Reflecting on the "foregone conclusion" of Hiroshima
This anniversary debate made us realize that an impassable gap separates the sensibilities of those who remember the war and those who do not.
As a fourteen-year-old boy in 1945, we never would have thought to doubt Truman's judgment. Nor would anyone else that we knew of. We were certain that the bomb should have been dropped to bring an end to the war. Everyone said so. We bore that absolutely clear answer through a good portion of our adult life without thinking much about it.
By chance the question happened to cross our desk in 1978 in an article entitled "Truman and the A-Bomb Decision: The Rhetoric of Incrementalism," by J. M. Williams, then Associate Professor of Communication and Media Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. It appeared in Speaker and Gavel, the publication of Delta Sigma Rho--Tau Kappa Alpha. This is (or was) the National Honorary Forensic Society, of Lawrence, Kansas.
But our interest in the article at the time was not the substantive issue of the bomb; it was the decision-making process itself. As a still-new college president, we had a need to learn more about the strange business of decision-making in a complicated organizational setting. We kept the publication through the years; and during the revisionist discussions surrounding the 50th anniversary, we pulled it out with a renewed interest in the decision itself.
The 1978 article spoke rather directly to the Truman question being rehashed in 1995. Indeed, Williams's special approach to the decision--through argumentative analysis--led to a criticism of Truman very much like that of the 1995 revisionists.
Williams saw Truman in a mode of "passive acquiescence" and "blind allegiance" to Roosevelt's people, who surrounded him when he assumed the office on FDR's death. The Manhattan Project leading up to the making of the bomb reflected "a rhetoric of incrementalism." Uninfluenced by decisive rhetoric from Truman, the "process of incremental decision-making contributed to the creation of an A-bomb policy too formidable to halt." (p. 72)
Williams concluded that "...the use of the bomb flowed out of the momentum of events, out of the locked-in quality of men and institutions who, once committed, saw no way to rearrange their priorities and decision."
The poignancy of Truman's weakness in the face of that momentum came out in The New Yorker article of 31 July 1995, by Murray Sayle. Sayle cited Truman's misinformed entry in his diary of 25 July 1945: "The target [Truman wrote] will be a purely military one and we will issue a warning statement asking the Japs to surrender and save lives." (p. 53)
Truman appears here either ignorant or disingenuous. Days prior to that entry, the decision to use the bomb on the target city of Hiroshima was a "foregone conclusion"--Sayle's phrase.
But the revisionist project of 1995 to cast Truman in a censorious light itself seems disingenuous. At least it seems so to a person whose sensibilities were formed in the war years. Such a person would believe that a moral certainty was clearly driving Truman in the tide of events. This made his decision understandable and defensible.
Our Ursinus College colleague, Professor of Physics Emeritus Evan S. Snyder, confirms this insight. Evan worked on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos after completing his studies at Ursinus in 1944. He has never had doubts about the making and the dropping of the bomb. He said this in an interview in the Pottstown Mercury on the fiftieth anniversary: "Those were decisions that were made under the conditions of those times. You can't make the decisions today for what was going on then."
Those who can remember the feelings of the war years understand this view in a way, apparently, that is beyond the grasp of those who are not old enough to remember. The gap in sensibility is unpassable.
As a fourteen-year-old, we learned from our elders, who were fighting the war, that a problem was really identifiable. And when it was identified, it could be solved. Japan had to be licked. Period. We could solve the problem if we threw our energy and our best brains into finding the solution.
When FDR swims out of the black-and-white past on the history channel and again we see him addressing Congress on December 8, 1941, we still can feel his certainty flow through us. The arsenal of democracy would win in the end. Winning by dropping the biggest bomb of all would only be natural and fitting.
This sense of certainty lived with us into adulthood. It made us comfortable about volunteering for the draft immediately upon graduating from college in 1953: American military might had won WWII, a morally just outcome; so serving in the military later was simply an affirmation of an instrument of moral justice. This clear sense of right was the foil against which we engaged the increasingly confusing conditions of the ensuing decades.
