Chris Wallace, the host of Fox News Sunday, discusses his new book, "Countdown 1945," about the turbulent first days of Harry Truman's presidency through the bombing of Hiroshima to end World War II, and what it's like to be on the receiving end of angry tweets by our current president.
Veteran television journalist Chris Wallace, the host of Fox News Sunday, discusses his new book, "Countdown 1945," detailing the turbulent first 116 days of Harry Truman's presidency, from Truman unexpectedly becoming president in the wake of Franklin Roosevelt's death to the bombing of Hiroshima to end World War II. Wallace also shares what it's like to be on the receiving end of angry tweets by our current president and weighs in on how news organizations—including Fox News—add to the divisions we currently see in our nation today.
Copies of "Countdown 1945" are available to purchase from The Store at LBJ.
[Podcast introduction with theme music in the background]
President Lyndon Baines Johnson: So it's all here, the story of our time—with the bark off.
Mark Updegrove: That was President Lyndon Baines Johnson upon the dedication of his presidential library in 1971. Since then, the library has played host to the biggest names and best minds of our day, who have helped to tell the story of our times through candid, revealing conversations—with the bark off.
This podcast delivers them straight to you. Welcome to “With the Bark Off.” I'm Mark Updegrove.
Our guest today is veteran television journalist Chris Wallace—the host of Fox News Sunday. He talks to us about his new book Countdown:1945 about the turbulent first days of Harry Truman's presidency through the bombing of Hiroshima to end World War II and what it's like to be on the receiving end of angry tweets by our current president.
[Slow fade of theme music. Conversation begins.]
Mark Updegrove:Chris Wallace, welcome to "With the Bark Off" and congratulations on the publication of “Countdown 1945.”
Chris Wallace: Well, uh, thank you. Uh, you're more of a veteran of book writing than I am. Uh, I have to say, I'm very excited about it, very proud of it. uhm, as I'm sure you know, when any project you do, whether it's a TV show or a news report or a book, you know, your original idea and intention and setting out to do it, oftentimes it doesn't turn out that way. And I have to say, this book has turned out exactly the way I wanted it to be, which is a, a good, fascinating, entertaining, informative ride, easy, and I hope pleasurable to read that in which you, you're discussing something that most people think they know something about. But hopefully and I think it's true in this book, you're constantly surprised by things. Gee, I didn't know that happened there.
Mark Updegrove: Well, I can attest to the fact that is both easy and a pleasure to read. Uhm, I very much enjoyed reading it myself and the book, as the title suggests counts down a period from April 12th to August 6th, 1945, and you write in the book, "in just 116 days, a new, untested leader made one of the most consequential decisions. He ushered in the nuclear age, creating a world where the future of mankind now rests on a hair trigger." And the idea of this book came to you in Nancy Pelosi's office in February 2019. Talk about the genesis of this book.
Chris Wallace: Well, yeah, it's funny. There, there's sort of two uh, genesis, uh geneses of the book. And the first is that I had a concept and it goes back to another history book I read called "April 1865" by Jay Winik, which I very much recommend to your listeners. Uhm and, and it's a deep dive into a very tight period, of two or three weeks in April of 1865. Lee surrenders to Grant at Appomattox. Truman [sic] begins his second administration and then he goes to Ford's Theater and is assassinated. And all of this happens, as I say, in one month in 1865. And one of the things I loved about the book was that all of these momentous events that people were generally aware of are all connected. And because he took such a focused period of time, he was able to, to drill down and almost a novelistic approach, it's all solidly researched, but in a very focused way tell you what was going on, what people were wearing, what they were thinking. And uh, so I had the concept to do it. But I didn't have a topic, I didn't have the period of time.
And as you point out, in February of 2019, uhm, Donald Trump was about to give his State of the Union speech one day, and he invited a number of us anchors over to the, the White House at lunch in the, in the state dining room to discuss, and presidents do this routinely, what he was going to say that night and then afterwards, about three or four of us were invited over to the Capitol for, and this is also common, the speaker of the House, if he or she is of the opposing party, gives a prebuttal where they basically say, "everything that is wrong with the speech that the president has not yet given, but that he's [inaudible]." So that when you're commenting on it that night, you already know what the pushback is from the other party.
