Was Hiroshima a war crime?

0:28We all have routines. This is a Global Player original podcast.

1:00end is not yet. That is President Harry S Truman 80 years ago announcing the first time that the world had seen an atomic bomb. Even by the scale of devastation that the world had been through up until 1945, this was something completely different, with the questions still reverberating today about whether what happened then was something beyond what war should allow. It changed the world. It ushered in a new era in which we are still living in the long shadow of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But 80 years on to the day, as Hiroshima remembers, should we remember those events in a different way? Was it a moment of triumph and victory?

1:51Or was it a moment that in fact was the biggest war crime we've ever seen in history. Something that many politicians today believe, including Jeremy Corbyn, who has said that it is a crime against humanity. How should we remember the use of the atomic bomb? And should we be less afraid of looking at our own history in the eye and calling it for what it was? Welcome to the News Agents.

2:20the news agents it's john it's lewis and in case you are not familiar with the events that took place 80 years ago or don't know much about it's worth just doing a brief history on the morning of august the 6th 1945 a us b-29 bomber named the enola gay took off from the island of tinian heading for japan they see these are the last days of the second world war germany had already been defeated but the war in the far east in japan was still raging thousands of american soldiers and and civilians and japanese dying every single week on board that plane was a single bomb code named little boy it was a uranium based atomic weapon the first of its kind ever developed at 8 15 in the morning the bomb was dropped over the southern japanese city of hiroshima big industrial base big military base the device explodes 600 meters above the city center and it unleashed a blast equivalent to roughly 15 000 tons of tnt the fireball unleashed instantly vaporized everything within about a mile radius it melted steel it turned tens of thousands of people to ash in seconds and by the end of that day an estimated 70 000 to 80 000 people were dead thousands more would die from burns radiation sickness and injuries pushing the total death toll to over 140 000 there was a second bomb a few days later in nagasaki and a few days after that the imperial japanese government surrendered and we're not trying to do a history podcast but we're trying to look at why this is maybe we are maybe we should audition for that maybe that's our next kind of branching out the newsagents history yeah the newsagents are history okay fine um yeah so the questions still reverberate today about what happened at hiroshima and nagasaki about whether it was a war crime and looking through a lens of 80 years on yeah i mean is it OK, to go and kill 140 ,000 people with the dropping of one bomb?

4:36No, horrible, horrendous. Well, we know what we would say if, say, Vladimir Putin were to unleash a nuclear weapon, which obviously we've been worried about for three years during the duration of the war, right? If he were to unleash a bomb on Kyiv or wherever it happened to be. But then you have to look at the context in which the decision was made by President Truman to drop that bomb, which was that the fighting in Japan had been particularly brutal. According to the Royal British Legion, you were seven times more likely to die in a Japanese prisoner of war camp than you were to die in a German one.

5:1327 ,000 Americans had died in those prisoner of war camps. It was the most hideous conditions where people were dying of starvation, were dying of disease, were being forced to slave labour to build the railway between Burma and Siam, all those other things. And there were 130 ,000 allied prisoners of war who were still being held and who were at risk of death. And so that's the context in which the decision was taken. We have somehow got to end this war in Japan and not a lot is going to do it easily. Well, funnily enough, one of the reasons that Hiroshima was chosen was that there were other targets which the Allies believed that there were allied POWs there and they didn't want to vaporize them.

5:55So it wasn't the only reason, but it was one reason chosen. And look, this is a debate which has raged. And it's not just a historical debate, of course, because it has so many contemporary, contemporary echoes and resonances. You know, as I said at the start there, we're still living in the shadow of the nuclear age. I mean, the nuclear bombs that are at the disposal of governments today are infinitely more powerful than that deployed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. The H-bomb was developed in the 1950s and the technology has developed in leaps and bounds since then. So it is something that has terrified the world ever since.

6:30And obviously, with the world as unstable as it is now, continues to create that terror. I mean, I know today, for example, I mean, there have been all of these, as you would imagine, commemoration ceremonies in Hiroshima. And the mayor of Hiroshima today calling for the world's most powerful countries to abandon nuclear deterrence because of what happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki 80 years ago. residents and survivors from 120 countries gathering at the city's Peace Memorial Park this morning. And the mayor there warning that conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East had contributed to a growing acceptance of nuclear weapons and the idea of their being deployed.