In the mid-sixties, we at first were slow to understand the sentiment of students against the war in Vietnam, but finally we did understand. And, of course, our own boyish certainty about WWII metamorphosed inevitably through lengthening experience. We led the strange adult life in America under conditions of extreme Cold War that often made nonsense out of sense, and vice versa.
But the oddest paradoxes of that era could not fully erase the traces of certainty made by the war on our apprehension of the world. We never lost the memory that our side defeated an unqualified evil through all-out effort. This memory leavened the process of living out the contradictions of the sixties and beyond. It gave a defining twist to the consciousness of our generational cohort. That consciousness represented the first wave of what would come to be identified as a postmodern sensibility.
It was the link with the postmodern that interested us when the revisionist questions about Hiroshima arose during the 50th anniversary. The debate reminded us of our unique generational position between two others: the WWII GIs, whose lives were shaped permanently in the war, and their children, the baby boomers, whose lack of first-hand knowledge of it allowed them to reject it in a way we of the middle generation never could.
We understood something of the shaping influence of the war on the GIs, although we did not participate in the process as they did. And through the sixties, our own increasingly complex sense of the reality of life in America permitted us to understand something of the opposition of the younger generation to the values that won the war. We have come to think that our understanding of both reflects an historically bound sensibility, made possible by our experiences on both sides of that impassable gap, symbolized by Hiroshima.
What we understood about the GIs was their clear-eyed certainty and their belief in a total solution.
Looking back at them (and at a part of ourselves) through the prism of postmodern studies, we see them as the last Moderns. They were characters in a classic "metanarrative." The war effort mobilized resources on a grand plan and attacked the totalitarian problem with its own totalistic strategy. When it proved to be successful, with its spectacular punctuation mark at Hiroshima, they internalized the lesson and carried it with them into the post-war era: with rational planning and extraordinary effort and discipline, the conditions of existence could be shaped for the better.
In the twenty years following the war, they had good reason to believe this lesson was right. With democracy triumphant, they participated in progress and prosperity. A Pax Americana controlled the global Cold War and secured the conditions for their material success. At a gut level if not at the level of consciousness, GIs grasped the powerful chain of logic that linked their military might of WWII with the corporate and political power that flowed from it afterward. In 1952 they expressed that linkage by choosing as their post-war leader the general who had led them to victory in the war. Dwight Eisenhower, as an icon, graphically confirmed for them the continuity of a reality that appeared to confer favor on their lives. They thus defined the American hegemony. And it defined them.
What we understood about the generation of the sixties was their feeling of being disconnected from that hegemony.
By the mid-sixties we had developed a deepening doubt about the arrangement of our personal life, so seemingly secure and successful. At the time, it seemed like a personal problem of identity. But, looking back, we see in that doubt a reflection of change in the larger American experience. The sense of certainty, created in WWII, came under intellectual and imaginative attack starting in the fifties. At the heart of it, we think this was a reaction to the price the individual had to pay for the benefits of the American hegemony. The pressure of conformity and the ubiquity of command created a psychological condition that finally demanded resistance--or a defeatist resignation. For the flavor of this resistance, one can look at the writing of Jack Kerouac and his "beat" generation contemporaries, at J. D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye, and at the social analysis of such writers as C. Wright Mills.
For us one of the key images associated with the change was that of "the outsider." This was the title of a 1956 book by the then-young and brash British writer, Colin Wilson. Wilson introduced us to Hermann Hesse's Steppenwolf and allowed us a bit of personal charity: the evidence of his studies of Hesse, Sartre, and Nietzsche showed that something general was shifting, not merely the grounding of our personal sense of things in the simple certainties of the forties.
Through postmodern studies, we realize today how "the outsider" as a concept could nourish a feeling of resistance in the fifties. Without a name the other, the alternative, did not exist: the hegemony, the system, the corporation, would not acknowledge that it was there. Wilson's name for the other, therefore, in retrospect, was for us a powerful first lesson in postmodern insight--even though we did not know that is what it was at the time.
The critique of the hegemony was well along by the time the baby boomers got to college in the mid-sixties. More than a decade older than most of them, we were prepared by it, at least in part, to be less than apoplectic when they dropped their generational bomb on the nation. The GIs, more certain of the established order of things than we had become, had a much more difficult time with them.
