We did the "in-person absentee" voting today at the library.

I texted from the line to someone who's been reading that 1120-page "Truman" book:

"It hadn't penetrated my think-tank that this was your hacienda when I came mavericking in."

Wrote William MacLeod Raine in the Western novella "Bucky O'Connor" (1910). 

The original meaning of "think tank" was brain. I learned that just now from the OED. 

In 1964, the St. Louis (Missouri) Post-Dispatch quoted Harry Truman saying that he wants to live to be 90 "if the old think-tank is working."  I guess the skull is the container — the tank — and the brain the contents. I see that people also said "think box." 

Does anyone still use the phrase "think tank" like that? It would be confusing, now that "think tank" has come to mean "A research institute or other organization providing advice and ideas on national or commercial problems" (OED). 

The oldest published appearance of that usage is:

"The buck stops with everybody."

Said Donald Trump, in #8 on a list of what CNN calls "Donald Trump's 199 wildest lines of 2019" (collected by CNN). I was reading them out loud, here at Meadhouse, until I noticed that they didn't stop at 10 or even 25... or even 100. I see (now) that the number is in the headline — 199. What an entertaining/infuriating President we have. CNN had to go to 199 just for one year and just to get to the "wildest" lines.

It's subjective. What makes a line wild? Is "The buck stops with everybody" wild or is it stable genius?

I see (because I looked it up) that Trump was talking about the government shutdown last January, and combative journalists were trying to get him to accept the classic Truman slogan "The buck stops here." He said, "The buck stops with everybody." Everyone's responsible.

Truman's slogan is a play on the expression "passing the buck":

The expression is said to have originated from poker in which a marker or counter (such as a knife with a buckhorn handle during the American Frontier era) was used to indicate the person whose turn it was to deal. If the player did not wish to deal he could pass the responsibility by passing the "buck," as the counter came to be called, to the next player.

Trump's play on Truman's play is not passing the buck. It's a rejection of the idea that the buck can be passed. All are always responsible. Trump's slogan is not wild. It's a sound observation, cleverly stated, aptly deflecting a reporter who must have thought the old Truman line would work to pin blame on Trump. Trump always fights. He's never going to concede to a reporter you've got me this time.

Here's Jimmy Carter delivering a dismal lecture to America while sitting behind Truman's "The buck stops here" sign:



Watch that if you can. Carter is the opposite of Trump. He speaks of limitations and how were going to have to accept pain. It's such a downer. You feel the hope drain out of you. We're running out of energy! Indeed, we were.

Some men see things as they are, and ask why. I dream of things that never were, and ask why not.

This morning, I'm pairing the famous RFK quote with the coat of arms of Greenland.

ADDED: Picture the map of the world with Greenland as the 51st state:



What a legacy for the real-estate mogul!

AND: If what they're saying about global warming is true, Greenland is the place to which the entire population of the United States could relocate. If we bought Alaska from Russia, why can't we buy Greenland from Denmark? We're already using Greenland for military purposes — there's an air force base — and our military protects Europe....

ALSO: The Mercator projection is like the wide-angle lens in real-estate photos on Zillow.

MORE: From "Trump Eyes U.S. Buying Greenland" in The Wall Street Journal:

The idea of the U.S. purchasing Greenland has captured the former real-estate developer's imagination, according to people familiar with the discussion, who said Mr. Trump has, with varying degrees of seriousness, repeatedly expressed interest in buying the ice-covered autonomous Danish territory....

Some of his advisers have supported the concept, saying it would be a good economic play, two of the people said, while others dismissed it as a fleeting fascination. It is also unclear how the U.S. would go about acquiring Greenland even if the effort were serious.

It's a great topic for conversation. There's even potential for racial politics, I think. Trump seems to love the Nordic places (in contrast to "shithole countries")?

With a population of about 56,000, Greenland is a self-ruling part of the Kingdom of Denmark, and while its government decides on most domestic matters, foreign and security policy is handled by Copenhagen....

U.S. officials view Greenland as important to American national-security interests. A treaty between Denmark and the U.S. gives the U.S. military virtually unlimited rights in Greenland at America's Thule Air Base. Located 750 miles north of the Arctic Circle, it includes a radar station that is part of a U.S. ballistic missile warning system.

The U.S. has sought to derail Chinese efforts to gain an economic foothold in Greenland. The Pentagon worked successfully in 2018 to block China from financing three airports on the island.