7:05So this is a very, this is an old event, but it is one which feels very now and perhaps more now than it would have done if we'd been having this conversation, say, in the 1990s or even the 2000s. So this is very, very active. I think, though, on the question of whether it needed to be deployed, and that is the sort of central question, I think we do have to remember that it wasn't just what happened that day in terms of the vaporization and the death of so many people. This was something, and I do think this is something that does distinguish nuclear weapons from other types of armaments and other types of incendiary warfare, because this lingered for decades and decades.

7:43It's people who were caught up in the after effects of what happened in Hiroshima that day, who weren't killed, but then went on to develop leukemias, cancers, deformities, and being unable to produce children. People were discriminated against from within Japan because they had been affected or been there that day. And there was this assumption that somehow they might be able to pass on the effects of the disease or that they may have had or that it was contagious. Nuclear contamination was contagious. This is something with which people are still living. Because there is obviously the moral question, which is to say, well, what's the difference between using one bomb, which vaporizes 70 ,000 people, and say what was happening earlier on in that same year with the firebombing of Tokyo, which was actually more lethal than what happened in Hiroshima that day.

8:30The use of B-29 bombers, which were this very new technology at the time, which basically created massive fireballs. There was nothing left of Tokyo. There was absolutely nothing left. One of the reasons that Tokyo wasn't chosen as a target in August 1945 is because the Americans said, well, there's nothing left of it. We've already completely destroyed it. What's the moral difference between those two things? I think there must be a moral difference in the sense of the lingering effects of nuclear weapons or biological weapons by comparison to normal armaments. And that is what the argument is in saying that it is a war crime.

9:01There is no escape from an atomic weapon. There is no escape from nuclear weapon. You can't do anything to prevent. You can't do anything to save yourself from it, which you can potentially from traditional bombs. Yeah, I suppose the Jeremy Corbyn point about it's a crime against humanity. There were an awful lot of crimes against humanity that were taking place in Japan during the Second World War. The savagery with which the battles were being fought, the Battle of Okinawa. You know, 100 ,000 people die in the space of three months in the fighting there. Should America try to mount an invasion of Japan itself?

9:38I mean, that was considered to be so fraught with risk. And there was also the Japanese people were under the control of Emperor Hirohito and where the clear message was it was better to die than surrender. You know, the whole legend of kamikaze pilots, you know, using their planes as missiles and that there was a calculation that this actually the death toll, though horrendous it would be, would be less worse than some of the other options. and I you know how else were you going to end the war in the pacific given that Japan had no intention of surrendering it was holding thousands of allied prisoners of war I remember years ago meeting someone who was a Labour Party member but who had been a Japanese prisoner of war who was progressive who was kind of a pacifist in the sense that he never wanted to see anything like it again but he thought it was justified because it ended the war that was just going on without any reprieve whatsoever so i think that this is the crux of the question of whether it was a war crime or not and i think what's interesting about this entire debate of course is that we remember the history we want to remember right i mean we all have our national versions of the second world war i actually think one of the sort of defining features of our age right now is the sort of collective memory of the second world war you know rapidly receding and vanishing from collective memory from living memory and i think the thing about the use of the atomic bomb is that and and truman president truman's decision to use it which is a debate which rages among historians i remember the context is that truman has only recently become president roosevelt dies in 1945 five.

11:28Truman didn't know anything about the Manhattan Project. Nothing. Nothing. The Manhattan Project being this astonishing, obviously anyone who's seen Oppenheimer will know all about it, this astonishing civil engineering project which was designed to create the nuclear bomb. Enormous resources being devoted to it across the United States, being developed in the Los Alamos laboratory. Roosevelt dies not longer after he's won the 1944 presidential election. Truman comes to office. He's only recently become vice president. Roosevelt rather sort of burnt through vice presidents. He had been a senator.

11:59He comes in, is told about it for the first time. He sees an ability to end the war by using it. Remember, Truman had fought, unlike Roosevelt, in the First World War. He'd actually worked as an artilleryman in the First World War. So when he's told that this has the destructive potential of 15 ,000 tons of TNT, Truman knows, Truman understands, right, what actually this potentially means, at least in terms of its incendiary power. And obviously, as you say, John, I think our collective memory in Britain is rather weaker, even though we had so many soldiers fighting in it. We tend to focus on what was going on in Europe, D-Day, Normandy.

