Regarding Ike... no.
Here's the thing. Eisenhower had to fight like hell, and came close to resigning over it, to get control of ALL US forces, including Navy and Air Force, American and British, destined for the invasion of Western France.
Eisenhower wanted to pursue the Transport Plan, which was designed to interdict German reinforcements and supplies by killing their ability to move those items towards Normandy and the coast in general in the lead up to D-Day.
The British and American air force commanders, however, wanted no part of that. They wanted to keep going after strategic targets deeper in Germany. Bomber Harris, specifically, wanted to keep pounding Berlin.
It wasn't until April 1944 that Eisenhower was given full command over the air forces, and he only kept it until I think late August when Allied forces began to break out through France.
Regarding Studs Terkel's interview with Tibbets --- I don't think it has ever been conclusively proven that there was a fourth atomic bomb anywhere near ready. That's been surmised in the past, but I've never seen any categorical proof.
The first bomb, of course, was the plutonium implosion test bomb that went into the Trinity Test. That was the prototype for Fat Man.
Little Boy was the uranium gun bomb that Tibbets dropped.
Truman alluded to the fact that the US was ready to really step things up when in July 1945 he talked about a "rain of ruin from the air the like of which has never been seen on this earth."
You have to wonder what the Japanese might have thought of that, given that they had seen virtually all of their major cities firebombed into oblivion.
Had the Japanese not surrendered when they did, it's very likely that there would have been a "breathing period" in which the US would have tightened the blockage noose and would have concentrated bombing against Japanese military targets preparatory to an invasion, and while additional atomic bombs were prepared.
Let's remember a couple of very, very important things...
This was new technology for almost everyone. Not even the Manhattan Project scientists were sure what the long-term effects were going to be. They knew that there would be radioactive consequences, but there was a lot of leeway in the estimates for how bad it would be, and for how long it would linger.
Even Oppenhimer was profoundly shocked at the power of the Trinity test. It's one thing to theorize about it, it's another entirely to see it put into practice.
For the military men who witnessed the test, it was a simple substitution in which one plane and one bomb could do the same damage as 200 planes and 25,000 fire bomblets.
The ethical questions and implications of such a new weapon often lag FAR behind the application phase. There's a direct analog to that with the employment of chemical weapons in Europe during World War I. It was only afterwards that soldiers and statesmen looked at the after effects and asked themselves if it is really worth it.
And that's where this revisionist history really gets its roots. It's easy to say, 70 years after the fact, that Japan was about ready to surrender, the atomic bombs were unnecessary, it was just revenge for Pearl Harbor, with a huge component of racism inherent in it all.
Of all of that, the one thing that is probably the most true is that there was a strain of racism in it. There had been significant anti-Asian sentiment in the United States for a LONG time, and the beatdown that the Japanese put on the United States early in the war fueled that. You can even see it in the cartoons that were shown to kids at the theaters, with things like Warner Brother's "Bugs Nips the Nips."
But I think it's incredibly wrong to say that that racism drove everything else, and that the bombs were only unnecessary.
At the time, many viewed Japanese intransigence in the face of overwhelming American military superiority with an incredible amount of horror. Take a look at the casualty figures throughout the war as the US got closer and closer to the Japanese home islands -- instead of dwindling as you might expect as the enemy gets closer and closer to defeat, they kept spiraling upward.
I forget who it was who, after the war, said that his personal estimates for the first week of the invasion of Japan proper would be 25,000 Allied (primarily American) dead and upwards 100,000 wounded, with virtually no end in sight to casualty figures like that for at least 6 months to a year.
As I noted earlier, the military struck half a million Purple Hearts in preparation for the invasion, and more than a few thought that that wasn't going to be enough by the time all was said and done.
Can you imagine being the president and being told... "Well, sir, our best estimates are that we're probably going to double the American death toll for the Pacific war in three to six months, and it's going to get a lot worse after that. Oh, and probably between five and ten million Japanese are going to die, too."
