In fact Truman acquitted himself well, and not only the United States but the whole world had reason to be grateful for his simple, old-fashioned sense of justice, the clear distinctions he drew between right and wrong, and the decisiveness with which he applied them.
Truman came from a family of Baptist farmers. He had the kind of childhood presented in Norman Rockwell’s covers. His family moral training was strict, reinforced by the public schools of his home town, Independence. His school’s emphasis on character-building was of a kind which American parents, at the end of the 20th century, find it impossible to obtain for their children, however much they pay for it. Family and school combined to give him a religious and moral upbringing which left him with a lifelong conviction that personal behavior, and the behavior of nation, should alike be guided by clear principles which made absolute distinctions between right and wrong. These principles were based on fundamental Judeo-Christian documents, the Old and New Testaments, and especially the Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount.
Truman was brought up to believe that, ever since its inception, America had occupied the moral high ground in the community of nations. Thus formed, he felt this distinction was slipping away from his country as early as the 1930s, confiding in his diary: ‘Some day we’ll awake, have a reformation of the heart, teach our kids honor and become a nation of God’s people once more.
Truman saw America as assigned by God to play a leading role in the world.
On August 6, America’s one, untested uranium bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. Some 720,000 leaflets warning that the city would be ‘obliterated’ had been dropped two days before.
