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Frances PerkinsFrances Perkins
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Perkins:

No. No, they hadn't yet. And he'd never had to make the decision whether you should use it or not, because they hadn't actually gotten it. They knew it would work, but they hadn't come to him and said, “Now, this goes-- shall we shoot it off?”

That was poor Truman's tragedy. He had to do that. Roosevelt had authorized them to go ahead in the development of weapons and experiments. Well, that was a general order, of course, and his assent to it was just a general assent, as you would assent to anything. Somebody's got a good idea--all right, explore it. Just as he explored the turtle-boats, and all that kind of thing.

No, I don't think he thought too much about the postwar in this country. He put up these committees and he believed they would do the right thing. “Yes, “he listened to their reports, “yes, that was good, and that's good.” And the speech that he made, you see--it was not long before this time--in which he said “sixty million jobs,” that was quite a long, quite a worked-out speech about the postwar period. In it he was saying, “We're going to come out all right, don't worry about this, we're going to do this and this--”

That was the direction of his thinking, and it was well bulwarked by the work that the various committees had already done.





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