12:34We focus a lot on V-Day. We don't think very much about V-J Day in nearly the same way. So it's sort of a little bit sort of willowy in our collective memory. But it was horrendous, beyond horrendous. It was bloodlands beyond anything that we can possibly imagine. The Japanese always literally did it. It's cliche, but it's true. They would fight to the last man. It was a highly martial society, a highly militarized society. They would not surrender. Truman's facing six to seven thousand U.S. soldiers dying every single week. He's getting those reports to his desk every day. The traditional history of this, certainly in the immediate aftermath, was that Truman had no choice, or at least it was the best option available to him.

13:13It has to be said, though, there has been more and more history done about this in recent years, where there are lots of historians who take a very different view now. They say that Japan was starving. Japan was on the verge of surrender. What Japan really wanted, which is something that the Allies hadn't given, was an assurance that Emperor Hirohito would be able to remain on the Japanese throne because the Japanese believed at that time that he was a divine figure and that therefore they wanted an assurance that hadn't been provided by the Truman administration. They also point to the fact, and I think this is something that is also forgotten, that there is actually now contention as to whether it was the use of the atomic bomb that actually was the thing that prompted and provoked the Japanese into surrender.

13:56Because something else happens in those weeks, which is forgotten about now, but which many historians think is as important. The Soviets, exactly. People forget, you know, that you assume that the Japanese must have been at war with the Russians. They were. The Japanese were hoping that the Russians, the Soviets, would actually come together, would actually negotiate, help negotiate a deal with the Americans, which was something short of unconditional surrender. But in a week or two leading up to the use of the atomic bomb, Stalin declares war on Japan. And suddenly he's moving loads of troops from the west to the east.

14:31And Stalin had plans to occupy northern Japan, the island of Hokkaido. And this is something that terrifies the Japanese. So in the end, it's that, as many historians believe now, as much as the use of the atomic bomb, which provokes the surrender and the fact that Japan was just finished, industrially, it was basically completely destroyed, it was starving, the blockade had worked. So there is a far more active debate these days about Truman's decision and actually whether it needed to happen. Of course, but that's the beauty of 80 years of hindsight, scholarship, looking at all of this. But there were people at the time who said it.

15:03Eisenhower, who was Truman's successor, of course, said that the atomic bomb never needed to be used and there were other people in the American military at the time, including one of the top defence chiefs, one of Roosevelt's top allies at the time, the head of the Navy, who abhorred the bomb and said it should never have been used and didn't need to be used. So even at the time there was debate. But you're Truman, you've just become the President of the United States of America. You've been a Vice President for a very short time. You were kept completely in the dark about the Manhattan Project and suddenly you learn about this thing and as you say Lewis, you're getting reports of the daily death toll, of the suffering of prisoners of war, of the starvation and the disease and the famine and all the rest of it and you think jesus i've got to do something and you can imagine that the pressure that he felt under to have something that could change the game and it was a game changer i think the other thing that's worth talking about 80 years on is it does live you know the the success of the film oppenheimer when you say Hiroshima and Nagasaki I think people have an instinctive sense of what that means the terror of there must never be another nuclear war that it was kind of ingrained on us we must never do this again which is part of the reason why the peace has been kept in the world that it hasn't been used again because of this kind of crazy 1960s doctrine of if you bomb us we bomb you and we blow up the world you know which had the acronym mad mutually assured destruction you know there have been times you know cuban missile crisis where it came pretty close but nuclear weapons have not been used since nagasaki and maybe it has done something but the kind of contrary to that is that more and more countries think geez i wish i hadn't you you know if you're colonel gaddafi and you had a nuclear weapon would you have been overthrown because you know the americans would have been and the french and the british would have been too fearful would saddam hussein have been overthrown you know kim jong-un is still there in north korea why because he's got nuclear weapons i have to say i mean this is another debate which sort of rages among historians particularly but more of historians of the cold war as to whether or not as you say john the use of those bombs 80 years ago acted as a a sort of moral lesson to the world that they ought not to be used, a deterrent, or whether it in fact legitimised their use.

17:31And we shouldn't forget, and this is what I mean about squaring up to our history, there is only, and this is sometimes something that the Russians like to point out, the Chinese like to point out, there is only one country which has ever used a nuclear weapon, and it is that great Empire of Liberty, the leader of the West United States. Now, you can have that debate about whether Truman was right or wrong, but that is just an indisputable historic fact. And I don't know if really it is true that their use in 1945 acted as a sort of inhibitor on anything, not least because, go forward just a few years, in the Korean War that's largely forgotten now, and it shouldn't be because it has such contemporary significance, but there were American military chiefs at the time urging Truman to use the bomb in Korea.

