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Takaki reports much of World War II with great ease in his novel Hiroshima, but he fails to truly encompass that which is Harry S. Truman. He focuses on Truman’s overcompensation of masculinity because of the femininity of his youth, as a source for his choice to drop the bomb on Hiroshima, but this so called cover up of an effeminate nature is not as present as Takaki portrays. Truman was a man whose life revolved around his family, and especially his mother whom he affectionately refers to as “Mamma” through his autobiography. His father was also someone who he loved and felt obligated to help, even when it might hinder his own activities. Harry Truman knew that people misinterpreted his life. He knew that his entire meaning and life was misread by thousands. He explains before the forward of The Autobiography of Harry S Truman, that: “I have read several books and pamphlets about my life, career, ambitions and accomplishments and most of them contain glaring errors. If Herodotus, Thucydides, Tacitus, Plutatch, Greene, Guizot, McCauley [sic], The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire are no more factual than the stories about me so far, then history and biography are just lies and reporters’ readable stories and not facts. I’ve read somewhere that Herodotus said a good historian makes the facts fit the event to make a good reading” (Ferrell, ix). This seems to be the case in many instances of Takaki’s writing, where he on occasion arranges quotes and words together so that they seems to have parallels that are not there in order to create more of a textual flow. In Takaki’s Hiroshima, he explains that “when [Truman] was a child, this strong president had been regarded as effeminate and weak” (109). The first refutable part of that statement was that Truman was a strong president. Yes. On the exterior he had many strong attributes, but on the interior of his adult self he was weak and dependant on the affection of his wife and his doting mother. In Dear Bess, a collection of letters to Truman’s wife, Truman writes: “Well I’ve been here six days and have one letter. None came yesterday and none in this morning’s mail. So I guess I’ll have to phone collect to see if you are up and around. You don’t know how badly I feel when I don’t get a letter. I had a terrific headache yesterday” (381). Truman relied on the love of his wife while he was president, but when you go back to his youth the story was not entirely different. Truman was not an effeminate child. He had glasses which his mother did not want broken.
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