Letter from Robert E. Bowers to President Harry S. Truman

10/27 9 E. Gorham St. Madison, Wis. October 24, 1945 to The President of the U.S. The White House Washington, D.C. Congress 10/23/45 B My dear Mr. President: With abashed reluctance I let this peep come out of the West to attempt the sounding board of the Presidential secretarial staff. A few days ago I had considered writing a let- ter devoted entirely to unstinting praise of your splendid career thus far in the Presi- dency, a career which has carried America far toward common sense without loss of our basic idealism. Such a letter of simple praise, it occurred to me, might be a breath of freshness in the parching heat and considerable miasma that must mark much of your unasked for cor- respondence. Such praise I surely tender you now, though I may not stop with praise only. With respect to one of your recent utterances, I and a few of my fellow students here at the University feel that perhaps we were like the deaf men in the story, thinking you said "Thursday" when perhaps you said "Wembly", and in any case we would like to "stop and have one." We refer, of course, to your recent recommenda- tions on the draft. Since you assured us the proposed measure is not conscription but is rather a sort of national service, we hope- fully assumed that perhaps you had been re- reading William James's "Moral Equivalent of War", which certainly is a great essay for Presidents to read. Recalling, too, the slight misunderstanding re- sulting from your European pronouncements on territorial acquisitions by this country, mis- construed by some to apply to naval bases, we