Today, Pew Research finds that Americans are equally divided between those who believe the bombings were justified, those who believe they weren’t, and those who aren’t sure. Politically, the division is much less even. Fifty-one percent of conservatives justify the decision to destroy the cities, while 42 percent of Democrats do not.
This is a historical anomaly. In the aftermath of President Harry Truman’s decision to deploy the bomb, conservative leaders were his most prominent critics. That included Felix Morley, cofounder of Human Events, and Medford Evans, who wrote in National Review in 1959, “The indefensibility of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima is becoming a part of the national conservative creed.”
“There was in fact mounting criticism after the war, started by the conservatives, not by the liberals, who defended Truman,” explains Gar Alperowitz, whose 1995 work The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb and the Architecture of an American Myth remains the definitive analysis of the internal debate and timeline leading up to Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
One of Truman’s predecessors in office, Herbert Hoover, had in his post-presidency become a kind of old man of the American right—a stature far removed from the progressivism he practiced in the White House. But what Hoover could lay claim to was a lifetime commitment to humanitarianism, and after Hiroshima he wrote, “The use of the atomic bomb, with its indiscriminate killing of women and children, revolts my soul.”
Dissent from Truman’s rationale extended to his eventual successor as well. Supreme Allied Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower counseled against using the bomb to Secretary of War Henry Stimson in July. “First, the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing,” he recalled to Newsweek in 1963. “Second, I hated to see our country be the first to use such a weapon.”
After Hiroshima, the personal pilot of General Douglas MacArthur—who hadn’t been consulted about the decision beforehand—recorded that his superior “is appalled and depressed by this Frankenstein monster [the atom bomb].” MacArthur was later touted as a Republican presidential prospect (actually as early as 1944), and for the remainder of his life he maintained that the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki served no military utility.