So, we, we were invited to this room and I'd covered the Capitol for a year and a half back in the 80s, late 70s, and but, I was in a room I'd never been in. And Nancy Pelosi, the speaker, said this was the board of education. I have to say, I think most of my colleagues have no idea what that meant. But as a student of history, I did. And I was very excited because this was the room that Sam Rayburn, Mr. Sam, when he was the speaker of the House, had used, uh, little hideaway room nine on the ground floor of the Capitol, uh, that, that he would invite, and it was by invitation only, select members of Congress or other political cronies, uh, to after hours to have a, uh, uh tumbler of bourbon and branch water and to discuss political, uh, gossip or to discuss strategy or to give them marching orders. So, first of all, I was excited to be in the room. And then she said, "and this was the room where Harry Truman found out in April of eight, of 1945 that Truman, that rather Roosevelt had died, and he had become suddenly president of the United States." She got it slightly wrong. He didn't find out that he was president. He got, he was told, "call the White House" he called the White House and FDR, his secretary, a guy named Steve Early said to him, "get to the White House quickly and quietly as possible." Well, the things she said that really piqued my interest, she said, "when he hung up the phone, he said, 'Jesus Christ and General Jackson', which is, I have to say, an explanation I had never heard before.
Mark Updegrove: Uh, very Harry Truman.
Chris Wallace: And I suddenly thought to myself, this is it. This is the deep dive. And, uh, I, so I owe it to Nancy Pelosi. Now, I didn't know... I knew I was going to do the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima. But I have to say, I found myself the rest of the day thinking about the 33rd president of the United States and not the 45th.
Mark Updegrove: Harry Truman said of that day, April 12th, 1945, "the world fell in on me." What, what were the circumstances under which Harry Truman took office?
Chris Wallace: Well, you know, and, and you do, you know this, I mean, as a historian, and it's why we love what we do, and why as a reporter, most of the time, you know, truth is so much more interesting and oftentimes more shocking and an unbelievable than fiction. Uh, he has been in office for three months. He's the vice president. The reason he was put on the ticket, FDR had nothing really to do with it. Uh, the Democratic power, power brokers that the current vice president was Henry Wallace. And he was pretty far to the left and, and the Democratic Party, uh, officials were worried about him being the vice president, particularly because although Roosevelt thought that he was going to live forever and be able to, to uh prosecute the end of World War II, all the people around him saw that his health was really failing. And they definitely did not want a President Henry Wallace. Though, at the convention was in Chicago that year, and Roosevelt basically left it to them. And they, they looked around, they thought about it, and they came to the conclusion... there are a number of people who were being considered, Alvin Barkley and Jimmy Burns, the senator and Supreme Court Justice. Uh, and they basically said Truman, his qualification was he would hurt the ticket the least. He was the least objectionable person. So, on that great basis, they said "you should be the vice president." And they asked Roosevelt, he didn't care because I would say he was going to be immortal.
And uh, so he was on the ticket and he literally was shut out from the moment that he became vice president. This is April. It's, what, two, three months after the inauguration in January. And he had met privately with Roosevelt twice in all that time. He had no contact with him at all. So, he, when Truman comes to the White House after the Jesus Christ and, and General Jackson explanation, he arrives on the second floor. He thinks Roosevelt, who was supposed to be in Warm Springs, Georgia, perhaps had come back as a surprise and for some reason wanted to talk to him. He arrives on this... is ushered up to the second floor, and there is Eleanor Roosevelt, the first lady, and her daughter dressed in black and they, she comes up to him and says, "Harry, the president is dead." And he says, I mean, again, all of this extraordinary. He says, "Mrs. Roosevelt, is there anything I can do for you?" And she says, "Harry, is there anything we can do for you? Because you're the one in trouble now." So, he is sworn in. They couldn't find a Bible; finally, they find a Gideon's Bible in the usher’s desk in the front of all of the White House. He calls his wife Bess and his daughter Margaret, who are living in a two-bedroom apartment up on Connecticut Avenue in Washington. They get there; the chief justice gets there; and he, he, uh, takes the oath of office, and everybody starts to leave, and Henry Stimson, who is the embodiment of the eastern establishment: he's 77 years old, he's the secretary of war, he has worked for five presidents. He is now... Truman will be his sixth president. Says "Mr. President, I need to talk to you for a minute." And he takes him aside by himself and he says, "there is this highly secret project in which we have developed a weapon of immense, incomprehensible power. But you've just been sworn into office, I've got to leave you to settle down and then I'll tell you about it."