18:10Now, Truman, to his credit, refused to do so, perhaps, because Truman, interestingly, never really talked about regret in terms of using the bomb, but it's interesting that, privately, he was absolutely adamant that it would not and ought not to be used. in Korea. But when you think about how many times we got really close in the Cold War to a nuclear exchange, not least over the Cuban Missile Crisis, I'm not sure that what happened in 1945 was a particularly kind of inhibiting effect. And as you say, in terms of today, and maybe this is because that memory is rapidly diminishing as well, but in terms of today, as you say, John, more and more states want nuclear weapons.

18:46No one is sitting around going, oh, my goodness gracious, we ought not to have nuclear weapons because of what happened in Nagasaki and Hiroshima. They want those nuclear weapons because they see it as a form of geopolitical power and that's the other thing about what happened 80 years ago some historians believe that what was partly motivating truman and there is disagreement about this what was partly motivating truman and if this is true then this is much darker is that he wanted to send a message to the ussr and to joseph starlin that the united states had this bomb and that there was one powerful there was at least for a while there was going to be a unipolar power in the world because they had this bomb indeed you know it was probably partly because of the use of the bomb that Stalin backed down and did not invade northern Japan there is an alternative history where Japan had been invaded and it could have been divided as Germany was into western east Germany or as Korea later became into north and south Korea that Japan had been split down the middle or not quite down the middle but had certainly been split between a northern communist zone and a southern capitalist zone it's just another one of those moments or paths not taken in history that's fascinating to think about

19:56Evening. Buyer's remorse. Buy a new car? I'll be moving in. Let's get started. Sorry, I think there's been a mistake. I bought it from Carvana. You what? Yeah, great price. I even have seven days to love it or return it. So there's no... No, no buyer's remorse. More like buyer's rejoice? I guess I'll let myself out. Congratulations. I mean it. Buyers rejoice. Buy your car today on Carvana. Limitations and exclusions may apply. See our seven-day return policy at Carvana.com. Hi, it's Kyle McLaughlin, host of the What Are We Even Doing podcast. You know, my favorite part of the morning is that first cup of coffee, a small, quiet ritual that sets the rhythm for my day.

20:37That's why I appreciate DeLonghi. For over 50 years, they've combined Italian craftsmanship and thoughtful design. And as the number one espresso machine brand in the world, they make it effortless. Just a damn fine cup of coffee in your own kitchen. Right now, you can save 10 % off your purchase at DeLonghi.com with code KYLE at checkout. After all, if it's not Italian, is it even espresso? This is The News Agents. How we see our own history is such a fascinating question. question i mean we talk about kind of alternate facts today and fake news and you know the spin doctors who try and tell you a version of events and you think that's all bullshit i mean you know look at the legend of dunkirk yeah and the evacuation of the british expeditionary force and it's told as a story of plucky brits the small boats going over it was a military catastrophe this expeditionary force it's so british to remember a failure though isn't it yes but we remember the failure and treat it as a success yes when i was the paris correspondent in 2000 there was still an awful lot of french history that seemed to kind of have its let me put it gently that the french in the second world war was full of resistance fighters and no one was really collaborating with the nazi occupation that just doesn't bear scrutiny there were some fantastically brave people who were part of the resistance but there were an awful lot who made their peace with marshal petain and carried on in the collaboration and allowing you know nazi rule in france yeah and so you know again it's history as you want it to be seen your national story as you choose to construct it rather than based on the reality i think in britain we have done a bit of soul-searching and there was the whole kind of firebombing of Dresden and you know whether there should be a plaque unveiled a statue unveiled to Bomber Harris who was the head of the RAF who sanctioned the bombing of Dresden with the terrible consequences that followed from that.

