I like the Oppenheimer quote [1].
> The meeting between Oppenheimer and Truman did not go well. It was then that Oppenheimer famously told Truman that "I feel I have blood on my hands", which was unacceptable to Truman, who immediately replied that that was no concern of Oppenheimer's, and that if anyone had bloody hands, it was the president. ...
> Truman had very little use for Oppenheimer then--little use for his "hand wringing", for his high moral acceptance of question in the use of the bomb, for his second-guessing the decision. Cold must have descended in the meeting, as Truman later told David Lillenthal of Oppenheimer that he "never wanted to see that son of a bitch in this office again". Truman would retell the story in different ways, but with generally the same result, waxing about how he dismissed the "cry-baby scientist".
So the former was weighing against alternatives, and the latter was weighing against inaction.
In Oppenheimer's defense though, at the time he couldn't have known that (a) the US would refrain from using nuclear weapons in subsequent wars, (b) other countries would rapidly acquire nuclear weapons, (c) MAD would become normalized as the only acceptable use of nuclear arms.
None of which were guaranteed to pass, meaning a very different perspective in 1945.
The US was using (in modern parlance, however ugly it is) data science to optimize bombing missions to the point that the nuclear weapons were merely a large blip rather than a sudden burst of killing sandwiched by silence.
Le May (whose group dropped the bomb IIRC) and McNamara both agreed they'd have been tried as war criminals.
For Truman at least I can see why he'd be annoyed. Maybe not as annoyed as he claimed to be, but in terms of decision making I think anyone who claims to have an easy answer to whether to drop the bomb or not is either a fantasist or an idiot.
He also lied heavily about about his finances as a sympathy play as he left the presidency, and basically stole petty cash on his way out the door.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_S._Truman#Financial_situ...
"The Truman Show: The Fraudulent Origins of the Former Presidents Act"
> Using recently released and until now unexamined archival evidence, this Article demonstrates that, in a complete contravention of the existing standard historical record, Harry Truman was, as a direct result of being president, a very wealthy man on the day he left the White House, with an estimated net worth, in relative economic terms, of approximately $58 million in 2021 dollars. The Article reveals that this wealth was a result of both Truman’s enormous presidential salary — several times larger, in real terms, than the current salary for the office — and, more problematically, of the evident fact that Truman misappropriated essentially all of the multi-million dollar — in 2021 terms — presidential expense account that was set up for him by Congress at the beginning of his second term.
> The Article also reveals that, again contrary to the current historical understanding, Truman made another fortune after he left the presidency, by doing precisely what he claimed he was not doing, that is, exploiting his status as a former president to maximum economic advantage. Indeed, by the time Congress passed the FPA in response to Truman’s various claims that he was at least teetering on the brink of potential financial distress, Truman’s net worth was, in relative economic terms, approximately $72 million in 2021 dollars.
Some of the information comes from Bess Truman's files, which were only recently released, for example:
> “The cash in the box at the Columbia has been for emergency use,” he wrote. “I kept it in the little safe in the White House as long as I was there. It came out of the $50,000 expense account that was not accountable for taxes. It should be put into bonds except what you need for immediate use.”
This is money from the White House expense account that he did not need to report as taxable income - about $550,000 per year in Y2021 dollars when adjusted for inflation.
See also the section on how much he made from his publication in Life.
> a perusal of the Schedule C attachments to Truman’s tax returns during the years when the installment payments on the memoirs were made (1955 through 1960) reveals that Truman enjoyed a net profit of at least $299,186 on the memoirs
> Converted to 2021 dollars, this means Truman enjoyed, in inflation-adjusted terms, a post-tax and expenses profit from the memoirs of $2,866,000.136 But again, in terms of relative income, this is a radical underestimate: a writer today, to earn a comparable post-tax profit on a book, would need to make approximately $7,600,000–after taxes and expenses
I still think you have good intentions and believe this, I certainly cannot falsify your claim just because I can't prove it.
TL;DR for following section: a good reset point when you start getting challenge would be stating your claim in a sentence, paragraph max, then providing a sentence, paragraph, max two paragraphs, that back it up, and a link or two out to the source.
Breaking the onboarding flow for this idea into discrete, easy to follow steps that lure the interlocutor along always keeps the temperature low
If I had to hazard a guess why people reacted strongly to the claim:
A) it's much more likely the popular narrative, especially as history progressed, exaggerated the situation than an ex-president made claims about his finances that are falsifiable
B) when arguing an extreme position, especially after the initial round of reactions noting it's extreme, it's better to take due care to link a one sentence claim you have to a paragraph that backs up the claim. Making people weed through a dense Wikipedia article section, then a long comment, neither providing anything that helps put ground under the claim, would reinforce the idea the claimant is mistaken
Again, this time with Truman's lies highlighted: "Truman made another fortune after he left the presidency, by doing precisely what he claimed he was not doing, that is, exploiting his status as a former president to maximum economic advantage. Indeed, by the time Congress passed the FPA in response to Truman’s various claims that he was at least teetering on the brink of potential financial distress, Truman’s net worth was, in relative economic terms, approximately $72 million in 2021 dollars."
> Making people weed through a dense Wikipedia article section, then a long comment, neither providing anything that helps put ground under the claim, would reinforce the idea the claimant is mistaken
All you've done is be dismissive, using meta-argument rather than presenting counter-evidence.
My comment highlighted parts from Campos's paper showing A) Truman lied about his finances, B) how the popular conception came to be, and C) mentioning how some of the evidence was only recently open to researchers.
It was almost impossible to have gotten someone worse.
An idiot that would be incapable of understanding even what was at stake.
We could probably just buy the whole city instead and not worry about blowing anything up.