And that is literally the first time and as much detail that Harry Truman has about the Manhattan Project. At that moment, the new president of United States has no idea that for three years under the order of Franklin D. Roosevelt, 125,000 people have been working across the country at Los Alamos and Oak Ridge and Hanford, uh, enriching uranium fuel, coming up with a nuclear weapon. And he is now, he, Truman is now going to be the man who has to decide whether or not to use it against the Japanese. And the countdown is the countdown of 116 days from that moment until the bomb is dropped on Hiroshima.
Mark Updegrove: So, these are astounding circumstances under which a president takes office. But why was...why did FDR not better prepare Harry Truman for the possibility of him ascending to the role of president?
Chris Wallace: The best information we can get... remember this is, this is Roosevelt's fourth term, you know, it's this...he's not the new kid on the block. He's been around forever, and he's had several vice presidents, uh, and they've kind of come and gone. And he thought that he and his select group War Cabinet, they were the ones who were going to prosecute the war, uh, and he didn't... he was going to be there forever. And, and in addition, uh, he had just come back from Yalta, a not very successful summit meeting with Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin. Uh, and he was absolutely exhausted, he was obviously in terribly failing health and he had gone to Warm Springs in utter exhaustion, and the best we can tell, he just... it never really occurred to him to bring in Harry Truman, he didn't really bring in any of his vice presidents. They were, they were, uh, you know, sort of the spare tire in the trunk.
Mark Updegrove: There are myriad plot. We'll get back to Harry Truman in a moment, but there are myriad plots in this book. And one of them is around the development of the bomb itself in New Mexico, which, a project headed up by J. Robert Oppenheimer. What did the process of developing a nuclear weapon look like?
Chris Wallace: Well, it was... there were really two people who were involved. One was Oppenheimer, who was the scientific director and an absolutely brilliant physicist. And, uh, he was the one who came up with Los Alamos, which was where he had grown up in, in, in New Mexico in an utterly deserted place. And so secret, incidentally, that it didn't even appear on any maps at the time. And then there was the military person and that was General Leslie Groves. And Groves, uh, was a bully of a guy, he was huge; he was big; he was burly. He had no problems whatsoever about, uh, commanding people that that outranked him. And he had just finished a project. It was the building of the Pentagon, which was the largest building in the world, and he had done it in about a year. I think it was for eight million dollars, so he was used to big projects. But the, the, the Manhattan Project absolutely dwarfed the, uh, the building of the Pentagon.
And, and there were so many moving parts, first starting back in the thirties there had been an increasing sense of the ability to split the atom and that were you able to do that you could unleash, uh, a chain reaction of unimaginable power and force. And one of the great concerns was because there were a lot of great scientists in Germany that the Nazis were going to come up with this weapon. And there were really two people: Leo Szilard, a physicist, and Albert Einstein, who even back then, uh, was synonymous with the word genius who, who basically thought we got to get the US to develop a nuclear weapon before the Nazis did. And, and Roos…—Einstein wrote Roosevelt in 1939 and said, "you really need to get going on this." But having said that, it really wasn't until 1941, 42, when Winston Churchill, very much, uh, Roosevelt's partner in this whole enterprise, he was... said, "you really need to put us on the front burner." And it was in 42 that the Manhattan Project began. And again, there were so many moving parts.
The first thing they had to do was they had to find the nuclear fuel. And they came up with the idea that if you enriched uranium...first of all, they had to find uranium. They got some of that from the Belgian Congo, uh, and they and they had a couple of plants. The biggest plant was in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and, uh, that if you enrich uranium, you could come up with an isotope U-235, which was enriched uranium, a super powerful uranium, which would create a bigger explosion. There was also a byproduct of that, that did not naturally occur, uh, called plutonium, which was even more powerful. So, while they are enriching the uranium, uh, Oppenheimer or "Oppy," as he was known, creates this laboratory, this tremendous laboratory with all of the best minds, all the best physicists. Oddly enough, a lot of people kept thinking I was going to be a bunch of [inaudible]. No, in fact, it was a bunch of guys in their 20s and 30s.
