The Accidental President: Harry S. Truman and the Four Months That Changed the World

by A.J. Baime

“Roosevelt was a great architect,” Oppenheimer figured. “Perhaps Truman will be a good carpenter.”

He wrote in a diary entry that night of his impression of Berlin. It had left him philosophical and fearful for the future of mankind. “I hope for some sort of peace—but I fear that machines are ahead of morals by some centuries and when morals catch up perhaps there’ll [be] no reason for any of it. I hope not. But we are only termites on a planet and maybe when we bore too deeply into the planet there’ll [be] a reckoning—who knows?”