‘Oppenheimer’ is a great film about the wrong guy

Free Harry S. Get Truman Updates

we will send you one myFT Daily Digest Latest Email Rounding Harry S. Truman News every morning.

The fact that J. That Robert Oppenheimer expressed anguish over his role in the creation of the atomic bomb is not interesting. Did he have to whistle for it to work? Harry Truman, who had the responsibility to use the “Gadget”, is the more dramatic figure, precisely because he made the most history-changing executive decision since Pontius Pilate, without any outward hesitation.

In Christopher Nolan’s biopic of Oppenheimer, the 33rd US president is given just one scene, in which he prances around as a provincial buffoon who can’t say Nagasaki correctly. Besides its over-reliance on dialogue for exposition and its naïveté about the prospects of complete Axis surrender, this description of NATO’s father is the most troubling thing in a great film whose three hours hardly drags on.

Over the past decade, as Donald Trump won the presidency, Vladimir Putin annexed Crimea and Xi Jinping set China on a more assertive path, liberals have tried to give a name to what we are defending from these revisionist leaders. The best effort, the “rules-based international order”, is terrible. So call it The Truman Show.

It is Truman who made the fundamental decisions of our world: keeping America in Europe after 1945, encircling vulnerable spots even further, reducing industrial tariffs. In ending American isolation, his predecessor, Franklin Roosevelt, had found the “advantage” of World War I. Truman set himself a difficult task: maintaining America’s forward position during peacetime. As a result, all empires except in name had to pay the price. But the last 18 months have been an excellent education in its use. Now imagine Ukraine without a committed America. In the other 18, depending on how Americans vote, you might not have to.

The lesson of this decade so far is that liberalism is not going to survive without hard power. And the humiliation of those who ruled before has not been adequately calculated. I am not calling for show trial, although it is important to know what is probed and what is not. The Covid pandemic is under scrutiny in the UK, but not for a fall in the defense budget since the 1980s. There was much talk on the Iraq War but not on the (warlike) response to Russia’s incursions into Georgia and Crimea. Could it have been stronger? How much did this embolden the Kremlin?

The trouble with Inquiry-itis, this virus not confined to the UK, is its focus on acts of commission, not omission. In retrospect, Barack Obama has taken his quiet detachment too far, at least in foreign policy. Few administrations anywhere in the West have had worse timing than Angela Merkel’s complacency. Yet, in polite society, each of those names still carries far less stigma than those of George W. Bush or Tony Blair. Active Defeat of the Iraq War. That moral calculation may be correct, but it doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.

Truman’s reputation remained tarnished for decades. His intervention in Korea was disastrous and somewhat of a failure. But what if the West had not shown itself to be a counterweight to any communist progress anywhere?

If they are ignored (how many Westerners can imagine them?) it is for two reasons. First, he reminds us of what liberalism has done to survive so far. The film treats the atomic bombing of Japan as a unique moral compromise, and it might as well be. But “conventional” weapons reduced much of Tokyo to ashes in a single night. The Allies bombed German civilians. As far as America’s own past goes, the Union did not heroically defeat the Confederacy.

Nowhere in liberalism was the mixture of high prudence and its opposite more so than in Truman’s personality. He freed the Philippines from colonization. He stood against future warrior-king General Douglas MacArthur for civilian control of the government. At the same time, this product of seriously rum municipal politics was called a bomb. “Blessings” Not long after he got used to it and joined the Red Scare at home. Oppenheimer’s urban manners and Vedic education do not make him a more morally complex person.

And so Truman is ambiguous for another reason. Conceit. It’s hard for some liberals to accept that we owe our world to a failed haberdasher from Missouri: the son of a mule-trader, the butt of gentle derision by his sixties, he became perhaps the most powerful man who will ever live. (Neither his predecessor nor his successor had a nuclear monopoly.) He leaves behind no texts and few epigrams, certainly not in translated Sanskrit. But he knew that a liberal must learn to walk with the beast, if not with the devil.

janan.ganesh@ft.com