And they create this top-secret installation in Los Alamos, a very deserted part of New Mexico, uh, to actually decide how you're going to take that, U-235 and use it to create and detonate a bomb and unleash this extraordinary explosion. What... just one last quick part, the amazing thing about this is Truman comes into office in, uh, in the April 12th of '45 and he's, you know, is years behind the development of the, of the Manhattan Project and the bomb, but the bomb had never been tested. In fact, that it is tested for the first and only time in Alamogordo, New Mexico, on July 16th, 1945, while Truman is in Potsdam for a summit meeting with Stalin and Churchill. And it is, it is the first and only test of this. They didn't know whether it would work, uh, is three weeks to the day before it was dropped on Hiroshima.
Mark Updegrove: You mention that the crew of the Enola Gay, the Air Force B-29 bomber that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima that would kill between 90 and 146,000 Japanese citizens, never looked back. But the plane’s co-pilot Robert Lewis wrote in his log after the bomb was dropped, “my god, what have we done?” You suggest in the book that Lewis felt the statement was misconstrued. What do you think he meant when he wrote that?
Chris Wallace: Well, they certainly were...incidentally, that's a, it's a fascinating part of the story, too. I think you'll agree just that the rivalries in the flight crew and who is going to be on the mission, they all desperately wanted to be on the historic mission, although none of them, with the exception of the commander Paul Tibbets, none of them knew exactly what the mission was and they were not told until they literally were on the plane on the way to Hiroshima... officially told this is an atomic bomb. They didn't know. But there was tremendous rivalry, particularly between Robert Lewis, who was the number two pilot and, and, uh, Paul Tibbets about who was gonna be the lead pilot for this mission. You know, in terms of his saying that, when it went off, first of all, it was a blast, unlike anything any of them had ever seen, as they say, a flash of light brighter than the midday sun filled the airplane. Then the plane, because they were very concerned about a number of things, as I say, there'd only been one test. It had been on a tower in the middle of a desert. It had never been even flown on an airplane, let alone in combat. So, nobody got any idea what the shockwaves were going to be like. And as soon as they dropped the plane before it had even, uh, exploded because it was going to drop down to 2,000 feet above Hiroshima and then explode, and the reason for that was it would create more damage if it exploded in midair rather than exploding, uh, when it hit the ground. Tibbets put the Enola Gay into this [inaudible]180 degree turn and dive to get away as fast as possible, uh, from the, from Hiroshima because they were literally worried that the plane was going to break apart from the shock waves.
Uhm, and, and when, in fact, the waves did hit the plane, one of them described it, one of the crew members described it as like a gia— a giant bashing the, the plane with a weapon that, you know, shaking it so much, and they really worried whether or not it was going to break apart. When he said, "what have I done," they turned the plane around after the shock waves and they all saw something they've never seen before. They saw this enorm—this, this searing white light. When the explosion first went off, they all were told to put welder's glasses on to shield their eyes, then there was this, this tornado of material and people and, you know, the wreckage of a city, uh, and then this giant mushroom cloud that billowed forty thousand feet into the air, so, you know, they were all shocked by the power and the destruction. But I don't think when you say misconstrued, I don't think he was, he was expressing regret for having done it. And I will say that none of them ever... there's a wonderful story [laughter] that, uh, I'm trying to think...I think it was in September or October, a couple of months after the bombing, Oppenheimer, who was the, the brains behind the operation but now was, was riven by terrible second thoughts, comes to the White House and a, and he's, he's there with Truman in the Oval Office. And he says, "my God, I have terrible second thoughts, Mr. President. I feel I have blood on my hands." And Truman says, "don't worry about it. I'm the one that gave the order. I'm the one with blood on my hands." And basically, threw him out of the office, and later said to Dean Acheson, who later was to become the secretary of state, I never want to see that son of a bitch again.
Mark Updegrove: [laughter] The buck always stopped with Truman, though, didn't it?
