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“kick in the teeth may be the best thing in the world for you,” he had been kicked in the teeth for years now, and the kicks were not abating. “When he came back to animation after the war,” Frank Thomas observed, “Walt never had the same enthusiasm…. It was never like it was on the early pictures, where he knew every frame of the film.” Moreover, the layoffs in 1946 and attrition had shrunk the workforce; despite Walt’s promises to stockholders that the studio was on the rebound, only an emergency loan of $1 million from RKO late in 1946 rescued the company from insolvency. When Woolie Reitherman returned to Burbank in 1947, he recalled that “there was quite a lot of down feeling at the studio.” He would see Walt eating at the Penthouse Club, and Walt “always seemed to be a little worried.” One animator remembered a story conference where Walt was clearly distracted. The man who had been pitching the story was forlorn at Walt’s lack of interest. “Walt looked at him and said, ‘You haven’t anything to worry about. It’s me. I’m the one that has to worry. Goddamn, I’ve got to stay up all night thinking about things for you guys to do.’”
Truman’s indignation disguised his own great uneasiness about bombs that destroyed entire cities. In the last days of the war, Los Alamos had cast a third plutonium core for shipment out to Tinian, where a Fat Man high-explosive assembly was ready to receive it. Truman decided not to authorize its use and told his Cabinet why; Secretary of Commerce Henry Wallace noted the President’s reason in his diary: “Truman said he had given orders to stop the atomic bombing. He said the thought of wiping out another 100,000 people was too horrible. He didn’t like the idea of killing, as he said, ‘all those kids.’ ”881 In October, not long before his confrontation with Oppenheimer, already impatient with Soviet intransigence in Eastern Europe, Truman had complained to his budget director, Harold D. Smith, “There are some people in the world who do not seem to understand anything except the number of divisions you have.” Smith had rejoined in the Jimmy Byrnes mode, “Mr. President, you have an atomic bomb up your sleeve.” And Truman had concluded somberly, “Yes, but I am not sure it can ever be used.”
I believe this little anecdote has the potential to distinguish success from failure in the pursuit of excellence. The theme is depth over breadth. The learning principle is to plunge into the detailed mystery of the micro in order to understand what makes the macro tick. Our obstacle is that we live in an attention-deficit culture.
The Art of Learning
Josh Waitzkin
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