Harry Truman: “You’ve got to make up your mind and you’ve got to act. If you don’t make up your mind and you don’t act there’s never any result. It’s much better to make a wrong decision than no decision because that can always be corrected by another decision.” — David Susskind Show “Open End” 1961 (now on Amazon Prime Video)
According to biographer Merle Miller, Truman called Nixon a “shifty-eyed goddamn liar.” Imagine what he’d say about Trump?
“I don’t believe anybody who hasn’t learned the difference between right and wrong by the time they are 30 will ever learn it.” – – Harry Truman
a book I really hated to see end. it was a fascinating glimpse into the time, the man and those around him. one wanted to continue the conversations and find out more.
You need a mind (brain) to make decisions with. If the brain case contains a shriveled mass of cells and sinew attacked by bacteria and messed with by the causes of Alzheimer’s and dementia, then it can not make real decisions. It only reacts like a spoiled four year old child.
So sorry to hear about John Lewis’ cancer diagnosis. Tributes and well wishes from Obama, Clinton’s, Pelosi, Biden, Warren, Buttigieg… and crickets from SFB and other repug leaders. Despicable assholes. I hope among Lewis’ accomplishments will be his vote to impeach the AHIC.
Craig and any of our other writers, this might be of interest:
Report for America
Their goal is to create a non-profit news source to replace all the local newspapers being lost nationwide. It’s well worth reading and possibly a new employment direction for reporters.
Deadline to apply : January 31.
from 12/30/19 issue of The New Yorker: “The Cartoon Department Coup”
[…]
It is true, though, that the most popular cocktail-party confession that I, the cartoon editor, solemnly receive and usually absolve is that someone “reads” The New Yorker only for the cartoons. Or that he or she always reads the cartoons first. (This is just before the penitent pivots to a harangue about the injustice of never having won the caption contest.) Apparently, The New Yorker also prints a bunch of bummer facts about corruption and oppression and imminent eco-apocalypse, but this week it just so happens that all the people in charge of that sort of thing have gone away for the holidays.
Yes, you read that correctly. (Look at you—still bothering with all these words!) Every last one of the serious adult types at this publication is off mulling some wine, trimming a tree, roasting a chestnut, taking in a matinée of “Little Women,” lighting a candle, putting out a candle-related fire, or catching up on back issues of verbose periodicals. And who happened to be napping under a desk when the office was being securely locked up for the winter break? You guessed it—the Cartoon Department.
Finding ourselves trapped in here, sans H.V.A.C. but avec the boss’s filing-cabinet Scotch (the good stuff), we banged on the doors and called for help, then collapsed onto the floor, weeping and rending our clothes. Later, we watched “Risky Business,” to get inspiration for cat’s-away high jinks, and skated around the Fact-Checking Department in our socks. Finally, we decided to give the cocktail-party people what they deserve: a cartoon-takeover issue.
To that end, we’ve thumbed through the archives, rummaged around in editors’ waste bins, and peered into the space behind my desk where important things tend to fall, and we’ve pasted together something resembling a magazine. It includes such treasures as a 1997 piece by John Updike on his youthful aspirations to be a gag cartoonist (judge for yourselves); cartoon-inflected fiction and poetry; cartoons about cartooning; musings on early animation; and comics by Liana Finck, Emily Flake, Ebony Flowers, and Emma Hunsinger. Ever wanted to know what Larry David’s or Mindy Kaling’s or Terry Gross’s or Ta-Nehisi Coates’s favorite cartoon is? We’ve got you covered. Been craving a Profile of that patron saint of neurotic geniuses, Roz Chast? Read on. There’s some old stuff and some new stuff, all aimed at keeping you smiling into the New Year, which we have on good authority will be much funnier than its predecessor.
Nine and a half decades ago, Ross had this to say about the publication he was planning: “It will hate bunk.” Of late, bunk has irrefutably been on the rise; the antidote, now as then, is humor. Besides, who couldn’t use a laugh break from this whiplash-inducing carnival ride of a news cycle?