Chris Wallace: It did, indeed. And he I will say...and as you can imagine for the rest of his life was asked and he lived on into the 1970s, this is 1945, was asked repeatedly, “would you have... would you do it over again?” You know, “do you have second thoughts?” And he always said, "no, it was a really tough decision. I fully understand the carnage, but it was the right thing to do to end the war and to end the killing and to save American lives.
Mark Updegrove: You mentioned, Chris, that, uh, he had an approval rating of actually 87 percent, one of the highest in history for a president. With the fragmentation of media, uh, and the divisions and partisanship we see today, would it be possible for any president to yield an approval rating that high?
Chris Wallace: Yeah, I, I think so. Uhm, I mean, look at...it's not quite the same, but as recently as 2001, after 9/11 and after George W. Bush summoned the country and had that famous moment down at Ground Zero with a bullhorn when he said," the enemy will hear us." His approval ratings were in the 90s. Uhm, so I think there are moments of national crisis when a president summons the nation to unity rather than seeking to divide it, uh, which we can talk about in terms of today, uh, you know, I think that a president can have that kind of approval rating, not perhaps for endlessly, but at least immediately. I mean, to me, you know, as we talk now in the midst of the Coronavirus, the shocking thing is not, uh, how much support President Trump has, but how little. And I think it's because he, uhm, truth... yes, our country is even more polarized than it was in 2000, uh, and one even more polarized than it was in 1945. And yes, you know, there certainly were political differences and those days, too. But I think that, that President Trump has, has not... and, and look there are accomplices: social media, the media, the other parties...I'm not saying that he's the only player. But I don't think that he has worked as hard as other presidents have in moments of national crises to try to, to bring the nation together rather than to, uh, emphasize differences.
Mark Updegrove: You alluded to Harry Truman's decisiveness, and that's certainly a part of his legacy, whether it be dropping the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or the Berlin airlift, or the recognition of Israel, he was extraordinarily decisive. How did Harry Truman make decisions?
Chris Wallace: Well, it's interesting because he, he was very decisive in making decisions. And in fact, one of the things that shocked the people in his cabinet in the first few months after he took over from Roosevelt, uh, is how decisive he was. They, they say that the cabinet meetings just completely changed. Uh, Roosevelt used to regale his cabinet with, with, with stories and, and thoughts, and oftentimes he didn't come to a decision, uh, you know, when a, when a decision was presented to, to Truman in the cabinet room of the Oval Office, he usually decided very quickly. And in fact, some critics, as I say, he had critics back then, too... Henry Wallace, who was ousted as vice president for Truman but stayed on as commerce secretary, said that, uh, Truman, uh, sometimes seemed to make a decision before he gave it any thought. That it was too quick. The thing that impressed me about this decision, which I ...one could argue is the biggest, toughest, most consequential decision any president has ever had to make is that as decisive as Harry Truman was, and we all have this image of the buck stops here, he's struggled with this one. Uhm, he, he... one of the things that impressed me is that at his very first cabinet meeting... eh, not really cabinet meeting, but when he met with the cabinet the night he was sworn in, he said, "I want your candid advice. I want you to tell me what you think. Uh, and it's fine to disagree with me until I make my decision, and then I expect you to support me.".
But, but he, he, he was looking for dissent; he was looking for people's best opinion. There's a, there's a meeting that takes place, uh, I think, in early June, uhm, where he's meeting with his war cabinet and they're discussing what to do about Japan, how to end the war. And this is the meeting at which George Marshall has a remarkably precise, uh, recommendation; he says we need 766,700 troops. How he came up with that number I don't know. And they're discussing, well, what's it going to be like if you hit the outer islands and then what are you going to need and what's the number of casualties? And he's going around Stimson, the secretary of war is there, all these top military and, and, and political people, and at the end of the meeting, he notices that John McCloy, who is an assistant secretary of war and a kind of troubleshooter for, for Stimson, has said nothing. And, uh, Truman says, "McCloy, nobody gets out of this meeting until they give me their opinion."
