HARRY S. TRUMAN

Truman had no rich supporters and the radio networks, like most businesses, supported his Republican opponent, Thomas E. Dewey. They charged high rates for a campaign speech. Truman could not afford to pay for the radio speech which convinced most that he could not possibly win.

He had helped with the Truman Campaign of 1948. Truman had no rich supporters and the radio networks, like most businesses, supported his Republican opponent, Thomas E. Dewey. They charged high rates for a campaign speech.

After Harry Truman stated that certain civil rights protests were communist inspired in 1960, his former Secretary of State requested that he restrain himself on this subject. The allegations of a communist conspiracy had arisen from the FBI’s chief, J. Edgar Hoover.

His statement was on the issuance of Executive Order 9981 which outlawed military segregation and granted equal treatment and opportunity to all service members regardless of their race:

Alexander was writing the President to accept her nomination to the Committee on Civil Rights.

The General’s public outburst over Truman’s Executive Order was emblematic of the military’s initial discontent with racial integration. Bradley subsequently apologized for his remarks.

When asked whether a rally in Dallas for President Harry Truman was integrated

This statement was in response to President Harry Truman’s ten-point civil rights proposal. Eastland was clearly implying that in the next presidential election, the South would have to stick together so that they could elect a segregationist Southern candidate.

The Gallup poll at the time showed that 85% of the American public favored use of the atomic bomb.

While attending a meeting in Washington D.C., an Ethiopian diplomat was asked to leave his seat at a meeting for being Black.

In 1922 Harry Truman first sought elected office as a Jackson County judge. Next to his name on the ballot appeared this statement. The “Tom and Joe” referred to were two Catholic political bosses in Missouri. People in Missouri were very much opposed to Catholics being in an elected office. The statement was false and was arranged by the Ku Klux Klan, who opposed Truman for his non-racist stance towards Blacks.

While a Congressman under the Truman administration, Johnson was critical of federal measures to enforce civil rights.

March 4, 1933 was the date that Franklin Delano Roosevelt had assumed the Presidency from Herbert Hoover and used government to combat the Great Depression whereas Hoover would not take any of these steps as the conservative wing of his party and he regarded anything that government did was “creeping socialism”. Historically, it is useful to recall what steps Roosevelt took that were described as socialism. These include Social Security, Federal Deposit Insurance for bank accounts, aid to farmers, the Civilian Conservation Corps, Regulation of the stock market, regulation of banks and many other things that are key elements of modern capitalism which virtually every capitalistic nations has in one form or another. Long after Truman was out of office, the most conservative elements of the Republican Party have accused every Democratic President of “creeping socialism” when they were actually quite opposed to socialism. Even when their career before their presidency was full of criticisms of socialism and policies that are opposite, as in the case of President Obama, the President has been accused of being a socialist. However, it started with Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry S Truman.

Truman had been briefed on the number of Japanese who committed suicide rather than surrender—including civilians—in Saipan, Okinawa, Iwo Jima, and other locations where United States troops had invaded. He and his experts agreed that the Japanese would not surrender unless there was a new dramatic factor that was outside the usual thinking—the atomic bomb. He was proved right about the warning. Not only did the Japanese ignore it, but they did not even surrender after the nuclear devastation at Hiroshima. It took a second bomb dropped on Nagasaki to motivate the surrender. So even a demonstration with all those Japanese casualties did not cause the surrender until it was repeated.

This quotation comes as a major surprise to most people who perceive modern CIA as the MAJOR U.S. spying and covert action organization. It is a marvelous case study of agency “mission creep”.

Germany had some world class physicists. Our scientists, military intelligence people, and political leadership assumed that the Germans were also seeking to develop the Atomic Bomb. Ironically, it turned out that they were not, and what Truman reported in this quotation was untrue (although that was not fully known at the time.) Einstein and several of the scientists who were early pioneers in modern physics were Jewish, and Hitler referred to the study of nuclear fission and fusion as “Jewish Science.” As a result, the German government did not commit the resources to the development of an atomic bomb. Instead, they were betting on the development of the Jet Airplane which they succeeded in deploying against the Allies at the end of the war. But they did not have enough or enough pilots left alive to fly them, and Germany was overrun by the Allied Troops. Prior to Truman’s erroneous report about the German development of an atomic bomb, there had only been one piece of evidence that the Germans were not developing one. An OSS secret agent, Moe Berg, had talked with Werner Heisenberg, at a Swiss scientific conference during the war. He was going to assassinate the greatest of the German physicists if Berg thought he was working on a nuclear device. Berg concluded from his discussions that Heisenberg did not know enough about nuclear fission to have been working on that. Berg did not kill Heisenberg, and reported that he did not think the Germans were developing a bomb as if they were Heisenberg would have been deeply involved. However, the American intelligence people and the American scientists, did not trust Berg’s analysis and conclusion. Berg was not a trained scientist. He was a professional baseball player—the NY Yankee backup catcher to Bill Dickey. He was a college graduate, a brilliant guy and a very fast learner who had studied physics books and papers before his assignment. Berg turned out to have been right, but that was not confirmed until a few years after the war. Truman had relied on an incorrect intelligence estimate when he made this quotation. It was not the first such error of intelligence analysis in American history and it would not be the last.

The second atomic bomb had just been dropped.

Truman had to deal with Stalin for many years. In earlier days he had a much more favorable view of the Russians. See {626410} for his view 22 years earlier.

Intelligence agents tend to prefer covert activities to the less dramatic, non-exciting, activity of gathering and analyzing intelligence. Most national intelligence services tend to enlarge their portfolio to include covert activities regardless of what the national leaders intended. Because of the secrecy, they can often get away with this.