Sublime

For the second time MacArthur felt he had been double-crossed by the War Department, FDR, and anyone else in Washington who might have had a hand in it.

Since June 1950, the United States had suffered well over a hundred thousand casualties, including more than twenty-five thousand men killed in action, and the Truman administration appeared to have no plan for ending the conflict.

Ike dismissed it out of hand. “I certainly do not think that the atomic bomb can be used by the United States unilaterally,” he told Cutler. “You boys must be crazy. We can’t use those awful things against Asians for the second time in less than ten years. My God.”22

As a former supreme commander, Eisenhower had the confidence to do so, where other presidents might not have. And by rejecting the use of the bomb, there is no question that Eisenhower raised the threshold at which atomic weaponry could be employed—a legacy we continue to enjoy.

On the morning after Truman’s dramatic announcement, the Sunday newspapers delivered to the delegates’ rooms were filled with speculation about imminent breaks in the Stevenson ranks from New Jersey, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. But by noon that Sunday, the party’s insiders already knew the truth. Counting delegates the evening before, they had

But for the Virginia-born Wilson, the New Freedom was for whites only. The first southerner elected president since Zachary Taylor, Wilson immediately segregated the government’s workforce.

Iran and Guatemala were not isolated phenomena. The role of the United States in world affairs was changing. As America’s international reach and sense of obligation increased, the instinct to adhere to traditional democratic procedures diminished. Eisenhower was a leading player in that process.78

What Truman and Eisenhower had in their favour was earnestness. They were self-taught, hardworking, strong-willed men.