And McCloy, who's a very junior man, looks over to Stimson like "Is it okay?" And Stimson says, "go ahead." And he says, "I think we need to have our heads examined if we don't discuss using the atomic bomb." And in this meeting of the war cabinet, they have been talking for quite a period of time, and no one had even mentioned the possibility as their discussing the invasion and the thousands or hundreds of thousands of troops would be killed nobody had even mentioned the bomb. And the fact was, uh, Truman wanted to hear that. He didn't decide because of, among other things it hadn't even been tested yet. Then he gets to Potsdam, and for all the talk again about how decisive he is, he has meeting after meeting and he keeps on, you know, he really waits to make the decision as to whether or not to use the bomb. And he... it was very hot that summer in, in Potsdam. And they didn't have screens on the windows of the villa that he was staying in next to a lake, and so the mosquitoes used to come in at night because the windows were open, it was so hot and give the presidential crew a working over. And Truman complained one of sleepless nights, maybe it was the heat, maybe it was the decision that he faced and also of terrible headaches that he had whenever he was under stress. So one of the things that impressed me about Truman is for all of the talk about, you know, decisive Harry Truman and the buck stops here, he really struggled with the political and, uh, the geopolitical, what it was going to mean long term for relations with Russia; what it was going to mean for Europe, and the, and the moral components of this decision as well he should have.
Mark Updegrove: From the impressive 33rd president to the 45th, uh, last month, Donald Trump, uh, tweeted, "just watched Mike Wallace, wannabe Chris Wallace, on Fox News. I'm now convinced that he's even worse than Sleepy Eye...Eyes Chuck Todd of Meet the Press and the people over at Face the Nation. What the hell is happening at Fox News? It's a whole new ballgame over there." This is one of a number of tweets, uh, that, that President Trump has sent about you, deriding you. What is it like to be actively targeted by the president of the United States?
Chris Wallace: Really, Mark, we couldn't have gotten through this podcast without [laughter] I'm teasing. I'm teasing. Uhm, you know, the funny thing is... I, look, I'm a tough guy. I've been in the business for literally half a century. I covered every president to some degree since Ronald Reagan. Uh, any political reporter who doesn't at some point, uh, end up ticking off a, a, a president or a political leader that covers city hall or [inaudible] the statehouse, uh, isn't doing their job. But to have a tweet, and that wasn't the first one, that was about the third or fourth personally attacking you by the president of the United States, it's kind of a shock to the system the first time. Uhm, you know, you're... I... [inaudible] you have a run of emotions, I suppose on some level, you're a little bit excited that the president of the United States, uh, is going to mention you [laughter] and this is going to be history, your feelings are kind of hurt that whatever you think of the president that, that, you know, respect for the office, that he is attacking you. Uhm, I will say by the time, the, the one you read, which, as I say, was the third or fourth, I kind of gotten used to it. And, and, uh, you know, it didn’t... I didn't... it was noise. It was just noise. I mean, look, I’ve known... not well, but I've known Donald Trump a long time, uh, you know, since he was a real estate developer in New York. Uh, he is quick on the trigger.
I've been on his right side a bunch of times. I've been on the wrong side a bunch of times. I think he you know, he works the refs. I think he thinks, well, if I say this, either he'll back off or his bosses will back off or, uh, you know, I'll get a... I'll get a, you know, it's like a, it's like an umpire arguing with a call on a baseball game. They know that they're not going to overturn the call, but they're hoping the next time, he doesn't call the umpire, we'll have that in the back of their mind, and they'll give him a break. It doesn't make any difference to me. I do my job and anybody who's watched my show since then has seen I'm, you know, just as tough on the president, just as I'm tough on Joe Biden. You know, I'm... I like to think I'm an equal opportunity inquisitor. I'm the cop on the beat wielding the nightstick and trying to keep everybody honest.
Mark Updegrove: I mentioned the divisions and the partisanship that we see in the United States today. Does Fox News bear any responsibility for that or do you think, Chris, it's inevitable in this media environment?