People outside the White House have described purchasing Greenland as an Alaska-type acquisition for Mr. Trump's legacy, advisers said...

Greenland relies on $591 million of subsidies from Denmark annually, which make up about 60% of its annual budget, according to U.S. and Danish government statistics. Greenland is culturally and politically linked to Europe. Following World War II, the U.S. under President Harry Truman developed a geopolitical interest in Greenland and in 1946 offered to buy it from Denmark for $100 million. Denmark refused to sell.

Truman tried to buy it! Trump endeavors to close the deal that was Truman's! If Greenland is draining $591 million a year from Denmark, they should pay us for taking it off their hands and taking care of it well and preventing China from acquiring dominance. But if China is so ambitious in Greenland, Denmark should wait for a good bidding war between the world's 2 superpowers. And every year gets us closer to the global warming disaster that will make Greenland the most desirable place on earth. In that light, Denmark should hold on as the landlord, charging exorbitant rents and until things become so catastrophic that Greenland is snatched away from them by military force.

At a dinner with associates last spring, Mr. Trump said someone had told him Denmark was having financial trouble over its assistance to Greenland, and suggested that he should consider buying the island, according to one of the people. "What do you guys think about that?" he asked the room, the person said.

The person described the question less as a serious inquiry than as a joke meant to indicate "I'm so powerful I could buy a country," noting that since Mr. Trump hadn't floated the idea at a campaign rally yet, he probably wasn't seriously considering it.

The person believed the president was interested in the idea because of the island's natural resources and because it would give him a legacy akin to President Dwight Eisenhower's admission of Alaska into the U.S. as a state....

PLUS: Kudos to the stable genius if he floated this idea intending to get his antagonists to declare it stupid and knowing that on further examination it would actually make enough sense to intrigue us to talk about this rather that whatever the hell we were talking about before this came up. I see WaPo is getting ahead of the curve with "Trump reportedly wants to buy Greenland. So did the Truman administration" (by Antonia Noori Farzan):

Harry Truman said "If you can't stand the heat you better get out of the kitchen." Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez says...

"It’s not the kitchen that’s popular, or the cooking that’s popular, it’s that I’m engaging people doing something I’m already doing." She was instructing her colleagues on how to do social media.

Here's the background on the Truman quote, from the Truman Library (where, if you click, you'll get a message that the site isn't being updated regularly because of the federal government shutdown, so this might not be the latest on Harry Truman):

One of the results of this system is that it gives the President a good many hot potatoes to handle--but the President gets a lot of hot potatoes from every direction anyhow, and a man who can't handle them has no business in that job. That makes me think of a saying that I used to hear from my old friend and colleague on the Jackson County Court. He said, "Harry, if you can't stand the heat you better get out of the kitchen." I'll say that is absolutely true.

For Truman, "the kitchen" was metaphorical. It meant the hard, complicated, stressful work of politics. For Ocasio-Cortez, it's literally the kitchen. She's talking about her highly successful Instagramming of herself in her kitchen:



And she's comparing herself favorable to Elizabeth Warren, whose stilted get-me-a-beer kitchen performance was so awkwardly wrong:



But AOC does pull out the old Harry Truman metaphor when cornered:



In my previous post, which is also about AOC's advice on doing social media, I focused on her word of wisdom: "If you’re an older woman, talk like an older woman talks." I wonder if she accepts the corollary: "If you’re a younger woman, talk like a younger woman talks." Because "If you can't stand the heat you better get out of the kitchen" is the way an old man talks.

NYT: "Trump’s Harsh Language on North Korea Has Little Precedent, Experts Say."

"Little Precedent" ≠ no precedent, and, in fact, the "little precedent" is — in the historical scheme, very big.

First, there was President Harry S. Truman, in 1945, demanding that the Japanese surrender or “they may expect a rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on this earth.”

Second, there was Bill Clinton, in 1993:

... during a speech in the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea that if Pyongyang ever used nuclear weapons, “it would be the end of their country.”

Victor Cha (of the Center for Strategic and International Studies) said “I take Trump’s statement in the same spirit” as Bill Clinton's. It's “a message of deterrence, which is important now to avoid any miscalculation.”

There are 2 other experts quoted in the article. One is Michael Beschloss who wonders if Trump "was impulsive." To be impulsive in making a statement like that would (of course) "be very much out of the history of the presidency on matters like this.... You don’t have presidents blurting out things when lives are at stake, and if that is what it was, it would be scary."