So, as you settle in for fireside holiday rants from your bunky uncle, we hope you enjoy this issue. (Tip: in its printed form, it can be rolled up and used as a low-impact weapon.) The ratio of pictures to words should satisfy even the most literacy-averse. Oh, and please send a locksmith, or at least a pizza.
that issue was one of the nicest surprises to arrive in the holiday mail. even more surprising was it’s lack of ads. well, almost lack if you don’t count the 2 inhouse ones and I think one or more sneaked in on back page. nothing like the usual first third of whole mag taken up by the corporate greedy.
viva la visuales!
Happy Birthday to Clive Bunker [Jethro Tull] 73
Tull – one of my favorites. In fact I downloaded Jethro Tull Essentials over the holidays. I gotta hand it to Apple Music on this series of downloads – they have this “Essentials” series for a huge range of artists that really do get the best of the best – pair it with the Deep Cuts series and you get just about everything you could want to listen to from a pop or rock artist.
And here’s more on Bishop Bransfield – the high living, hard drinking, spendthrift defrocked Bishop of West Virginia. Funny how he has ties to the Republican Congressman of four district.
Hmmm, coincidence? I don’t believe in coincidence.
Harry Truman… sigh… that’s when Americans actually gave a damn about this country… now it seems quaint.
I know we made fun of millennials yesterday… but from what I’ve seen… they have a more “let’s stick together” mindset than that “rugged individualism” one. That later sense about self made this country… but it no longer serves us well, IMO.
ps… yes everything outside is encased in ice… but it’s not as bad as 10 years ago. No power outages so far…. let’s keep it that way. The rain has changed over to snow…. which means… well… it ain’t ice!
Ice storms are deadly beauty. So destructive yet when the sun comes out you live in a sparkling magical crystal world. Makes you forget the night before as you watched flashes hellish green light from the transformers across the neighborhood as they shorted out.
Walk carefully Renee
Jack
Isn’t it early in the election season to drag out the corpse of Harry Truman and stand him in the corner? I guess it is like Christmas, the season just keeps getting longer.
Jack
Harry Truman. A man who went to and knew war. A father that smacked the Times when they dissed his daughter’s music making. A politician who set Gov Dewey on his butt. A leader, left in the dark by FDR, picked-up the pieces and finished the war against Japan. Then he set out to make automobiles instead of artillery pieces.
When transferred to Ft Leavenworth in 1980, our first weekend day trip was to Independence, Missouri to explore where Truman used to walk. The town felt empty as did the site of his mother-in-law’s house.
Flatus
As happened in a lot of small cities
That part of town had emptied out at that time and moved out east and along the interstate. Part of the times, the new suburbs were where it was at. In the last 10 years the neighborhood has revived, but still not to it’s former upper middleclass status. At that time my inlaws lived 1 block west and 1 block to the north.
Jack
As to Truman dealing with the current situation.
No matter how many honesty quotes you find, Truman cut his political teeth in Pendergast Kansas City. So I suspect he could handle himself
He cultivated his honest reputation and thrived politically by it. It was handy for Boss Tom As he was able to fill an important position with a friend instead of an enemy even if he got nothing out of it except breathing space from the pursuers.
Truman wanted to become governor but that would have disrupted Boss Toms plans. So Boss Tom offered him a senate seat that got him out of Missouri and Tom’s business.
Jack
Jack, thanks for the added context. I often wish that I could have been present when Truman had his ‘chat’ with MacArthur on Wake Island, a place palpable with history (I’ve been their several times, long ago even when Pan-Am ran a snack bar out of a Quonset hut.)
The first atomic bomb was an unnecessary experiment … It was a mistake to ever drop it … [the scientists] had this toy and they wanted to try it out, so they dropped it
— Fleet Admiral William Halsey Jr., 1946
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debate_over_the_atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_and_Nagasaki
^from that wiki, the whole article is a good read
I don’t know but had Truman waited to hear all that a-bomb debate at least 100,000 Americans would have had to die in a land invasion.
That’s post-war propaganda. A cursory reading of that wiki shows Truman authorized the bombings against the counsel of some of that generation’s most respected military leaders, so maybe Truman was more like Trump than one might think.
Truman’s quote up top reads like an admission of guilt, not to mention being terrible advice. A bad decision isn’t better than no decision.
