BAD CHEMISTRY
As Truman began the final month of his presidency, he didn’t indulge in reflection, but, like regret, reflection had never been his métier. In interviews with several favored journalists, the closest he came to expressing self-doubt was when he talked about Korea — “the most terrible” decision he’d had to make, and a “much more important decision than the one to drop the atomic bomb.”
He didn’t personally deliver his final State of the Union message; rather it was read aloud by clerks in the House and Senate. Its 9,700 words included an aside to Stalin: “You claim belief in Lenin’s prophecy that one stage in the development of communist society would be war between your world and ours,” it said. “But Lenin was a pre-atomic man, who viewed society and history with preatomic eyes.” Referring to the recent test of a thermonuclear weapon, he warned that “the war of the future would be one in which man could extinguish millions of lives at one blow, demolish the great cities of the world, wipe out the cultural achievemerits of the