Remember, what Trump said was: "North Korea best not make any more threats to the United States. They will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen. He has been very threatening beyond a normal state and as I said they will be met with fire and fury and frankly power the likes of which this world has never seen before."

Did Trump speak on impulse or with attention to precedent? My opinion is influenced by the phrase "fire and fury." There's alliteration, like Truman's "rain of ruin," and the phrase after the alliterative phrase is almost the same as Truman's. Compare Trump's "like the world has never seen" to Truman's "the like of which has never been seen on this earth." Trump then repeats himself, with a bit of variation. He says "the likes of which this world has never seen before," which gets closer to Truman. It's almost as if he was aware of his difference from Truman and decided to repeat himself to tighten the connection.

He also added the non-alliterative "power" to "fire and fury," and that sounds like an ad lib to me because of the inclusion of the weak introductory word "frankly." Was that impulsive or blurting (to use Beschloss's words)? I wouldn't say so. "Power" conveys less of a threat of nuclear annihilation. It's more general and more opaque. There are endless ways to exercise power. It's a reference to America's great stature in the world — stature that we need to maintain, whatever we think of Donald Trump.

Is President Trump going to adhere to the presidential tradition of press conferences?

Here's a transcript of Hugh Hewitt's conversation with Sean Spicer, who will be the new White House Press Secretary. They're talking about whether President Trump will have the same kind of press conferences we've seen from past presidents, which Hewitt characterized as "regular" and "energetic."

I had to stop and check to see what the tradition of press conferences really is. Has it been distinct and consistent? Here's a piece from the White House Historical Association. Woodrow Wilson started the practice of press conferences, and all of his successors (so far) have used it.

Calvin Coolidge considered it "rather necessary to the carrying on of our republican institution that the people should have a fairly accurate report of what the president is trying to do." Fairly accurate. Trying to do.

JFK — who's right in the middle of the line of men that begins with Wilson and ends with Obama — gave the first live, televised press conferences. Up until Eisenhower, the sessions were not even on the record, and the President retained the power to rewrite his quotes. When Truman said "I think the greatest asset that the Kremlin has is Senator McCarthy," the reporters helped him see that the quote was too exciting and they even assisted him in mushing it up into: "The greatest asset that the Kremlin has is the partisan attempt in the Senate to sabotage the bipartisan foreign policy of the United States."

JFK made the televised press conference into something that served his agenda and suited his particular gifts and desired image. Later Presidents accepted Kennedy's approach but also adapted it. George H. W. Bush introduced the joint press conference with world leaders. Obama has often substituted interviews with one chosen reporter. In his first 2 years, Obama did 21 Kennedy-style press conferences to a roomful of reporters and 269 of those one-on-one encounters.

With that background on presidential press conferences, let's get back to Hewitt and Spicer:

"Like Dylan, he writes his own songs, so of course he will write a wonderful book."

Said the literary agent for Prince, whose book deal was just announced. The publisher was garrulous: "Prince is a towering figure blah blah blah..." The 5-foot-2 rock star was laconic: "You still read books, right?"

Rock memoirs have proved a lucrative niche for publishers as baby boomers snap up books by their favorite performers. The gold standards in terms of both sales and literary qualify include “Life” by Keith Richards (776,683 print copies sold, according to Nielsen), “Chronicles” by Bob Dylan (560,706) and “Just Kids” by Patti Smith (466,635).

I've read all 3 of those — and Eric Clapton's book too — so I guess I'm in the niche. And I love Prince. But the author needs to tell good stories on himself — like Richards, Smith, and Clapton — or have an endless assortment of interesting things — like Bob Dylan. I don't know if Prince is up for any of that. He seems so secretive and enigmatic. But it's surely not enough to "like Dylan" write ones own songs. Song lyrics are song lyrics for a reason. They go with singing and lots of instrumentation. When read, what seemed sublime is often stupid.

I did a chapter-by-chapter series of blog posts when I read Dylan's "Chronicles" in 2004. Sample:

Dylan seems to have gotten some ideas from Harry Truman, whom his parents took him to see when he was a kid: "Truman was gray hatted, a slight figure, spoke in the same kind of nasal twang and tone like a country singer. I was mesmerized by his slow drawl and sense of seriousness and how people hung on every word he was saying." Pp. 230-231....