22:48I do think we ought to be braver in terms of looking at the darker parts of our own history even in the Second World War which you know was you know no doubt Britain was fighting on the right side and and Churchill in 1940 does the world an enormous service in refusing to capitulate to Hitler global history would have been very very very different had Churchill chosen a different course in 1940 and there were other politicians available who would have without doubt chosen a different course but you know when we were involved in the firebombing of a city in Dresden for example which killed 25 ,000 people we never talk about that we never talk about that and history I have such disagreement with you know the people particularly on the cultural right the radical right who who seem to imply or don't just imply they say that looking bravely at your own history and acknowledging where your own country has fallen short or perhaps done terrible things that somehow that is a diminishment of history that it's sort of cancelling history no it's a fuller richer understanding of history it's actually i would argue a far more patriotic approach to history because it's looking at your own country's history squarely in the eye and saying yes we did these great things we also did these bad things and you know on the japanese side for example there is a whole history to that as well which is still playing out in contemporary geopolitics japan is a country that unlike germany has not been willing to have that honest conversation about their own role in the second world war and again it's not a history that we really are very aware of very much in this country but you know if you ask someone in china when did the second world war start they won't say 1939 they'll say 1931 with the japanese invasion of manchuria absolutely and the crimes i mean we're talking about whether the atomic bomb was a war crime there is no doubt whatsoever that what japan did in china in the lead up to what we would call the second world war throughout the 1930s and 1940s were some of the most abhorrent war crimes that has humanity has ever, ever seen.

24:48We're talking probably modern historians would say that between, if you take the totality of everything that happened in China in those years, between 20 to 30 million civilians died, partly motivated by the most profound xenophobia, racism, imperial, colonial outlook. You know, the Nanjing massacre, Japanese soldiers choosing to just indiscriminately shoot to kill women, children, using things that we would consider completely barbaric, dropping plague-infested fleas onto Chinese cities to spread the bubonic plague, horrendous biological experimentation on civilians. You know, the list just goes on and on and on.

25:28And again, to go back to the Truman point, Truman would have been aware of this and knew that. So you can't wrench these decisions from the historical context. You know, we'd had VE Day, people were just desperate to get the troops home, to get the prisoners of war back to start a new life in the post-second world war era and you know in that context is when truman took the decision that it was time to drop the bomb i just going back to your point about i think nations are pretty bad looking at their own history squarely terrible there's one place i just want to talk about the experience i had mount vernon mount vernon which is george washington's home on the potomac river on this magnificent bluff it's now a visitor center you can go around and see you know where he lived and where he kept his horses and you know all the rest of it but you pick up a voice kind of you know headphones a headset and you can listen to the history of the house and the washington's and where the children were buried and you know his military career and political career and all the rest of it but you can also have it on the slave setting where it describes what the slave's life was that's so interesting working at that estate at that time and i thought it was absolutely fantastic and i'm sure there'll be people in magaland who will say we don't need to know about this why don't we just keep the history that george washington was the founding president the united states of america and great man and you don't need all that i think we are all the better for understanding historical context that's completely right and i suppose in a way it is um This is sort of weirdly fresh in my mind, partly because just by complete coincidence, having been in Japan a couple of weeks ago and visiting the Hiroshima Peace Museum, which is an astonishing place.

27:12Anyone who's been to it can hardly fail to be moved by. Obviously, there's a famous dome, which is the only building which still exists because it was literally the place right underneath the bomb. So miraculously survived because it was right underneath. but again in terms of the sort of how a country like Japan remembers this, what I found so interesting is it is an extraordinary, the museum which has been set up there, it is an extraordinary museum, it was the most affecting museum certainly that I've ever been to, I think there was barely a dry eye in the house by the time you get to the end of it because what it does is that for most of the actual exhibit it is just telling the human stories, it's telling the stories of the kids who were desperately looking for their parents you know after the initial explosion of old ladies and old men going into the water and finding that the water was actually burning them the black rain which appeared an hour or so after the initial explosion which was corrosive and acidic and burned people's skin off and on and on it goes to discrimination that those involved as i say faced in the in the decades to come and on and on it goes and what's extraordinary about it is how weirdly unpolitical it is this is the most extraordinary military event but it's also an event of profound political significance obviously it presages the surrender of this country but the way it's talked about and i think you know from reading about it a bit more because it piqued my interest so much i think it mirrors the way that japan thinks about its history and that moment more generally it talks about it almost as if it was the weather as if it was just bound to happen as if it was just sort of inevitable with almost no attempt to address the causes of it on the American side or indeed on their own side of the fact that obviously Japan had been an imperial aggressor of its own history and so on and that that as I say does continue to create contemporary political problems because I mentioned what happened in China we could talk about what happened in Korea with Japan it is still a bone of diplomatic and profound political contention and aggression between China, Japan, Korea, which lives on to this day that Japan, they feel, has not sufficiently and adequately addressed its crimes in the Second World War and lead up to the atomic bomb and what we saw there in a way that one would say Germany, by contrast, most profoundly has and does so repeatedly.

