The Day the World Changed

Sixty-three years ago, America won a war and lost its innocence. On August 6, 1945, the world's first nuclear weapon was detonated over Hiroshima, and six days later, World War II ended.

I was in uniform then in Germany, one of thousands waiting to be sent as foot soldiers to invade Japan. All we knew then was that a mushroom cloud had ended our dread of going to the Pacific to storm beaches and fight through cities. For the first time in years, we could wake in the morning without feeling there was an IOU out on our lives, held by someone unknown and payable on demand.

It was weeks before we learned the moral price for our relief--that over 200,000 would die from that explosion in Hiroshima and another over Nagasaki three days afterward and that our country would forever bear the burden of being the first to use weapons of mass destruction.

Almost two decades later, in August 1963, I was interviewing John F. Kennedy in the Oval Office. "Since 1945," he said, "we have gone into an entirely new period of nuclear weapons. Most people have no conception of what it all means. A nuclear exchange lasting sixty minutes would mean over 300 million deaths. We have to prevent the end of the human race."

This August, as presidential candidates argue over gasoline prices and each other's celebrity status, it's easy to forget they are asking voters to give them a Godlike control over the lives of multitudes of people, not only in our own country but all over the world.

It's too late to anguish over that decision 60 years ago but not too soon to remember how much power of life and death will be in the hands of whoever we choose this November and what qualities of judgment, character and human feeling he will need to make such choices for us in the future.

Dethroning America's King George

The creation of a Bush monarchy by Administration lawyers was decried at week's end by Rhode Island's freshman senator, Sheldon Whitehouse.

"This nation," he said on the Senate floor Friday, in reviewing the need for FISA reform, "was founded in rejection of the royalist principles that 'l’etat c’est moi' and 'The King can do no wrong.'"

But, Whitehouse contends, White House and Justice Department lawyers have given their President unprecedented powers to decide what's legal in spying on American citizens. In effect, unless Congress acts to modify their usurping of authority to allow the Oval Office monarch to do whatever he wants, Bush is free to do just that without consulting Congress or the courts.

Reviewing the circular logic in "highly classified secret legal opinions related to surveillance" by the Office of Legal Counsel in the Department of Justice, Sen. Whitehouse arrived at a "nutshell" description of this new definition of President power:

"1. 'I don’t have to follow my own rules, and I don’t have to tell you when I’m breaking them.'

"2. 'I get to determine what my own powers are.'

"3. 'The Department of Justice doesn’t tell me what the law is, I tell the Department of Justice what the law is.'"

Whitehouse reminded Senate colleagues, "We are a nation of laws, not of men...Our Attorney General swears an oath to defend the Constitution and the laws of the United States; we are not some banana republic in which the officials all have to kowtow to the 'supreme leader.'”

The Senator from a state that had its own version of the Boston Tea Party was urging them to correct "a second-rate piece of legislation passed in a stampede in August" and take away the powers that all the king's men have conferred on the monarch with more than a year to go on his White House throne.