The Accidental President Quotes

“Mark Twain: ALWAYS DO RIGHT. THIS WILL GRATIFY SOME PEOPLE AND ASTONISH THE REST.”
― A.J. Baime, The Accidental President: Harry S. Truman and the Four Months That Changed the World—A Fast-Paced Chronicle of Truman’s Tumultuous First Days Amidst World War II

“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?”
― A.J. Baime, The Accidental President: Harry S. Truman and the Four Months That Changed the World—A Fast-Paced Chronicle of Truman’s Tumultuous First Days Amidst World War II

“ALWAYS DO RIGHT. THIS WILL GRATIFY SOME PEOPLE AND ASTONISH THE REST.”
― A.J. Baime, The Accidental President: Harry S. Truman and the Four Months That Changed the World—A Fast-Paced Chronicle of Truman’s Tumultuous First Days Amidst World War II

“Stalin revealed at the table that he did not believe Adolf Hitler was dead. “I think he’s loose somewhere,” Stalin said—maybe in Argentina or Spain.”
― A.J. Baime, The Accidental President: Harry S. Truman and the Four Months That Changed the World—A Fast-Paced Chronicle of Truman’s Tumultuous First Days Amidst World War II

“The job was “a graveyard of politicians” in Washington parlance, traditionally disparaged by the men who held it. The VP before Truman, Henry Wallace, bragged that he had never had so much time to work on his tennis game. “The Vice President has not much to do,” Truman said, referring to himself as a “political Eunuch.” When asked what he would do with his “spare time,” he answered: “Study history.”
― A.J. Baime, The Accidental President: Harry S. Truman and the Four Months That Changed the World—A Fast-Paced Chronicle of Truman’s Tumultuous First Days Amidst World War II

“The president wanted to know from each an opinion on the most efficient means of forcing Japan to surrender unconditionally, and to bring the war to an end.”
― A.J. Baime, The Accidental President: Harry S. Truman and the Four Months That Changed the World—A Fast-Paced Chronicle of Truman’s Tumultuous First Days Amidst World War II

“Without Lend-Lease, Hitler could never have been defeated.”
― A.J. Baime, The Accidental President: Harry S. Truman and the Four Months That Changed the World—A Fast-Paced Chronicle of Truman’s Tumultuous First Days Amidst World War II

“The secret Yalta agreements caused one major problem, however. Roosevelt’s commitments would require large concessions on the part of the Chinese. Nobody had informed the Chinese.”
― A.J. Baime, The Accidental President: Harry S. Truman and the Four Months That Changed the World—A Fast-Paced Chronicle of Truman’s Tumultuous First Days Amidst World War II

“We now have ample proof that the Soviet government views all matters from the standpoint of their own selfish interests,”
― A.J. Baime, The Accidental President: Harry S. Truman and the Four Months That Changed the World—A Fast-Paced Chronicle of Truman’s Tumultuous First Days Amidst World War II

“Few people can hate one another with more cordial enthusiasm than a bunch of Democrats.”
― A.J. Baime, The Accidental President: Harry S. Truman and the Four Months That Changed the World—A Fast-Paced Chronicle of Truman’s Tumultuous First Days Amidst World War II

“There is no substitute for a fact. When the facts are known, reasonable men do not disagree with respect to them.”
― A.J. Baime, The Accidental President: Harry S. Truman and the Four Months That Changed the World—A Fast-Paced Chronicle of Truman’s Tumultuous First Days Amidst World War II

“The army ranked eighteenth in the world in size at the beginning of 1940 (smaller than Belgium’s, Portugal’s, even Switzerland’s), with fewer than 200,000 men, compared with nearly 7 million trained Nazi soldiers.”
― A.J. Baime, The Accidental President: Harry S. Truman and the Four Months That Changed the World—A Fast-Paced Chronicle of Truman’s Tumultuous First Days Amidst World War II

“It seems very unfortunate that in order to secure political preference, people are made Vice President who are never intended, neither by Party nor by the Lord, to be President.”
― A.J. Baime, The Accidental President: Harry S. Truman and the Four Months That Changed the World—A Fast-Paced Chronicle of Truman’s Tumultuous First Days Amidst World War II

“It was also a time of massacre, when the U.S. military committed acts it still struggles to justify more than seventy years later.”
― A.J. Baime, The Accidental President: Harry S. Truman and the Four Months That Changed the World—A Fast-Paced Chronicle of Truman’s Tumultuous First Days Amidst World War II

“during which the new president sat at the negotiating table with Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin in Soviet-occupied Germany, in an attempt to map out a new world. Humanity saw the first atomic explosion, the nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the dawn of the Cold War, and the beginning of the nuclear arms race. Never had fate shoehorned so much history into such a short period.”
― A.J. Baime, The Accidental President: Harry S. Truman and the Four Months That Changed the World—A Fast-Paced Chronicle of Truman’s Tumultuous First Days Amidst World War II

“this terrible job I fell heir to on Apr. 12, ’45.”
― A.J. Baime, The Accidental President: Harry S. Truman and the Four Months That Changed the World—A Fast-Paced Chronicle of Truman’s Tumultuous First Days Amidst World War II

“An iron curtain is drawn down upon their front,” Churchill wrote, using the term iron curtain for the first time. “We do not know what is going on behind.”
― A.J. Baime, The Accidental President: Harry S. Truman and the Four Months That Changed the World—A Fast-Paced Chronicle of Truman’s Tumultuous First Days Amidst World War II