29:32So this question of history, it's not just history. As someone said, you know, the past is never dead. It's not even past. It continues to have such significant contemporary political implications in almost every way we see. And even in the United States, I mean, the history of the United States. I was amazed to learn the other day that the first president to visit Japan in any kind of real official capacity, I thought, assume, given that, you know, you had tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of American soldiers stationed in Japan from 1945. It wasn't Eisenhower. It was George H.W. Bush when Emperor Hirohito died.

30:08It was the emperor during the war and controversially was allowed by the Americans to stay on and reigned on until 1989. he was died in 1989 it was George H.W. Bush who first visited because up to then it was still so controversial among American POWs and it was controversial on that visit as well and of course Bush had been a POW and had actually been a soldier in the Pacific so he had the cachet to do it in a way but for him to visit and it still be controversial as late as 1989 it just shows you kind of the long shadow of it all. And you're talking about kind of coming to terms with your own history and the fact that Japan hasn't you know in terms of in this terms of its relationship with China and Korea in the way that Germany has with Europe and the United States it's also striking that you talk about George H.

30:56W. Bush I mean Barack Obama went to Hiroshima and he spoke and that again was still controversial but there was no apology from him for the dropping of that atomic bomb. On a bright cloudless morning, death fell from the sky and the world was changed. A flash of light and a wall of fire destroyed a city and demonstrated that mankind possessed the means to destroy itself.

31:41Why do we come to this place, to Hiroshima? We come to ponder a terrible force unleashed in a not-so-distant past.

31:59We come to mourn the dead, including over 100 ,000 Japanese men, women, and children. thousands of Koreans a dozen Americans held prison

32:20their souls speak to us they ask us to look inward to take stock of who we are and what we might become I think what you can hear in Obama there is it's probably something that Obama was uniquely placed to do. And I think actually he does it very elegantly, characteristically, which is to walk the line where he nods to the, we can argue whether it was a war crime or not, but how grave it was. What a terrible legacy it has left for so many people. And an acknowledgement of that fact, whilst not apologising for it, because if he had done so, the controversy of that in itself. And also there was an argument about whether he ought to, because that's exactly the discussion we've just been having about basically you're arguing about whether Truman was right or wrong, or maybe he was damned if he did and he was damned if he didn't, and whether another politician would have made a different decision in his shoes.

33:20We'll never know. And whilst the memory of the Second World War is dimming in terms of the battles and maybe some of the lessons that should be learned and taken out from it and the reasons why we got to that stage, There are some arguments that are going to carry on and that have relevance to our politics today. And Hiroshima and Nagasaki are part of the future arguments to be had about our politics of peace and of war. Their names will live on. We'll be back in just a moment.

34:04Queen Carvania stood haloed by the morning sun. An army hung on her every word. My champions! I have sold my chariot on Carvana! T 'was a lovely SUV, an inexplicably queenly offer. They're even coming to the castle to collect it! Tonight, we feast! An offer you can feast on. Sell your car today on Carvana. Pick up fees, may apply. Hi, it's Kyle McLaughlin, host of the What Are We Even Doing podcast. You know, my favorite part of the morning is that first cup of coffee. A small, quiet ritual that sets the rhythm for my day. That's why I appreciate DeLonghi. For over 50 years, they've combined Italian craftsmanship and thoughtful design.

34:53And as the number one espresso machine brand in the world, they make it effortless. Just a damn fine cup of coffee in your own kitchen. Right now, you can save 10 % off your purchase at DeLonghi.com with code KYLE at checkout. After all, if it's not Italian, is it even espresso? This is The News Agents.

35:17And on the subject of presidents and the controversial decisions they have to make, Let me just push you in the direction of News Agents USA, where we'll be talking about Donald Trump. No way. Yeah, no way. Equally momentous decision about where to build a ballroom in the White House grounds. Truman thought it had it bad. Yeah, I know. Where am I going to put this ballroom? And is it going to be like Versailles? Is it going to be Louis XIV? I think it will be. That's all on News Agents USA. And we'll be back tomorrow. See you then. Bye bye. This is a Global Player original podcast.

35:58Evening. Buyer's remorse. Buy a new car? I'll be moving in. Let's get started. Sorry, I think there's been a mistake. I bought it from Carvana. You what? Yeah, great price. I even have seven days to love it or return it. So there's no... No, no buyer's remorse. More like buyer's rejoice? I guess I'll let myself out. Congratulations. I mean it. Buyers rejoice. Buy your car today on Carvana. Limitations and exclusions may apply. See our seven-day return policy at Carvana.com.