Back to newspaper home page

By Adam Holmberg

"Carry the battle to them. Don't let them bring it to you. Put them on the defensive. And don't ever apologize for anything."

                                                -Harry S. Truman

Harry S. Truman was an extraordinary man. In a time of great peril, he came to power in the shadow of another extraordinary man, inheriting a war for the very survival of freedom.

At no other time in history has freedom itself been in such peril; others had tried to conquer the world, but Hitler was the first who actually could. Japan was on the run in the Pacific, but they were deeply entrenched on their own soil – an island completely hostile. Truman’s only choice was an invasion that would likely kill millions of Americans. He prepared for it.

And then, he was informed about a little project in the New Mexico desert. It was an atomic bomb, and it could devastate an entire city. They tested it, and it was as powerful as they had hoped. Truman saw a weapon that would scare the Japanese into surrender – a solution that would sacrifice thousands for millions. He made his choice. And the rest is history.

Harry S. Truman was an extraordinary man, not because he killed thousands of our enemy but because he seized the moment – in the hour of maximum danger, he defended freedom by choosing a solution that likely saved millions of lives. To those who vilify him, I ask you this – would you have the courage to make the choice he did? Would you have the courage to see it through?

The world has changed much since Truman’s time. The world is at war, but none of it is declared. The world is almost as dangerous; in 1945 we had two enemies, and both of them occupied territory plainly marked on maps.

Now we fight enemies who hide in caves or in plain sight, dressed as Americans, speaking English. Enemies who ram planes into buildings instead of meeting us on the battlefield. We have our friend John in the Justice Department (John – does it disturb you to see your wife naked, or is the statue more real to you?) who likes to lock up people with funny accents and thinks that habeas corpus is an inconvenient barrier to national security.

We also have George W., who will always be remembered as a strong man but never mistaken for a great president. We have Colin Powell, the greatest figure currently in our government, yet he’s the black sheep of the Bush administration. He’s also the only statesman in the bunch.

So, what great men and women do we have? We have Colin Powell. We have Donald Rumsfeld, whose disregard of morality and decency disturbs yet who is one of the few men with the resolve to fight this war against terror wherever we must take it. We have the firefighters and policemen of Sept. 11, and all the volunteers who showed that we might be the ugly Americans, but we sure know how to band together in the hour of maximum danger. We know how to survive when we don’t even know who has turned our own planes into bombs.

I’m still convinced that we’re the greatest nation on Earth. I’m still convinced that our version of civilization is better than the barbarism of men like Mullah Omar and Osama bin Laden or Ariel Sharon and Yassir Arafat. I’m still convinced that we’re the glue that binds the modern world together – we’re the new empire that comes to the rescue more often than not.

We kept our promise to the Jewish people – we gave them Israel, and even now when that nation is wrong, we stand with them to ensure that it will survive. We are the only nation on Earth great enough to demand Arafat reject terror in the same breath that we condemn Sharon.

We stand at a crossroads. In the hour of maximum danger, we pause and wonder how to keep on fighting this war to make the world safe from terror. It’s a war that I don’t think we can ever truly win. But that’s never stopped us before.

Sixty-one years ago another extraordinary man stood at a crossroads. His entire Pacific navy lay in ruins, his enemy approaching from every side. His nation could no longer remain neutral, yet the weapons they needed to fight had been destroyed. So he seized the moment, and in almost a year he rebuilt those weapons. And he took the fight to those who would threaten freedom. He wouldn’t live to see the victory he set in motion.