As everyone knows, history repeats itself, or as the late great Peter Allen sang, “Everything old is new again.”
Once upon a time, Democrat president Harry Truman effectively ended World War II by dropping the first nuclear bombs ever detonated on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, on August 6, 1945, resulting in multi-thousands of deaths. It was a decision that promised to end his presidency.
All the political experts—pundits, writers, radio newscasters—agreed that the unassuming former haberdasher who became the unlikely choice of VP in the election of 1944 didn’t have the charisma of the man whose shoes he had stepped into after President Franklin Delano Roosevelt died of a stroke just three months after his fourth presidential inauguration, and that Truman’s war-mongering act was not only antithetical to the values of peace-loving Americans who were exhausted by World War II’s profound losses in bodies and blood, but that it would ultimately condemn him to political ignominy.
But when Truman ran for a second term in 1948, Americans turned out in record numbers for the plain-spoken, decisive Missourian whose action, they recognized, spared the deaths of thousands of American troops, and voted overwhelmingly against the smooth-talking Republican, Governor Thomas Dewey of New York.
As it turned out, all the “expert” predictions of the media were dead wrong!
So arrogantly confident were Truman’s naysayers—sound familiar?—that a political writer of The Chicago Daily Tribune wrote an article declaring Dewey’s victory before the results were in, and the hapless publisher ran with the story!