Clifton Truman Daniel - Beneath the Mushroom Cloud

 

My grandfather was Harry Truman. He is known for a great many things, but the one that always comes up, and the one that usually comes up first is his decision to use atomic weapons against Japan in 1945. My grandfather never spoke to me about that decision. To be fair, I probably didn't give him a chance. You had to be careful around my grandfather. He would give you a history lesson if he could catch you. [audience chuckles] 

 

I learned about Hiroshima and Nagasaki the same way that all of you did, from a history book. And my history book did not have a whole lot. It has to cover a lot. So, there was a page and a half. There was explanation, there were casualty figures, there was usually a picture of the mushroom cloud. But there wasn't much or anything at all about what happened to the people on the ground.

 

In 1994, three things happened. I was 37 years old. The first thing was that I agreed to join the board of the Harry S. Truman Library in Independence, Missouri. I had not, up to that point, taken an active role in my grandfather's legacy. I was married, I had started a family, I was working as a newspaper reporter in Wilmington, North Carolina. But my mother, Margaret Truman, had gotten older and had felt that it was time to pass the baton to have the next generation come in.

 

At about this time, my editor on the newspaper said, "There is a Japanese exchange student in town. She is going to give a demonstration of ikebana, Japanese flower arranging. Go out, interview her. I need a story for tomorrow's paper." So, I met the young woman and her host, who was an older guy who lived in town. I knew him. And at the end of the interview, he, her host, said to me, "I told her who your grandfather was." And she smiled and bowed and said, "That's very nice." And I said, "Thanks." 

 

And in the next second, he said to her, "Tell him about your grandfather." She looked very uncomfortable. She stared at the floor. When she didn't answer, he said to me, "Her grandfather was killed in Hiroshima." I said to her the only thing that I think one human being can say to another in a case like that, I said, "I am so sorry. I am so sorry you lost your grandfather." But what she did surprised me. She looked me in the eyes and smiled and said, "Thank you." And in that brief instant, I thought that both of us wanted to walk over there and knock her host on his butt [audience chuckles] for putting us in that situation.

 

The third thing that happened, actually happened three days earlier. My mother, Margaret Truman, had agreed to give the keynote address at ceremonies in Wilmington, marking the 50th anniversary of the D-Day landings at Normandy. As we're all leaving theater at the end of the show, big crowd of us going out, two older men were trying to get my mother's attention. They were reaching for her sleeve, and they missed. My mother was whisked out the door with the crowd, put in a car, and driven back to her hotel. 

 

My wife and I were behind her. So, we turned to these two gentlemen and asked if there's anything we could do. We noticed that both of them had tears in their eyes. And we said, "What's wrong?" And they said, "Nothing. Nothing, we just wanted to thank her. If it hadn't been for her father dropping that bomb, neither one of us would be alive." They were Pacific War veterans.

 

Five years later, we are now living in Chicago. We moved to Chicago. And my son Wesley, who is now 25 years old, he was 10 years old at the time. He came home from school with a book, Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes. For those of you who don't know the story, Sadako Sasaki was a real little girl. She lived in Hiroshima. She was two years old when the bomb exploded. She and her family survived, but Sadako was diagnosed nine years later with radiation induced leukemia. 

 

To help her treatment, she followed a Japanese tradition that says, if you fold a thousand origami paper cranes, you are granted a wish or a long life or health. There are several interpretations. The most popular version of this story has her folding 644 cranes. Her family says that she actually folded closer to 1,500. Spiritually, it was a great help to her, but sadly, she died of the leukemia in October of 1955. There is a monument to Sadako and to all the children killed, wounded, sickened by the bomb that stands in Hiroshima's Peace Memorial Park to this day.

 

Thinking of the Japanese exchange student and thinking of the two Pacific War veterans, I told Wesley that I was glad he was reading this book, because he needed to understand both his great grandfather's decision, but also understand what that cost the Japanese people. His teacher didn't stop with the book. She taught them Japanese history, she taught them culture, she taught them geography. I came home one afternoon and found my living room coffee table covered with sushi and green tea, and Wesley standing next to it wearing a kimono. [audience chuckles] 

 

He brought all of Japan into our lives. He brought the country, the culture, everything into our household. Over the next four or five years, I mentioned this to a couple of different Japanese journalists, who were working on stories on the anniversaries of the bombings. And one day, my phone rang. It was from a call from Japan. It was Masahiro Sasaki, Sadako's older brother, himself a survivor of Hiroshima. And he said he'd heard that I had read his sister's story and he would like to meet me someday. 

