George Bush’s Gulf Tears

I can’t help wondering why William F. Buckley Jr., in his defense of George Bush’s tears before the Gulf War (“A Commander Pays Honor With Tears,” Column Right, June 9) felt compelled to contrast these understandable tears at sending “Americans in some cases to their deaths” with President Truman’s decision to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. “. . . (Truman) had his usual ho-ho hearty dinner and went calmly to bed.”

Equating these two situations and implying that Truman was a heartless man who laughed all the way to bed can only be put down to Buckley’s extreme partisanship. Bush cried for American lives; it has not been reported that he worried much about Iraqi lives. Truman’s action, if it saved the United States from having to invade Japan, saved, according to contemporary estimates, 100,000 to 1 million American lives and many more Japanese than died at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

In addition, we were in the midst of a bloody war where the memories of Pearl Harbor, the Bataan death march, the reports of Japanese atrocities and the losses we had suffered in taking back some of the conquered territory were fresh in our minds. Not many people would have cried over the decision to drop the bombs as the price of ending the war, especially as we were killing almost as many people in firebomb raids every week.

JOHN R. SELLARS

Redondo Beach