![]() ![]() Little Harry was no genius, and his short fuse and fragile ego sometimes served him badly, but he was a genuine patriot with a strong store of common sense. Truman once compared Soviet dictator Josef Stalin to Prendergast, and he actually meant it as a compliment. How any of this was supposed to mitigate the effect of a direct nuclear hit on the nation’s capital was never explained.Īt the heart of the story is the flawed, feisty figure of Harry Truman, a seemingly mediocre product of one of the nation’s most corrupt political machines, “Boss” Tom Prendergast’s thoroughly rotten party organization that ran the state of Missouri out of Kansas City and put Truman into the Senate.įrom there he was plucked by FDR to replace incumbent vice president - and parlor pinko - Henry Wallace (no relation to the author) on the 1946 Democratic ticket. We were herded downstairs to the ground floor, told to seek shelter crouching underneath desks, and to shield ourselves with our hands, palm-sides outward, because the skin was tougher there. Looking back, it didn’t faze us all that much, despite the best efforts of everyone from over-solicitous schoolmarms to Soviet-backed “pacifist” groups to scare us out of our wits.Įven to a reasonably observant third grader, the regularly scheduled “civil defense drills” at John Eaton elementary school in Washington, D.C., seemed more comical than frightening. We were the first Americans born in the shadow of a mushroom cloud and raised to adulthood in the mad, mad, mad world of Mutually Assured Destruction. I was one of them, the cohort of kids who came along just as World War II was ending and the Nuclear Age was beginning. Before there were baby boomers there were baby bombers.
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