A Bob Dylan political opinion: "I wasn't that comfortable with all the psycho polemic babble. It wasn't my particular feast of food. Even the current news made me nervous. I liked the old news better." P. 283.

UPDATE: Meade and I are discussing the meaning of "Just look for the purple banana til they put us in the truck." I say it was what was a typical Prince message: Live it up because you're going to die. The banana is obviously the man's penis and the truck is the hearse that takes you away. Meade says the truck is the vagina. He agreed about the banana. 

"Trump Defeats Kanye" = Kanye wins in 2020 (and Trump wins in 2016).

A nice new New Yorker cover, by Barry Blitt:



Historical reference:

"How the Hiroshima bombing is taught around the world."

A WaPo article. Excerpt:

Philippines: "Horrible atomic bombs" brought Japan to her knees.

Canada: "Most Canadians are unaware of the crucial role Canada played in the development of the atomic bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki." (A uranium refinery in Ontario supplied the Manhattan Project.)

Italy: "There was no doubt that in very little time the Japanese, already at the end of their tether, would have had to surrender ... What seems certain is that the show of force, made indiscriminately at the expense of unarmed people, increased the United States' weight in post-war tensions and decisions, especially concerning the Soviet Union. It is probably therefore that Truman's decision was inspired more by post-war prospects than by calculations on the most convenient method to put an end to the conflict with Japan."

Help me make a list of people who have been imitated by a President of the United States.

The previous post has video of Harry Truman doing an imitation of the radio commentator H.V. Kaltenborn. And I can remember Barack Obama imitating Al Green. Or maybe that shouldn't count. He was just doing his best at singing "Let's Stay Together." Oh, I see that later he joked: "Tonight, I am speaking not just as a President, but as one of America's best-known Al Green impersonators." Obama also imitated the Seahawks' Richard Sherman: "I'm the best President in the game!"

I couldn't think of anything else. I googled people who have been imitated by presidents, and the first hit was a NYT pieced called "The Spirit of the President. Let it be Imitated." which I misread as promising for my list-making purpose. Turned out it was from November 12, 1864. Abraham Lincoln had called upon "all having a common interest [to] reunite in a common effort to save our common country," and the NYT editors recommended an imitation of his "forbearing and generous spirit." That's an immensely interesting detour, profound when I'm being lightweight. I'm only mentioning it because it's my way to blog about the process of blogging, and today, especially, has been a day of blogging details.

I'm genuinely trying to make a a list of people who have been imitated by a President of the United States.

A witty allusion to H.V. Kaltenborn.

For reasons that need not be explained here, today's post titled "Out-olding the nouveau old" eventually gets around to the topic of what Holden Caulfield ate in "Catcher in Rye," and I quote him saying:

When I’m out somewhere, I generally just eat a Swiss cheese sandwich and a malted milk. It isn’t much, but you get quite a lot of vitamins in the malted milk. H. V. Caulfield. Holden Vitamin Caulfield.

This prompts commenter Rob to say — and I have no reason to doubt the truth of this:

I'm guessing there's damned few readers today of The Catcher in the Rye who pick up that in talking about "H.V. Caulfield" Salinger was making a witty allusion to H.V. Kaltenborn.

At the link, we learn of the radio commenter who was born in Milwaukee in 1878 and lived until 1965. Apparently, Kaltenborn could speak vividly and intelligently without a script for hours. I liked this anecdote about him and Dizzy Dean:

As of 1978, there were only 3 presidential candidates — known to Theodore White — who had not succumbed to sexual adventures with women who were not their wives.

"In his 1978 memoir, Theodore White, the most prolific and influential chronicler of presidential politics in the last half of the twentieth century, made John Kennedy and most of the other candidates he’d known sound like the Rolling Stones gathering up groupies on a North American tour. 'What was later written about Kennedy and women bothered White but little,' he wrote. 'He knew that Kennedy loved his wife — but that Kennedy, the politician, exuded that musk odor of power which acts as an aphrodisiac to of the other candidates he’d known sound like the Rolling Stones gathering up groupies on a North American tour. White was reasonably sure that only three presidential candidates he had ever met had denied themselves the pleasures invited by that aphrodisiac — Harry Truman, George Romney and Jimmy Carter. He was reasonably sure that all the others he had met had, at one time or another, on the campaign trail, accepted casual partners.” (Yes, White wrote his memoir in the reportorial third-person voice, and he used terms like 'musk odor.' It was a different time.)"

From the new book by Matt Bai, "All the Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid." That book is about how reporting on presidential candidates changed in 1987, when, for various reasons, the reporters who followed the candidates suddenly broke their conspiracy of silence and destroyed Gary Hart.

Long-headed.

Long-headed?! Meade questions my word use in a previous post. It came to mind because I was just law-professing the famous Supreme Court case Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer, within which the long-headed lawprof-turned-justice Felix Frankfurter — explaining that the Constitution's Framers "were not inexperienced doctrinaires" — wrote:

These long-headed statesmen had no illusion that our people enjoyed biological or psychological or sociological immunities from the hazards of concentrated power. It is absurd to see a dictator in a representative product of the sturdy democratic traditions of the Mississippi Valley. The accretion of dangerous power does not come in a day. It does come, however slowly, from the generative force of unchecked disregard of the restrictions that fence in even the most disinterested assertion of authority.

The "representative product of the sturdy democratic traditions of the Mississippi Valley" was Harry Truman, who had accreted a little too much power.

The (unlinkable) OED defines "long-headed" — definition #2 — as "Of great discernment or foresight; discerning, shrewd, far-seeing." The historical examples include:

1711   R. Steele Spectator No. 52. ⁋3   Being a long-headed Gentlewoman, I am apt to imagine she has some further Design than you have yet penetrated....
1841   Dickens Old Curiosity Shop ii. lxvii. 178   Men of the world, long-headed customers, knowing dogs.
1864   J. R. Lowell McClellan or Lincoln? in Prose Wks. (1890) V. 173   Mr. Lincoln is a long-headed and long-purposed man.

Searching my own files, I see this in Henry David Thoreau's "Walden":

Or on a Sunday afternoon, if I chanced to be at home, I heard the cronching of the snow made by the step of a long-headed farmer, who from far through the woods sought my house, to have a social "crack"; one of the few of his vocation who are "men on their farms"; who donned a frock instead of a professor's gown, and is as ready to extract the moral out of church or state as to haul a load of manure from his barn-yard. We talked of rude and simple times, when men sat about large fires in cold, bracing weather, with clear heads; and when other dessert failed, we tried our teeth on many a nut which wise squirrels have long since abandoned, for those which have the thickest shells are commonly empty.

Now, don your frock, cronch on in to the comments section, and have a social crack with the long-headed squirrels of Althouse. Extract morals, haul a load of manure, talk of rude and simple times, or try your teeth on the toughest empty nuts. You know who they are!

"McCain jokingly wiped his face, pretending to wipe off moss."

Moss can't be wiped off, and it's not — like the metaphorical egg — only on the face.

In fact, the standard term is mossback:

A reactionary; one who furiously resists progress of any kind.

The word is derived from a sea creature so ancient that it has moss or seaweed growing on its back. During the Civil War it was used to describe those who fled to the swamps and forests to evade the draft; in the 1870s the word was given a political meaning as a Northern counterpart to a Southern "Bourbon (i.e., conservative) Democrat."

Emporia Gazette editor William Allen White, in his famed "What's the Matter with Kansas?" editorial in 1896, thundered: "We have an old moss-back Jacksonian who snorts and howls because there is a bathtub in the State House; we are running that old jay for Governor."

Old jay, eh? Was he wacko? Back to the discussion of mossback (which is from the greatly missed William Safire).

Pennsylvania Congressman J.C. Sibley drew a typical word picture in 1900: "Primitive man lived in caverns, clothed himself with skins, and ate his meat raw, sitting on his haunches, and there has never occurred a change for the higher and better forms of life without arousing the hostility of some old mossback, conservative hunker[s], who will prate of those fairer and better days of old, when their grandfathers swung by their tails from the limbs of the trees."

Wacko monkeys.

Will Rogers told defeated Democratic candidate Al Smith in 1929: "taken out from under the influence of a lot of these old Mossbacks, you are a pretty progressive fellow, Al, and with you and this fellow Roosevelt as a kind of nucleus, I think we can, with the help of some Progressive young Democratic governors and senators and congressmen, make this thing into a Party, instead of a Memory."

Make this thing into a Party, instead of a Memory... a good phrase for Republicans to think about today.

The word was relatively dormant during the thirties and early forties, but President Harry Truman gave it new life in the 1948 campaign. In the Far West he charged that the Republican party's domination by "eastern mossbacks" would stifle the economy of the West. Throughout the country, he denounced the Republican chairmen of the Senate and House committees as "a bunch of mossbacks."

One of the lines that best describes a mossback was leveled at House Speaker "Uncle Joe" Cannon: "If he had been present at Creation, he would have voted for Chaos."...

In 1992 President George H.W. Bush complained that he had extended a "hand of friendship" to Congress at the start of his presidency "and these old mossbacks bit it off." Long Island's Newsday reported a year later that "Clinton joined... Richard Nixon in toasting [Strom] Thurmond's inspiring 90-year journey from racist Democratic segregationist to mossback Republican obstructionist."

The Oxford English dictionary has the old Civil War meaning first, then "A slow, rustic, or old-fashioned person; one attached to antiquated ideas; (hence) an extreme conservative; a reactionary. In early use often denoting farmers of the southern and western States of the United States (see quot. 1888)." Examples:

[1850   H. C. Lewis Odd Leaves from Louisiana Swamp Doctor 181   Here you sit, like a knot in a tree, with the moss commencing to grow on your back.]...
1885   Boston (Mass.) Jrnl. 5 Mar. 2/3   Everybody rejoices over the passage of the bill... We say everybody—we except a few intense mossbacks, who were known during the war as copperheads.
1888   America 18 Oct. 16   Mossback..seems to have originated in the swamps of North Carolina, where a particular class of the poor whites were said to have lived among the cypress until the moss had grown on their backs.
1924   J. Buchan Three Hostages i. 10,   I was becoming such a mossback that I had almost stopped reading the papers.

Blaming "politically correct" textbooks for the widespread ignorance about history.

It's David McCullough (the very popular writer of historical biographies):

"History is often taught in categories—women's history, African American history, environmental history—so that many of the students have no sense of chronology. They have no idea what followed what."

What's more, many textbooks have become "so politically correct as to be comic. Very minor characters that are currently fashionable are given considerable space, whereas people of major consequence farther back"—such as, say, Thomas Edison—"are given very little space or none at all."

Mr. McCullough's eyebrows leap at his final point: "And they're so badly written. They're boring! Historians are never required to write for people other than historians."

McCullough sounds a bit self-promoting or self-defensive there. He knows he writes well. He's popular. And other historians disrespect that, perversely. But keep to the point. Who writes textbooks for schoolkids? Not the lofty scholars McCullough has a gripe about. There should be an immense amount of care taken with respect to school textbooks. Why wouldn't those things be written especially well? The whole point is to digest material and present it for the consumption of children.

Also, it seems to me that McCullough himself gives "considerable space" to  "minor characters" to satisfy the "fashionable" interest in women's history. I read his tome about Truman, and there was an insane amount of material about Bess Truman. I mean, there's no historical significance at all to Bess Truman as far as I can remember. It just doesn't matter. It was pablum for female readers. And then he did it again with his book about John Adams. Abigail Adams is more important than Bess Truman, but nevertheless, why are we reading a thousand-page book about a reasonably nice marriage? Clearly, McCullough isn't following some rule about giving characters attention in proportion to their historical significance.

"During the ceremony, Hiroshima’s mayor welcomed the ambassador, John Roos, and praised President Obama..."

"... as one of the world leaders who 'wielded their powerful influence' to rid the world of nuclear weapons."

This is the first time a U.S. ambassador has attended the ceremony. The bomb was dropped on Hiroshima 65 years ago.

The White House and War Department announced today that an atomic bomb, possessing more power than 20,000 tons of TNT, a destructive force equal to the load of 2,000 B-29's and more than 2,000 times the blast power of what previously was the world's most devastating bomb, had been dropped on Japan.

The announcement, first given to the world in utmost solemnity by President Truman, made it plain that one of the scientific landmarks of the century had been passed, and that the "age of atomic energy," which can be a tremendous force for the advancement of civilization as well as for destruction, was at hand....

What happened at Hiroshima is not yet known. The War Department said it "as yet was unable to make an accurate report" because "an impenetrable cloud of dust and smoke" masked the target area from reconnaissance planes. The Secretary of War will release the story "as soon as accurate details of the results of the bombing become available."...

Not the slightest spirit of braggadocio is discernible either in the wording of the official announcements or in the mien of the officials who gave out the news. There was an element of elation in the realization that we had perfected this devastating weapon for employment against an enemy who started the war and has told us she would rather be destroyed than surrender, but it was grim elation. There was sobering awareness of the tremendous responsibility involved....