 

We met in New York in 2010, where Masahiro and his son Yuji were donating one of Sadako's last folded cranes to the World Trade Center Memorial, as a gesture of healing. And during that meeting, Yuji Sasaki produced a small box, and took out of it a tiny paper crane, and put it in my palm. And he said, "That's the last one Sadako folded before she died. Will you come to Hiroshima and Nagasaki for the memorial ceremonies?" And I said, “Yes.”

 

We arrived in Tokyo in August of 2012. And the train ride from Narita airport into Tokyo proper, it is about an hour. And my family and I, I took my wife and my two sons, Wesley and Gates. We all had our faces shoved up against the windows of the train, because all this time, the last two years, we had been soaking up Japan. We had been soaking up the culture, the food. We had been watching one Miyazaki movie after another. [audience chuckles] 

 

And here it all was on the outside of the train. Villages, houses, rice fields, mountains, forests of bamboo. We were in Japan. We were there for a very somber purpose, but we loved being there. We had sushi and sake, and went to bed happy that night. And the next morning, I had my first interview with NHK, the nation's largest television network. And the young lady who interviewed me started off with a couple of intro questions. She said, "How was your flight? How do you like Tokyo?" And the third question was, "Are you here to apologize?" And I said, "With respect, no." And she said, "Well, then, why did you bother coming?" 

 

All of the advance publicity for this trip had been positive. Japanese reporters had come to my home in Chicago and interviewed me and turned in upbeat stories, this looked like it was going to be very well accepted. So, this question caught me flat footed. I stammered through it. I said, "It's not about apology. It's about reconciliation. It's about honoring the dead and listening to the living." She didn't like any answer I gave her. She rephrased the question over and over and over again, digging for a different answer. And it finally got so uncomfortable that my interpreter almost stopped the interview.

 

And that afternoon on the train to Hiroshima, I thought, God, what have I done? What have I gotten myself into? I am not a representative of the United States. I am a private citizen. I cannot apologize for my grandfather. I cannot apologize for my country. I've held Sadako's crane in one hand, and I have held in my other hand the hands of men who fought a horrible and bloody war. What's going to happen when I keep saying no? How is this going to-- Is this whole thing just going to be a bust? I worried about it all night in Hiroshima. I practiced that answer over and over again, so at least I wouldn't fumble through it, at least I would be succinct. I didn't sleep much.

 

We got up the next morning and went into the Peace Park. And there, around the base of Sadako's statue, around the children's peace memorial were 30 or 40 reporters, cameras, microphones. And I thought, here we go. I braced myself to just spend the next week answering apology questions. And out of the middle of this throng came Masahiro Sasaki. And he walked up to me. I hadn't seen him for two years, since the first time we met. And he walked up to me, and he smiled, and he put his arms around me, and hugged me. My worries vanished, because we were going to do this together. We did everything together after that. 

 

Masahiro answered the apology question for me. He always got in front of that. And what he essentially said was, "If we ask them for an apology for Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they can ask us for one for Pearl Harbor. And where do we go from there?" The survivors themselves-- We interviewed Masahiro. I sat down with more than two dozen survivors, and just let them tell me their stories. It's hard to describe, and it's hard to imagine what they went through. Burned, the skin stripped from their arms and legs, their houses destroyed, their children trapped in the rubble, burning to death because they couldn't get them out. People vanished in an instant, vaporized. 

 

Yet none of them, none of them asked me for an apology. None of them came to me in anger, none came with recrimination. They only asked that I listen. Sakue Shimohira, who survived Nagasaki, said, "I think the basic idea of peace is to have some understanding of other people's pain." She and the other survivors asked only that I listen to them, and I tell their stories to you, to anyone else who will listen, so that every one of us understands what it's like to live through a nuclear explosion, so that hopefully, we never, ever do this to each other again. Thank you.