I have been amazed at how many people have
gotten so riled up over anything that Harry Truman might have said about the
Marines. Truman was an equal-opportunity bigot and smear-monger, even to the
point of being an anti-Semit. If one goes to: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/3059087.stm, there is the report about how old Harry "described Jews as "very,
very selfish . . . They [the Jews] care not how many
Estonians, Latvians, Finns, Poles, Yugoslavs or Greeks get murdered or
mistreated as D[isplaced] P[ersons] as long as the Jews get special
treatment," he wrote in 1947.
"Yet when they have power, physical, financial or
political, neither Hitler nor Stalin has anything on them for cruelty or
mistreatment to the underdog.
"Put an underdog on top and it makes no difference whether
his name is Russian, Jewish, Negro, Management, Labor, Mormon, Baptist, he
goes haywire.
"I've found very, very few who remember their past
condition when prosperity comes."
All that can be attributed to Truman is that he was
an unabashed bigot, meteoric tempered, never forgave a slight, and wroye down
too many personal thoughts that were best kept unsaid. That being said from a
historian's perspective, I think that there has been far too much time spent
on this thread on what and why this smallish man said about one of this
country's armed services.
Though Truman was not the
onlt former president who was bigoted, FDR even had a plan for the forced
eugenics of the entire Japanese race with south-Pacific islanders to "bread"
out their militant tendencies. But thankfully, this country, and the office of
the presidency is larger than the petty foibles of a few small men. I would
hope that the readers and contributers to this thread are made of the same
stearner metal than to take some small slight as grounds to take some off-hand
remark as a personal offense.
Harold
Stockton