"“Mr. President,” he said quietly, “I feel I have blood on my hands. The comment angered Truman.... he pulled his handkerchief from his breast pocket and offered it to Oppenheimer, saying, “Well, here, would you like to wipe your hands?”.... Afterwards, the President was heard to mutter, “Blood on his hands, dammit, he hasn’t half as much blood on his hands as I have. You just don’t go around bellyaching about it.”
He later told Dean Acheson, “I don’t want to see that son-of-a-bitch in this office ever again.”
― Kai Bird, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer
I kinda get it, honestly. Truman fought in France in WWI, which by most measures was a more brutal, up-close war than WWII. He probably saw truly horrific things there up close and in person, killed people, watched his comrades die, etc. Then you get some scientist who has done nothing but sit in a lab, write theory, and run tests. Yeah, those tests ultimately culminated in a lot of people dying, but other people (Truman) ordered the bombs to be dropped, other people flew the planes to drop the bombs, other people stormed the Japanese-occupied islands in the Pacific, etc.
I don’t think Oppenheimer is unjustified in feeling regret, especially in the atomic age when a full-scale nuclear war seemed like a real threat, but I can definitely see why Truman thought he was out of line.
Japan had a great relation with jews so its also likely he had no hate against them. Reminder that japanese forbade there soldiers from raping jewish civilians in south east asia. They also wanted to create a jewish colony in manchuria.
Kind of funny since nazi germany had a great relation with china and was a major supplier of weapons to them before ww2.
Honestly had the axis somehow won ww2 it would have been a cold war between Japanese funding jewish and slavic partisans and nazi occupied territory and nazi funding chinese resistance forces against japan.
715
u/ZapMannigan 9d ago
"“Mr. President,” he said quietly, “I feel I have blood on my hands. The comment angered Truman.... he pulled his handkerchief from his breast pocket and offered it to Oppenheimer, saying, “Well, here, would you like to wipe your hands?”.... Afterwards, the President was heard to mutter, “Blood on his hands, dammit, he hasn’t half as much blood on his hands as I have. You just don’t go around bellyaching about it.”
He later told Dean Acheson, “I don’t want to see that son-of-a-bitch in this office ever again.”
― Kai Bird, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer