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He was the absolute dictator over 180 million people of 170 nationalities in a country representing one sixth of the earth’s surface, the Generalissimo of gigantic, victorious armies, and Harry Truman, like nearly everyone meeting him for the first time, was amazed to find how small he was. “A little bit of a squirt,” Truman described him, Stalin standing about 5 feet 5.
However, one secret agreement concerning “military operations in Southeast Asia” was to have far-reaching consequences. He, Churchill, and their combined Chiefs of Staff decided that Vietnam, or Indochina, would, “for operational purposes,” be divided, with China in charge north of the 16th parallel and British forces in the southern half, leaving little chance for the unification or independence of Vietnam and ample opportunity for the return of the French. Truman so informed the American ambassador in China, Patrick J. Hurley, by secret cable the last day of the conference, August 1. At the
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At 6:10 the Swiss chargé d’affaires in Washington arrived at the State Department to present Secretary Byrnes with the Japanese text, which Byrnes carried at once to the White House.
Truman mused that perhaps he should add some new Kitchen Cabinet secretaries as well: a Secretary of Inflation to convince everyone that however high or low prices went, it didn’t matter; a Secretary of Reaction, to abolish airplanes and restore ox carts and sailing ships; a Secretary of Columnists, to read all the columns and report to the President on how the country should be run; and a Secretary of Semantics, to supply big words as well as to tell him when to keep quiet.
“You don’t have time. Later somebody can sit around for days and weeks and figure out how things might have been done differently. This is all very well and very interesting and quite irrelevant.”
Always be nice to the people who can’t talk back to you. I can’t stand a man or woman who bawls out underlings to satisfy an ego.
“They [the Republicans] did not understand the worker, the farmer, the everyday person. . . . Most of them honestly believed that prosperity actually began at the top and would trickle down in due time to benefit all the people.”
Truman called for a federal law against “the crime of lynching, against which I cannot speak too strongly.”
In the summer of 1946, the Jewish terrorist group Irgun blew up the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, killing ninety-one people.
To Mrs. Roosevelt, whom he had made a delegate to the United Nations, he wrote: “The action of some of our United States Zionists will eventually prejudice everyone against what they are trying to get done. I fear very much that the Jews are like all underdogs. When they get on top they are just as intolerant and as cruel as the people were to them when they were underneath. I regret this situation very much because my sympathy has always been on their side.”
“There are those who say to you—we are rushing this issue of civil rights. I say we are a hundred and seventy-two years late. . . . The time has arrived for the Democratic Party to get out of the shadow of states’ rights and walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights.”
Do not say that you disapprove of them. Whatever you think you are under no compulsion to broadcast it. Free speech is a restraint on government; not an incitement to the citizen.