Chris Wallace:Sure, I think we bear some responsibility, but, but I think our, uhm, role is exaggerated. I mean, you know, people talk about the opinion side of Fox, and I... there's very much a division in Fox between the news side of which I'm a part and other shows in daytime are a part and, and the primetime opinion side. Uh, but what I would say is, you know, if eight, nine, ten o'clock at night, if you switch off the opinion in primetime at Fox and turn to MSNBC or CNN, I think the opinion is just as pointed. The... and I've come to the conclusion that the reason the media critics don't write about the opinion on CNN or the opinion on MSNBC as much is because I think they tend to agree with that opinion. So, they're not... they don't find it as objectionable. They find it is kind of straight talk, when in fact, it's just as far in, in one camp as the Fox opinion is in another camp. And, you know, while that certainly could contribute to, the word you used is exactly the right word, it doesn't create it. It's not the sole reason for it. It, it it adds to the echo chamber. Uhm, but people sure seem to like it. You know, I have to say, frankly, I, I don't want to watch... I don't want to watch people yelling at me [laughter] from the right or the left at nine o'clock at night. I kind of want to read a book and go to bed. Uh, but there are millions of Americans who, who, uh, do like watching that opinion at night, and God bless them.
Mark Updegrove: Back to 1945 for a moment. Uh, certainly, these 116 days are one of the crises that our nation has gone through. We're going through a crisis again today. What lessons do you think we can derive from that very consequential period in 1945 that would apply to today?
Chris Wallace: Well, I don't know that they necessarily can. I mean, the lesson I'd like to see applied is exactly what I think Truman did. You can... I can fully understand people saying he shouldn't have dropped the bomb. I can understand people saying he should have dropped the bomb. What, what impressed me was the care that he took in making the decision from hearing from all sides, from learning as much as he could about the science and the potential damage and, and, and taking the facts and making a decision based on the facts. In the end, it was obviously a judgment call as all the tough decisions are, but it was certainly fact-based, not politics-based, not, not, uh, based on trying to generate support or, or, or drive in opposition. Uhm, you know, what I would hope in terms of the decisions our leaders make, and by that I mean the president, members of Congress, governors, local officials, cause they all are playing a role in the reopening of the country is that it be fact based, it be science based. You know, people act like, well, we we've got to open, you know, and there's become this political divide now, which I find terribly disheartening between stay safe or reopen the country. I mean, it's even come down to wear a mask or don't wear a mask. And that, it seems to me to be the totally wrong way of looking at this. You can't spin a virus, you can't... you can't, uh, spin a, a natural phenomenon, whether it's an earthquake or a tsunami or a pandemic. Uh, you, you have to understand to the best degree possible what it is and deal with it. And so, you know, I understand as in the decision to drop the bomb, it's a judgment call in the end. How long do you keep the country sheltered and locked down and at what point, at what speed and under what conditions do you begin to reopen?
But you would sure hope it would be fact phase and not based on something other than fact. I mean, to take one example, I was terribly distressed when the president announced that he's taking Hydroxychloroquine, uhm, because there's no study out there that says, you know, there's some anecdotal evidence which is worth nothing, uh, there's, there's no, uh, study out there... you know, there are some studies that say maybe in a hospital setting for people who are in extremely critical conditions, it may alleviate symptoms and help them get better. But nobody says, uh, that you should take it as a prophylactic. You should take it when you're not sick to prevent yourself from getting it. There's nobody that says that. And yet here's President Trump, uh, who's been taking it for two weeks, uh, I don't know... by the time we run, this airs whether he'll still be using... and who took it for two weeks on no scientific basis. Even his own Food and Drug Administration said it should only be used in hospital situations for people in critical conditions. So, look, in the end, the president has got a lot of protection. He's got a doctor on, on the premises 24 hours a day. He can take the ten or fifteen-minute test every day. But what I worry about is that there are a lot of other people there who very much support this president and who are going to think, well, if he's doing it, I'm going to do it. And they don't have the support that this president does. And maybe their condition, physical condition is worse and potentially it could be life-threatening to them. So that, that worries me.
Mark Updegrove: Well, that view just might earn you another fiery tweet from the 45th president of the United States. Chris Wallace, thank you so much for your time today. Congratulations on a great read, “Countdown 1945.”
Chris Wallace: Mark, thank you.
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Mark Updegrove: My thanks to Chris Wallace, to our sponsors, the Moody Foundation and St. David's HealthCare, and of course to you for joining us. Subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts.
I'm Mark Updegrove. See you next time.
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