US May Never Apologise For Hiroshima, Nagasaki: President Truman's Grandson

Clifton Truman Daniel, the grandson of President Harry Truman, who ordered the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki 70 years ago, goes back into time, remembering his gradual evolution for a drive towards a nuclear-free world, according to rt. 

President Harry Truman's only child, fiction writer Mary Margaret, saw his grandfather regularly, but only at school did he find out that the grandpa was a president. He learnt about the WWII from history books, and "for many years felt no personal connection to the pivotal events of the 20th century".

"The bombs were a great thing. They ended the war. They saved hundreds of thousands of lives on both sides and that's what my grandfather said was his reason for the decision. To shorten the war and save American lives that would likely be lost in an invasion of the main islands. I went from thinking about it in that way to not thinking about it, as I say, it was history," he recalled.

His approach went a sea change when he read about Sadako Sasaki, the survivor of Hiroshima at the age of two, who died of "radiation-induced leukemia" after nine years.

 "As I said earlier, my text book had numbers and reasons and planes and megatons. There wasn't anything that happened to little girls," Daniel said. "I went from not giving it much thought at all to being confronted one day with the reality that people lost their lives and in horrible ways and that has sort of brought me to the middle."

While addressing U.S. high school students at an event organized to discuss war and peace in New York City in April, he said: "I can love and respect my grandfather. Yet it turns out that I have friends who I also love and respect who were horribly, horribly hurt by his decision," he said, according to the-japan-news.  "And that's where I stand today, right in the middle."

In 2012, he was the first Truman member to visit Japan, where he was part of the commemoration for the victims. He was called by Sadako's older brother, Masahiro Sasaki.

Daniel's "toughest" moment was when a Japanese journalist asked him repeatedly whether he would apologise for his grandfather's act.

He never did.

 "I don't know that there'll ever be an apology. Maybe the two countries can find language that brings them together to say 'you know we acknowledge that serious hurt was done on both sides and we own that and going forward we pledge not to do something like that' but it doesn't feel at this point that there will ever be a flat out apology from the US to Japan or the other way around," he explained.

After all, President Harry Truman felt that he had been saving a lot of American lives. He had "first-hand experience of battlefield during World War I and valued soldiers' lives," said Daniel.

 "The real question which we keep trying to answer but we can't is did it in fact stop the war. Some people say no, Japan would have surrendered anyway; other people say they were not giving up, it stopped them cold," Daniel said. "But we can't know that because we did it and the war ended, so we don't know how it would have gone."

"I think that Americans can still look at the decision and they can still say it was done for the right reasons," he added. "They can also say look what it cost. They can have empathy. It doesn't take anything away."