Hiroshima, 65 years later

Let’s say you’re the president of the United States. You’ve been in office just a few weeks, having replaced a beloved man who had served for 12 years; he had just taken the oath for his fourth term before he died of a cerebral hemorrhage.

Then your braintrust comes to you and says, “Mr. President, we want to tell you about something. There’s this project out in New Mexico we’ve been working on that we think is going to end the war — quickly.” You agree to take a look at the information on this secret matter, called the Manhattan Project.

Then you learn about a very big bomb that can kill tens of thousands of people in an instant. You ponder what you have just learned for a few moments and then say, “OK, let’s do it. We have to end this war before we kill many more thousands of our guys and possibly millions of theirs.”

That was the situation facing President Harry Truman in mid-1945. He didn’t know about The Bomb until he took office. Then, 65 years ago today, he ordered a B-29 Stratofortress to take off for Japan. It carried a single explosive. The plane, piloted by Army Air Force Col. Paul Tibbetts, dropped the bomb on Hiroshima. Three days later, a second bomb fell on Nagasaki. And just a few days after that, Japan threw up the white flag of surrender.

The war was over.

I have a particular stake in this event. My father was in the Philippines at the time preparing — along with hundreds of thousands of other servicemen — to invade the Japanese homeland. Dad had seen his share of combat already in the Mediterranean theater — North Africa, Sicily and Italy. His naval duty put him in harm’s way countless times.

I cannot say this with absolute certainty, but given all he had seen in the Med, it well might have been that Dad’s number would have been up had the United States invaded Japan. All the conventional wisdom on the planet at the time suggested that perhaps millions of people would have died in the attempt to subdue the Japanese. Were that the case, and he met his end, well … that would have precluded yours truly from ever entering this world.

Dad survived. He came home, got married — on Aug. 24, 1946 — and started his family.

I have owed President Truman my gratitude ever since for stiffening his backbone and making the toughest decision of his life.

We can debate until we run out of breath over the rightness of the decision. As the son of someone who stood at the gates of hell preparing for the fight of his life, I have no particular interest in such an intellectual exercise. My interests in what President Truman did are more, um, personal.

Thank you, Mr. President.