Truman's Manhattan Surprise

I've been doing a bit of an on-the-hoof review of unit 2.1 and I can't help but think that some avenues of discussion and arguement have been left unexplored or not pursued to a mutually satisfying conclusion. I guess that's simply the way it is though. We must move on or we'll be wrapped around the axle for months.

Anyway, one item that I failed to mention during the final throes of the first unit and a recurring thought that keeps coming back to me even now is the whole Truman/bomb decision issue. I really wanted to tear into Bernstein for entirely missing the point (IMHO) in his paper on the subject of Truman's 'half a million American lives' statement. I believe that he missed the point of what politics is all about (Schlesinger hit this particular nail on the head in his Foreign Affairs paper 'Origins of the CW'(p.26) when he talked about politicians 'design[ing] their expressions to have particular effects on particular audiences' etc. Furthermore, Bernstein helps to highlight an aspect of modern politics (and indeed, the modern media) that I find particularly distasteful: spectacular misrepresentation designed to pursuade a largely ignorant but nethertheless powerful public to buy a particular product, be it a newspaper or a primeminister.

Am I alone in having this opinion?