I admit it; I’m a news junky. Actually, I’m an editorial, op-ed, and letters to the editor addict. Each morning, I spend an hour or more on the opinions of pundits and ordinary people far and wide. While there are many columnists that I admire, my favorite part of the day is to read what moves the readers of America’s papers to send their views to the local rag.
While I usually agree with writers like Paul Krugman of the New York Times and Richard Cohen of the Washington Post and rail at Robert Novak, I understand that they and their fellow pundits are generally well informed and honest purveyors of whatever line of thought they happen to have seized on for the day. Naturally, there are as many strikeouts as home runs. Meeting a deadline two or three times a week over a forty year career means an occasional error.
Some days back, I jumped down Anne Applebaum’s throat for her comparisons of al Qaeda and the Irish Republican Army in a Washington Post opinion. I was right, of course, but one of my best friends – wrongly – thought my Celtic heritage got in the way of sound reasoning. In case she’s reading, my challenge to her is withdrawn.
Now I’m upset with a column in the Boston Globe. I check the opinions in that paper daily as I’m a native of its circulation area and spent nine years as a subscriber before moving back to Virginia three years ago.
As you all know, Boston is the Hub of the Universe and is home to some of the most brilliant Homo sapiens on the planet. It also swarms with historically literate people, and, while I’m a moderate, many of these historians – amateur and professional – are of the liberal persuasion. So, when I saw an op-ed piece in the Globe that not only had its facts wrong but that gave an erroneous slap at Franklin Roosevelt, I thought the good folks of Boston would inundate the Globe with thousands of letters brimming with righteous indignation. Never happened!
Peter S. Canellos, the Globe’s Washington Bureau Chief, in an otherwise inoffensive article, ends his column with an apples and oranges analysis of the words of FDR. He argues that the president’s pre-war promise of `Freedom from Fear’ was permanently undermined by the nuclear weapons that his own decisions brought into existence. There are two statements on the subject of fear made by Roosevelt that may be in Canellos’s mind, and neither of them works in this case. The first was his famous first inaugural statement that “All we have to fear is fear itself…” Those words referred directly to the economic woes of the nation and the insecurity infecting the people.
The second FDR reference that Mr. Canellos may have in mind is that of the famous Four Freedoms of why we were fighting the war. Freedom from Fear was indeed one of those freedoms. That one too had nothing to do with the atomic age that we were frantically trying to enter. Roosevelt never heard of an atomic bomb when he uttered the first words, and there was a strong possibility that an atomic bomb would not be practical when the Four Freedoms were expounded.
You may recall that Roosevelt sent us down the path to nuclear weapons at the suggestion of a group of scientists, headlined by Albert Einstein, who suspected that Nazi Germany was already making efforts to develop such a weapon. It was. Thus, with a stroke of the pen, the Manhattan Project came into being. Naturally, had the fears of those scientists become a reality and Germany or Japan (which had a rudimentary atomic program) developed the bomb before us and before the end of the war, our world would be considerably different than the one we live in.
It has been argued and I agree with the notion that nuclear weapons on both sides of the Cold War actually kept us at peace during that frigid period. But Canellos is correct; all of us now live in fear of nuclear weapons and there is no `Freedom from Fear.’ But the even greater truth is that nuclear weapons were an inevitable product of the science and technology extant at the middle of the twentieth century. There can be no doubt that there would be nations with the bomb today regardless of whether the United States President, Franklin Roosevelt, had acted irresponsibly in the face of the warning by fearful scientists and had not sought the weapon.
Mr. Canellos’s article falls apart on his final points, and he laments an innocence that could never have continued.
My real surprise and disappointment was that neither his editors nor the readers I cited in the opening so much as yawned in the face of the ridiculous notion that somehow FDR somehow goofed by establishing the Manhattan Project.
Attached is a link to the article so you can judge for yourselves.
http://www.boston.com/news/world/asia/articles/2005/08/09/60_years_after_hiroshima_america_still_lives_in_fear/
Don’t believe all that you read in the newspaper!
Blog on!
Wild Bill
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4 comments:
Well, Wild Bill, no one who generally agrees with those far out lefties Paul Krugman (as rabid a partisan as ever lived) and Richard Cohen can claim to be a "moderate." We have finally outed you!
I know who made this prepostrous charge. It ain't true. Guilt by association just won't stick
I wish nuclear weapons had never been invented, and I wish they had never been used in Japan.
My Dad was a B-29 crewman, flying daily missions to Japan from Tinian, the island air base where the two A-bomb missions originated. My grandfather was an engineer on the Manhattan Project. He told me once that all he wanted to do was to help end the war before my Dad got killed flying missions. He didn't want to kill Japanese kids, but desparately wanted to protect his son.
My pastor was part of the invasion force at Okinawa. He sure didn't want to invade the Japanese mainland.
My father-in-law was on a troop ship headed for the pre-invasion mustering areas.
I know that if a bad guy came through the front door of my house and threatened my family, I'd use whatever weapon I could come up with to eliminate the threat, without regard for how horribly it hurt the invader. In fact, the worse the better because I want the threat to conclusively end.
It is indeed a tragedy that all those Japanese kids got killed. But my Dad, my father-in-law,my pastor, and millions of others came home.
War sucks. Don't start one.
So true, Paul, so true.
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