Looking back now, we see the hardness of the American resolve against the Soviets as the root of the great unrest of the baby boomers. From that resolve grew the pervasive rigidity of social and intellectual life. From it came the creation of what came to be seen as our own "anti-Communist empire" throughout the world. Young people could look at virtually anything in the society around them--including their college or university--and see in it evidence of repression for the sake of an abstract global goal.
With our bifocal vision adapted for seeing on both sides of the impassable gap, we could come to see their point without forgetting our experience as a kid during WWII.
From these memories of certainty and change, then, we feel we can color the anniversary debate about Truman in newly found tones of the postmodern. They derive from Michael Andre Bernstein's book, Foregone Conclusions: Against Apocalyptic History (1994).
Bernstein takes a resolute stand against big stories with big themes that squeeze experience into odd and false shape. Such stories have the dangerous allure of "foreshadowing" and "backshadowing." In both procedures, the story tellers presume to be able to show prior evidence of the outcome or to show why the outcome was inevitable.
Bernstein denies the power of large-scale theory to explain vast movements. He opposes "teleological determinism."
His particular project is to show that the Holocaust--the other piece of the terrible frame of WWII--was not foreshadowed by pre-war events. He seeks to show why it was not inevitable. Things could have gone differently. And he insists on acknowledging those other unrealized possibilities, those "counterlives," in what he calls "sideshadowing." He would have us keep their potentiality alive after the event; for they season the actual with the flavors of what might have been.
"Counterlives count," says Bernstein, "because they are a constituent element of the lives we have, just as it is often by the shadows the sun casts, not by its direct light, that we can best calibrate where we stand." (p. 8)
Clearly Bernstein would say of Truman's decision on Hiroshima what he says of the Holocaust: it did not necessarily have to happen. Something else was possible.
He would hold that Hiroshima happened because America had a mistaken allegiance to a "big" story with a big theme. In this big story, America's role in WWII was to defeat evil and secure the world for the good. Or, as Bernstein would put it, we had "apocalyptic expectations of a uniquely redemptive history." (p. 10) Such expectations rationalized and justified Truman's decision as foregone and inescapable. He was providing the perfect story book ending that everybody (including Truman himself) learned to expect.
In contrast to this apocalyptic vision--which we can label Modernist--Bernstein would urge us to forget about a big story with a foregone conclusion and to focus on the details of events. He would say that Hiroshima as an event occurred in the matrix of counterevents that could have occurred but did not. To be responsible fifty years later to its remembrance, we think Bernstein would argue that the counterevents ought to be acknowledged. That is, we should face the fact that Truman could have decided otherwise. And we should always preserve this possibility in our thinking, along with what did happen. By doing so, we will be more faithful to the way life is--replete with what Bernstein calls "quotidian exigencies." (p. 126)
We know that Michael Andre Bernstein wrote on this near side of the impassable gap that separates people who remember the war from those who do not. But his thesis resonated comfortably with our sense of things today. We could see Truman and Hiroshima in a more subtle light fifty years later.
When the WWII veterans vented their anger at the revisionists during the anniversary, of course we understood their feeling. The memory of that boyhood sense of certainty lived on. Unlike the veterans, however, we could also understand that the revisionists should ask their questions. If we stood with Bernstein against apocalyptic history, or "metanarratives," we would have to believe that Hiroshima was not inevitable. It was not a foregone conclusion.
Because of the continued counterlife of the alternative histories that Truman might have triggered, he was not beyond being judged. We may judge him innocent; but judge him, after a half century, we must--and can.
Murray Sayle, in The New Yorker article, tells about a fateful meeting on August 10, 1945, four days after Hiroshima. Sitting on a hard wooden chair behind a desk, Emperor Hirohito at 2:00 am resolved the conflict of opinion among his leaders about the course of action Japan should take. "Now is the time to bear the unbearable," he reportedly said. Japan would surrender. The story reminds us that the Emperor too--like Truman--could have decided otherwise that morning. And we would have a still different outcome to talk about.