Obama to make no apology for Truman's decision

The White House has made it clear President Obama has no intention of offering an apology for dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima at the end of World War II, but the complex legacy of Harry Truman’s decision remains contentious seven decades later.

“This is obviously very historically significant. The dropping of the atomic bomb was one of the major events of the 20th century,” said Kurt Graham, director of the Truman Library in Independence.

Obama is on an extended trip to Asia, and he stops in Hiroshima on Friday. On Wednesday, he said he plans to honor all of those killed in the war and push for a world without nuclear weapons.

Graham said the burdens and pressures of the presidency are enormous.

“Presidents make decisions in the context of their own time,” he said.

In the summer of 1945, America was three and a half years into the war – victorious in Europe but now facing projections of hundreds of thousands of casualties, on both sides, if an invasion of Japan was needed, as appeared likely. Some historians and others have argued strongly that Japan was on the verge of collapse.

Truman also knew the toll that the war was taking, often on a mass scale, on civilians and on entire cities. Allied firebombing of Dresden, Germany, in early 1945 took up to 100,000 lives, and the firebombing of Tokyo killed up 135,000. The use of a horrific new weapon, the atomic bomb, also caused mass deaths – up to 146,000 in Hiroshima and up to 80,000 in Nagasaki.

Truman’s decision ended the war, shocked the world and changed the political and military landscape.

“Certainly his decision to drop the bomb tempered his other decisions, including how he handled the Korean War,” Graham said.

The United States has never apologized for the two bombings, and neither has the Truman family. Truman’s eldest grandson, Clifton Truman Daniel, has visited Hiroshima and worked closely with people there on reconciliation efforts. In a moving ceremony last fall, he was on hand as the Truman Library was presented with a paper crane – highly symbolic in Japanese culture – folded by Sadako Sasaki, who was 2 when the Hiroshima bomb fell and who died 10 years later of leukemia, one of the widespread effects of the bomb.

Her brother, Masahiro Sasaki, spoke warmly of Truman that day last fall. He and Daniel have grown to be good friends.

“Certainly the work of reconciliation is of interest to the library,” Graham said.

Graham stressed that the way the country looks at a president today will differ significantly with the view many decades later. That applies to Truman in 1945 and Obama going to Hiroshima today, he said. He noted that Truman at one point went to Mexico – a nation the U.S. had fought a century earlier – and honored the dead of that war.