIDENT HARRY S TRUMAN HARRY S TRUMAN

1968

October 12, Saturday: The Republic of Equatorial Guinea, under President Francisco Macias Nguema, was declared independent of Spain.

The Games of the Nineteenth Olympiad of the Modern Era opened in Mexico City.

Former President Harry S Truman looked on as President Lyndon Baines Johnson signed a bill, in the Truman home, designating October 24th, 1968 as U.N. Day. The president also issued a proclamation noting Truman’s part in having brought the United Nations organization into being in 1945. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PRESIDENT HARRY S TRUMAN HARRY S TRUMAN

1969

March 21, Friday: Former President Harry S Truman was visited by President Richard M. Nixon and Mrs. Pat Nixon, after which President presented to the Truman Library a Steinway piano that had been in the White House during Truman’s presidency.

Our national birthday, Saturday the 4th of July: Former President Harry S Truman watched the parade in his home town of Independence, Missouri. CELEBRATING OUR B-DAY HDT WHAT? INDEX

PRESIDENT HARRY S TRUMAN HARRY S TRUMAN

1971

December 29, Wednesday: With wife Bess Truman, daughter Margaret Truman, and son-in-law E. Clifton Daniel, Former President Harry S Truman toured the Truman Library for the final time and viewed the film “For All the People” — a new motion picture intended for the orientation of museum visitors. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PRESIDENT HARRY S TRUMAN HARRY S TRUMAN

1972

December 26, Tuesday: Agence France-Presse reported that bombing raids on Hanoi were the heaviest of the war. North Vietnam agreed to resume peace negotiations within five days of the cessation of bombing.

Former US President Harry S Truman died in Independence, Missouri at the age of 88. (The body would on December 28th be interred in the courtyard of the Truman Library.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

PRESIDENT HARRY S TRUMAN HARRY S TRUMAN

1982

October 18, Monday: Mrs. Bess Truman died at the age of 97. Funeral services would be held in the Trinity Episcopal Church in Independence on October 21st, after which the body would be interred in the courtyard of the Truman Library. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PRESIDENT HARRY S TRUMAN HARRY S TRUMAN

1994

September 12, Monday: Frank Eugene Corder stole a red-and-white Cessna 150 trainer and made a name for himself by diving it into the White House. The sniper nest on the roof of the Executive Mansion had a maximum of 14 seconds to get off the Stinger missiles that were planned to disintegrate such an aircraft in the air, and failed to get off even one, possibly because the planes they were on the lookout for were substantially higher-tech attack bombers. The plane hit the magnolia tree that had been planted by the slaves of President Andrew Jackson. This graceful tree is the one that is depicted on the back of our $20.00 bill, and the Cessna broke off one shapely limb and damaged the bullet-proof glass of the window of an aide-de-camp’s office on the ground floor:

First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton came out onto the upstairs portico that had been added by President Harry S Truman and leaned over to take a peek (as simulated in red, above, on this snip from the currency) as the dead body of what’s-his-face was being cut out of the wreckage.

AFA press release. A Veteran-Congressman blasted the Enola Gay exhibit: “In 1943, I left the United States for the Pacific theater as an 18-year-old Army Air Force recruit prepared to defend my country against one of the most brutal aggressors of our time. Fifty years later, I find myself again defending our country from another HDT WHAT? INDEX

PRESIDENT HARRY S TRUMAN HARRY S TRUMAN

surprise attack, this time from American scholars attempting to rewrite history.” WORLD WAR II

“MAGISTERIAL HISTORY” IS FANTASIZING: HISTORY IS CHRONOLOGY

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Harry S Truman HDT WHAT? INDEX

PRESIDENT HARRY S TRUMAN HARRY S TRUMAN

COPYRIGHT NOTICE: In addition to the property of others, such as extensive quotations and reproductions of images, this “read-only” computer file contains a great deal of special work product of Austin Meredith, copyright 2015. Access to these interim materials will eventually be offered for a fee in order to recoup some of the costs of preparation. My hypercontext button invention which, instead of creating a hypertext leap through hyperspace —resulting in navigation problems— allows for an utter alteration of the context within which one is experiencing a specific content already being viewed, is claimed as proprietary to Austin Meredith — and therefore freely available for use by all. Limited permission to copy such files, or any material from such files, must be obtained in advance in writing from the “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project, 833 Berkeley St., Durham NC 27705. Please contact the project at .

“It’s all now you see. Yesterday won’t be over until tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago.” – Remark by character “Garin Stevens” in William Faulkner’s INTRUDER IN THE DUST

Prepared: April 7, 2015 HDT WHAT? INDEX

PRESIDENT HARRY S TRUMAN HARRY S TRUMAN

ARRGH AUTOMATED RESEARCH REPORT

GENERATION HOTLINE

This stuff presumably looks to you as if it were generated by a human. Such is not the case. Instead, someone has requested that we pull it out of the hat of a pirate who has grown out of the shoulder of our pet parrot “Laura” (as above). What these chronological lists are: they are research reports compiled by ARRGH algorithms out of a database of modules which we term the Kouroo Contexture (this is data mining). To respond to such a request for information we merely push a button. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PRESIDENT HARRY S TRUMAN HARRY S TRUMAN

Commonly, the first output of the algorithm has obvious deficiencies and we need to go back into the modules stored in the contexture and do a minor amount of tweaking, and then we need to punch that button again and recompile the chronology — but there is nothing here that remotely resembles the ordinary “writerly” process you know and love. As the contents of this originating contexture improve, and as the programming improves, and as funding becomes available (to date no funding whatever has been needed in the creation of this facility, the entire operation being run out of pocket change) we expect a diminished need to do such tweaking and recompiling, and we fully expect to achieve a simulation of a generous and untiring robotic research librarian. Onward and upward in this brave new world.

First come first serve. There is no charge. Place requests with . Arrgh.