The McArthur firing was very bold at the time. Seems obvious now. I think as the years go by and McArthur’s self promotion fades you have to wonder why he even achieved the heights he did. Some of the decisions and blunders he did at the beginning of the war should have got him fired. I suspect he was a better political general than field general, also, given the admirals who lost their jobs over Pearl Harbor I guess you can’t fire everybody and all the good generals wanted to be in Europe where all the action was.
Jack
my favorite Truman biography is by David McCullough
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000FC0VVQ/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1
I thin historically speaking he has gotten a lot of inaccurate coverge. He was not a haberdasher despite having once owned an interest in a men’s shop, He was a lot more complicated then people assumed.
At times during my career, I’ve been intimately involved with nuclear weapons and their targeting. I’m totally convinced that our use of nuclear weapons over Japan was a proper decision. And our continuing deployment of nuclear weapons over the next 75-years has saved the world from cataclysmic first-use of such weapons by others; mutually assured destruction has been a viable international policy.
Bink, I’ve always wondered if those military leaders favoring a land invasion of Japan were more interested in their own glory than the massive loss of our soldiers it would have meant.
Apparently, they didn’t favor a land invasion: more propaganda- they favored blockades and economic strangulation.
Soviets had already begun the process of invasion, so i’d imagine the U.S. didn’t want to lose the race to Tokyo like they did Berlin.
Hey, speaking of WWII, i wonder why American forces storming Normandy on D-Day weren’t given more (or any?) air support. Maybe an a-bomb on that beach would have prevented more American casualties than the ones over Hiroshima and Nagasaki did.
All Monday morning quarterbacking about whether Truman’s decision was right or wrong and what would have happened had he decided to continue with a conventional war with Japan is influenced by post war propaganda. I am sure that someone has made an accurate assessment of what would have occurred had Truman ignored the “bomb ’em” proponents and proceeded to try and slog it out conventionally, but in reality, no one knows. It was a terrible responsibility to have to shoulder for Truman – and for Canada and Britain under the Quebec Agreement of 1943, and dropping bombs with the then somewhat unknown destructive power on Japan was I am certain championed by some and opposed by some of the most well respected military command members of the day. I never heard any of the adults from my father’s generation, virtually all of whom (except my Uncle Gene – USAF Lt. Col.) by the way supported our involvement in Vietnam, criticize Truman or his decision to drop the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I won’t second guess Truman on that decision. It ended WWII and from a personal perspective allowed my father to return from the war before he got killed by a Japanese bullet, and for that I applaud Truman.
Bink, that is not the case. I suggest you read up on Operation Downfall, the planned invasion of the Islands of Kyushu and Japan, which was abandoned after Japan surrendered. Some may have favored a blockade and economic strangulation – in fact after 1943 the Navy, exemplified by Halsey, took the position that a blockade and bombing would do the trick but the Army argued to the contrary, that a land invasion would be necessary to effect a timely end to the war with Japan (pursuant to the Quebec agreement) after Germany surrendered. The Army’s approach prevailed. Didn’t matter in the end.
And as for Normandy, that would have been quite the trick since the first successful nuclear device test explosion occurred thirteen months after the Normandy invasion.
I attended a lecture by a Japanese World War II scholar many years ago and was surprised to hear him say that there is less debate in Japan about the atomic bomb decision than there is in America. He maintained that most Japanese understood their evil regime would never have gone away without the bombs, and they believe their country was better off in the long run. Just one scholar’s opinion.
If we followed the route of the “no bomb dropped” the best we would get is a WWI Germany type situation. Where Japan rebuilds, and does it all over again. This time it is Pearl Harbor with nuclear weapons. Almost every defense of the “no drop” relies on the belief that conventional bombing can win wars. It never has and probably never will.
The only bombing campaign that worked were the 2 atomic bomb dropped on Japan.
They worked because they shocked the Japanese elites. They went “oh fuck, they could kill me” not just a bunch of draftees or lower class civilians as had been the case so far. The second bomb was necessary to drive home the point, your only option is to surrender or by the end of the month there will be no Japanese people. They believed this because it is what they would have done. You have to remember the Japanese in charge were not nice people, look at what they did to China, look at what they did to Korea, look at what they did to our troops in the Philippines. Every support for the “no bomb dropped” position relies on these people behaving in a rational manner and all the evidence point the other way.
