Right Thing, Right Now

Surely it couldn’t hurt to have a man in Washington, but mostly Pendergast, who had known never to ask Truman to do anything unethical, wanted somebody more typical— more amenable— in the job closer to home. Just months prior to the first explosions of the nuclear age, Truman did not even know the bomb existed! In every battle, Gandhi seemed to be almost impossibly mismatched, facing the most powerful forces on earth, be it the British Empire or the hardness of the human heart. It took more than four years, but finally, in 1948, the UN did it, topping their declaration with a unanimous treaty banning genocide— the nameless, awful thing that the Nazis were doing when they murdered Lemkin’s mother.