Read a book written by ???David??? McCullough on Truman. According to Truman (I do not purport this to be the exact quote):
“I made the best decision I could at the time with the information I had.”
I think there is no question that he got it right, even though he was a Democrat.
Moreover, Truman was a man who had seen the horrors of battle, up close and in person. He was a Captain of arty in WWI.
For Truman, the decision was simple:
Consideration 1: Which path led to the fewest American lives being lost?
Consideration 2: Which path led to the fastest end of the war?
I believe that if we had a POTUS who had a fancy-pants Ivy League education, they would have turned this into a naval-gazing moment, complete with a pre-fabricated sob story to tell the press. Fortunately for the US, we had a guy who had been an infantry soldier, a dirt farmer, had spent long hours in the Missouri sun looking at the rear end of a mule while he was pushing a plow through the dirt, then had been a haberdasher and a failed businessman before getting into politics. Truman might have been a Democrat, but he was arguably the last of the common men of that party to become POTUS.
This was 68 years ago...
...when men were still men and democrats were still patriotic Americans.