And like Pogo said and from my point of view. If our troops would have had to invade Japan, my father in law would have been in with the first landing party. He survive one in the Philippines but Japan would have been different. As a result there would have been no Mrs Jack and that would have been a loss to the world and me.
Jack
Yes, i remember being told throughout my childhood by the WWII generation how irrational and evil Japanese people were, except they never called them “Japanese people”. Made me kinda racist for a while.
Thanks for the “Operation Downfall” link, Pogo- also an interesting read. Wikipedia is such an amazing resource, i need to donate, today.
Facts is facts, Bink
Name calling doesn’t change them.
Jack
I’ve always believed the main reason Truman has always been vilified by the American left is because when Roosevelt replaced Wallace with Truman they lost their only chance to put one of theirs in the White house. Not that they ever had a chance.
Jack
This has all got me thinking about George Marshall. One of the greats. Too modest perhaps. Let Eisenhower take credit he actually deserved. Credit to Truman for giving him his due for the Marshall Plan. No precedent in history for a victorious nation rebuilding its former enemies.
Yes, we must be polite. Please, Hirohito, have your soldiers return my sister-in-law whom they borrowed but never returned.
vilified by the left? never heard that, jack. always thought it was the right that hated harry because he integrated the military, was on the side of unions and was for that big bug-a-boo of theirs “socialized medicine.” the eastern elite hated him because they hated anyone who wasn’t one of them. so with all sides hating him, he must have been doing something right.
BTW, mother and daddy loved him. ergo I did too.
Have yet to meet an evil and/or irrational Japanese person, Jack. Maybe they’re just instinctively nice to “leftists”.
Does questioning the largest single-day extermination of human beings in recorded history make me a “Leftist”, i wonder? Hmm…
“Snot is running down his nose.” Thanks for the ear worm, Jamie.
Andrew Yang said he would look at pardoning Trumpsky, because we shouldn’t get into the habit of punishing political rivals. Ummm, he brought it on himself. MATH = Make Andrew Think Harder
BB – I’m not sure if it’s dementia, because Trumpsky has always been a reactive, spoiled, toddler.
ahh yes, we must be more civilized about our relationships and when killing millions of people always do it the genteel way and only murder them a few hundred thousand at a time instead
“C-h-e-e-s-e-a-n-d-o-n-i-o-n-s, oh no.” RIP Neil Innes Do a cup of tea in honor of the passing of a Ruttle.
Well, I see Bink surrendered.
Pat,
just the “Harry was a warmonger” bunch. He managed to piss off a bunch of others too. I think his approval rating when he got on that train with Bess for the trip home was somewhere in the low 30’s.
I did find all the 1950 quotes from all the Generals in the Wiki link amusing. Was puzzled at first, as they didn’t provide that advice back in the day. then it occurred to me, Election coming up and every WWII general out there was running for president. Looks like Ike beat them all.
Jack
Lol, Jack, don’t confuse de-escalation with capitulation. None of anyone’s arguments here strike me as authoritative or convincing from my perspective, they’re just opinions like mine.
I’m not saying Truman was right or wrong but i think it’s worth discussing, and apparently so do you all!
bink, you’re more for spreading the mass killing out? not the 280,000 in one fell swoop but parceled out like only a trainload or gas chamber full at a time ’til you reach 6 million
i think CC would call that a “strawman argument”, patd
That’s cool that you value your unsourced opinion more than a sourced reference article, Jack, you’re really crushing me in this debate.
I’m sorry, though, people, what you all support retrospectively as a “good decision” no one has ever made again, since, not even the most evil despots of the world’s most dangerous regimes, and let’s hope that remains true, right?
Bink
It was observations on your sources. From what I saw one side laid an argument out with facts and the other one laid out one based on conjecture. All I did was point out a couple of flaws. You want to try to shore up the flaws have at it.
But for me your switch to name calling basically means you surrendered.