“As Aldous Huxley once wrote, “The charm of history and its enigmatic lesson consist in the fact that, from age to age, nothing changes and yet everything is completely different.”
― A.J. Baime, The Accidental President: Harry S. Truman and the Four Months That Changed the World—A Fast-Paced Chronicle of Truman’s Tumultuous First Days Amidst World War II

“Truman’s victory moved his daughter, Margaret, to pronounce, “Harry S. Truman was no ‘accidental President,’” for now he had been elected by the American people.”
― A.J. Baime, The Accidental President: Harry S. Truman and the Four Months That Changed the World—A Fast-Paced Chronicle of Truman’s Tumultuous First Days Amidst World War II

“If mankind continues to make the atomic bomb without changing the political relationships of States, sooner or later these bombs will be used for mutual annihilation .”
― A.J. Baime, The Accidental President: Harry S. Truman and the Four Months That Changed the World—A Fast-Paced Chronicle of Truman’s Tumultuous First Days Amidst World War II

“Even before the Japanese surrender, the race was on for control of China and Korea.”
― A.J. Baime, The Accidental President: Harry S. Truman and the Four Months That Changed the World—A Fast-Paced Chronicle of Truman’s Tumultuous First Days Amidst World War II

“Truman had studied enough history to put this moment in context. The United States had provided soldiers and a great majority of the tools of war that destroyed Nazism and saved Europe. The United States had defeated a Japanese military intent on dominating all of the Far East. In the eyes of the world, this was America’s finest hour. Never before had the United States achieved such prestige. What Truman did not know at this moment was this: never would the United States achieve such prestige again.”
― A.J. Baime, The Accidental President: Harry S. Truman and the Four Months That Changed the World—A Fast-Paced Chronicle of Truman’s Tumultuous First Days Amidst World War II

“Hordes of jumpy reporters milled about, waiting tensely for the word that would send them to tell the world that it was all over.”
― A.J. Baime, The Accidental President: Harry S. Truman and the Four Months That Changed the World—A Fast-Paced Chronicle of Truman’s Tumultuous First Days Amidst World War II

“General Groves had communicated to the War Department on this day, saying the next bomb would be ready for delivery after August 17 or 18. But now, in the cabinet meeting, Truman said that he was ordering an end to the atomic bombing. He could not stomach the idea of wiping out another 100,000 people, of killing “all those kids,” he said to his cabinet.”
― A.J. Baime, The Accidental President: Harry S. Truman and the Four Months That Changed the World—A Fast-Paced Chronicle of Truman’s Tumultuous First Days Amidst World War II

“The Bockscar made three runs over its primary target, Kokura. The citizens of that metropolis had no idea that cloud cover saved tens of thousands of their lives on this morning.”
― A.J. Baime, The Accidental President: Harry S. Truman and the Four Months That Changed the World—A Fast-Paced Chronicle of Truman’s Tumultuous First Days Amidst World War II

“Truman spent the afternoon catching up. He signed the United Nations Charter on August 8. (On this same day, the Allies signed the London Agreement, which officially set the stage for the war crimes trials at Nuremberg.) He had been gone a long time, and with Bess also absent from the White House, he had bills stacked up on his desk, many for White House groceries. He sat at his desk writing out no fewer than a dozen checks from a special White House account he had opened at Hamilton National Bank. He owed the Metropolitan Poultry Company $5.03, and the General Baking Company $1.44.”
― A.J. Baime, The Accidental President: Harry S. Truman and the Four Months That Changed the World—A Fast-Paced Chronicle of Truman’s Tumultuous First Days Amidst World War II

“Crewmen aboard the Enola Gay gave their first interviews. “The crew said, ‘My God,’ and couldn’t believe what had happened,” said weaponeer William Parsons. “A mountain of smoke was going up in a mushroom with the stem coming down. At the top was white smoke but up to 1,000 feet from the ground there was swirling, boiling dust.” General Carl Spaatz, one of the army air forces’ top officials, called the atomic bomb “the most revolutionary development in the history of the world.”
― A.J. Baime, The Accidental President: Harry S. Truman and the Four Months That Changed the World—A Fast-Paced Chronicle of Truman’s Tumultuous First Days Amidst World War II

“When the bomb detonated, many thousands of citizens of Hiroshima disappeared off the face of the earth, instantly and without a trace. Survivors would remember the flash of light first, followed by a sound that had never been heard by human ears.”
― A.J. Baime, The Accidental President: Harry S. Truman and the Four Months That Changed the World—A Fast-Paced Chronicle of Truman’s Tumultuous First Days Amidst World War II

“Less than forty-eight hours earlier, the crew members of these ships had learned of the atomic bomb for the first time, the secret behind the mission for which they had been training for months.”
― A.J. Baime, The Accidental President: Harry S. Truman and the Four Months That Changed the World—A Fast-Paced Chronicle of Truman’s Tumultuous First Days Amidst World War II

“In the moment, Lewis was writing in his logbook, scribbling with difficulty since it was dark in the vibrating aircraft. He wrote, “My God, what have we done.”
― A.J. Baime, The Accidental President: Harry S. Truman and the Four Months That Changed the World—A Fast-Paced Chronicle of Truman’s Tumultuous First Days Amidst World War II