You both are on the money.
Mr. McGowan needs to imagine if he was Truman, and if he decided to withhold the bomb and let a mainland invasion proceed.
Imagine what kind of monster that history would have declared him to be, letting millions of people die instead of ending the war with less than 200K casualties. The same number of casualties, I would add, happened in 2-3 weeks of incendiary bombing of Tokyo and other largely populated Japanese targets.
Maybe Mr. McGowan could sleep well at night after years more of war, like Obama does. Truman, being old school populist pro-American Democrat, probably would not.
“Maybe Mr. McGowan could sleep well at night after years more of war, like Obama does. Truman, being old school populist pro-American Democrat, probably would not. “
Mr. McGowan, like Obama, gets to sleep safely in his bed far away from anything remotely resembling a battlefield. His biggest worry is what he will have for dinner, not whether or not at 21 yrs old he will be alive for one more day. That worry was for unimportant GIs who should have been willing to die by the thousands so that McGowan and his friends wouldn’t have their moral purity sullied.