BTW, until I made the “you surrendered” comment above all of my comments were directed at the wiki argument and it’s obvious historical backers. You seem to have taken some of them personally. So It is time to stop on my part and let it go.
Jack
The whole argument is conjecture and no, i didn’t take anything personally, all in good fun.
Another reason to stop is I still have to get that year end grant report filled by the end of the day.
While, searching through my files searching for the garden stuff we did this year I discovered the link to my old garden website. I created it in 2008 and had’t posted on it in several years. I thought I had lost it. Kind of fun to walk down memory lane.
OK back to work
It was a matter of fate that some serious USA hell was going to rain down upon the Japanese after Pearl Harbor. Maybe call it manifest destiny or something.
Lefty
”Another reason to stop is I still have to get that year end grant report filled by the end of the day.”
Thanks for all of that awesome work you do.
Bink
I have to disagree about the quote. All choices have the negative that whichever way you go, you are giving up the other option. You can look back on the whole of your life, decisions made and their result. There are very few times when you look back and ask what would have been different that don’t result in losses of things you would have missed otherwise. I tried it once and every single time however bad the original decision might have been, the loss of the ensuing results could well have been worse.
If you bat 300 in baseball, they put you in the Hall of Fame.
Although more of a discussion than a moral decision today, the bombing of Japan means much to me. My father-in-law was in Germany with orders to deploy to the Pacific for the invasion of Japan. They knew from what happened during the island hopping and Okinawa that any invasion was going to be a blood bath. For everyone.
I was frozen for a thirteen month tour of duty in a combat zone several times, it was to go to Vietnam. All my orders to Germany were given to others because I was frozen. Frozen means you have been selected by a command and no other command can get you until you are released. I was in the last flights of the Air Force trained to go to Vietnam, therefore a good choice to go. Just as my father-in-law looked at his transfer to the invasion of Japan, I looked at the U.S. going back to Vietnam in late nineteen seventy-five or early nineteen seventy-six. It was going to be a blood bath.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2015/08/06/how-the-hiroshima-bombing-is-taught-around-the-world/
I consider this discussion to be one of the better ones, model wise, on the blog. Respectful disagreement is how I’d characterize it.
I gotta say that from what I saw from the hundreds of photos taken in the wake of the fighting on the islands of the south pacific between the Allies and Japanese by the man who was a photojournalist during the war (an Army photographer I believe) lived 3 doors down from me where I grew up, I’d have to say the Japanese army had little regard for human lives or living conditions of their prisoners. The only word that comes close to adequately describing what he documented is gruesome. He would occasionally let us kids look through the photos he kept after the war, and it was fascinating in a very morbid kind of way. I have no way of knowing whether the Joint Chiefs’ estimate of 250,000 American casualties in a land attack on Japan was anywhere near a good estimate, but in a war, choosing a more or less sure thing to result in their dead as opposed to our dead and/or shortening rather than lengthening the war would be the leadership decision that should be made almost every time. Intelligence and estimates are never exactly correct so it involves a gamble every time – and whether that gamble turns out to be right or wrong can’t be known is a matter of debate and speculation. Bad decision to have to make.
Moving on – James Comey has an interesting op-ed piece in Wapo today. about being the target of SFB’s ire. A small taste of it.
Ya gotta like this guy whether you agree with him or not.
New York Times article on all the people reliving “The West Wing” on Netflix
They Can’t Get Enough of The West Wing
I have never sought to read a Trump tweet. I don’t feel a bit deprived.
I’m w/Mr Flatus on that.
The MSM covers twit’s tweets. There’s no way to avoid them entirely.
Me three. XR, my best to the Gophers Wednesday. It would be difficult to express my dislike of Auburn. Oh, and you, me and Flatus are in the ”Fuck Trump’s Tweets Club”. Anyone else care to join?
Thank you Mr Pogo.
I admit that I occasionally see trump tweets here.
Good luck to the Tide. They might need a lot of it against the Badgers. They’re tougher than they look.
Let’s hope that there are no injuries to the members of your, Ms Cracker’s, or my teams.
the tweet collection
think of future students assigned to read and report on various years from the library files of presidential papers.
no need for cliff notes, outlines or long nights researching.
NEW THREAD