Rayburn, who referred to it simply as “downstairs,” met there for a “libation” every afternoon, once the formal business of “upstairs” was concluded. It was an important part of his day, and to be invited to join him, even once or twice in a term, was considered the sign that one had arrived. Truman was among the regulars.
Moving along at his usual brisk pace, he would have covered the distance from the Vice President’s office in less than three minutes. So it must have been just after five o’clock when he came in.
Though pictured often as small and plain, the room was about 20 feet in length, its ornate ceiling busy with painted birds and animals. The furnishings, too, were large, comfortable and utilitarian—big, worn black leather chairs, a long couch, a sink, and a large refrigerator that was camouflaged with veneer to more or less match the big desk, where Rayburn kept the whiskey.
Two others were already with the Speaker when Truman arrived, Lewis Deschler, the House Parliamentarian, and James M. Barnes, a staff man at the White House assigned to congressional liaison. The gray afternoon outside was fading, the room growing dim. No one had bothered yet to turn on the lights.
Apparently it was Deschler who reminded Rayburn that Truman had had a call from the White House.
“Steve Early wants you to call him right away,” Rayburn said. Truman mixed himself a drink, then dialed the number, National 1414.
“This is the V.P.,” he said.
Steve Early’s voice sounded tense and strange. Truman was to come to the White House as “quickly and as quietly” as he could, and to enter by the main entrance on Pennsylvania Avenue.
As Lewis Deschler later recounted, Truman lost all his color. “Jesus Christ and General Jackson,” he said, putting down the phone.
He was wanted at the White House right away, he told the others. They must say nothing.
He went out the door alone. Then he began to run, taking a different route. He kept to the ground floor this time, racing down a hall between a double line of bronze and marble Civil War generals and forgotten state governors, his shoes pounding on the marble floor. He ran through the echoing old Crypt, past the Senate barbershop, then up a flight of stairs with brass banisters to his office—to get his hat.
He told Harry Vaughan he was on his way to the White House and to keep that to himself. In minutes he was in the big Mercury with Tom Harty driving, but still no Secret Service guard, moving with all possible speed through the evening traffic. By now it was approximately 5:15 P.M.
What thoughts were rushing through his mind, he never fully revealed. “I thought I was going down there to meet the President,” he later said.
“I didn’t allow myself to think anything else.” To his mother he would write it occurred to him that perhaps Roosevelt had returned from Warm Springs because the retired Episcopal bishop of Arizona, an old friend of the President’s, had been buried that day. “I thought that maybe he wanted me to do some special piece of liaison work with the Congress and had sent for me to see him after the funeral.”
But if this was so, why had he run back to his office? “I ran all the way,” he told her. What did he imagine he was running toward? Or leaving behind?
At the White House, the long black car turned off Pennsylvania, through the northwest gate, and swept up the drive, stopping under the North Portico. The time was 5:25.
Two ushers were waiting at the door. They took his hat and escorted him to a small, oak-paneled elevator, more like an ornate cage, that had been installed in the Theodore Roosevelt era and that ascended now very slowly to the second floor.
In the private quarters, across the center hall, in her sitting room, Mrs. Roosevelt was waiting. With her were Steve Early and her daughter and son-in-law, Anna and John Boettiger. Mrs. Roosevelt stepped forward and gently put her arm on Truman’s shoulder.
“Harry, the President is dead.”
Truman was unable to speak.
“Is there anything I can do for you?” he said at last.
“Is there anything we can do for you,” she said. “For you are the one in trouble now.”
Part Three
To the Best of My Ability
9
The Moon, the Stars, and All the Planets
So ended an era and so began another.
—ALLEN DRURY
I
The news broke at 5:47 P.M., Eastern War Time, April 12, 1945.
International News Service was first on the wire, followed seconds later by the Associated Press, United Press, the four radio networks, and the Armed Forces Radio Service. In New York CBS interrupted a children’s serial about Daniel Boone called “Wilderness Road.” NBC broke into “Front-Page Farrell,” ABC interrupted “Captain Midnight,” and Mutual, “Tom Mix.”
In minutes the bulletin had reached every part of the country and much of the world. The time in London was near midnight. In Berlin, where it was already another day, Friday the 13th, an ecstatic Joseph Goebbels, Nazi propaganda minister, telephoned Hitler personally to proclaim it a turning point written in the stars. In Moscow, the American ambassador, Averell Harriman, was hosting an embassy party when a duty officer called to report what he had heard on a late broadcast on the Armed Forces Radio Service. At the Armed Forces Radio Station in Panama, Sergeant James Weathers, assigned to answer incoming calls, began picking up the phone and answering, “Yes, it’s true,” “Yes, it’s true,” over and over again.
Franklin Roosevelt had died of a cerebral hemorrhage at the “Little White House” in Warm Springs, Georgia, at 4:45 in the afternoon (3:45, Warm Springs time). Two hours earlier, sitting at a card table signing papers, he had complained of a terrific headache, then suddenly collapsed, not to regain consciousness. As many accounts stated, his death at age sixty-three came in an hour of high triumph. “The armies and fleets under his direction as Commander-in-Chief were at the gates of Berlin and the shores of Japan’s home islands…and the cause he represented and led was nearing the conclusive phase of success.”
From the White House, Mrs. Roosevelt sent cables to her four sons in the service, saying their father had done his job to the end, as he would want them to do, a point Steve Early included in the initial White House announcement. To Early and Harry Truman she had also expressed a wish to fly to Warm Springs, but questioned whether it would be proper now for her to use a government plane. Truman, unhesitatingly, said she should. This and the arrival of Secretary of State Stettinius were among the few things he would remember from the scene in her study. Stettinius had appeared in the doorway with tears streaming down his face.
They agreed the Cabinet should be assembled at once and the Chief Justice summoned to administer the oath of office. Truman started downstairs for the West Wing. From the President’s office he telephoned Les Biffle. He wanted the congressional leadership to come at once, and a car sent for Mrs. Truman and Margaret. He then called the apartment and told Bess what had happened. She had not had the radio on. It was the first she had heard.
The West Wing throbbed with activity and tension. Reporters, photographers, White House staff people, the Secret Service, and a few of Truman’s own staff converged from several directions, crowding corridors and offices. Voices were hushed and tense. Telephones kept ringing. In the twilight outside, across Pennsylvania Avenue, in Lafayette Square, thousands of people gathered in silence.
By seven o’clock nearly everyone who was supposed to be there had assembled in the Cabinet Room: Stettinius and Chief Justice Harlan Stone, Sam Rayburn, John McCormack, Joe Martin, Henry Stimson, Henry Wallace, Harold Ickes, Attorney General Francis Biddle, Secretary of Agriculture Claude Wickard, Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal, Julius Krug, War Production Board Administrator, Fred M. Vinson, Director of the Office of War Mobilization, Admiral William Leahy, who was Roosevelt’s personal chief of staff, Bob Hannegan, and Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins, the only woman present until the arrival of Bess and Margaret. Missing were Postmaster General Frank Walker, who was ill
, and Alben Barkley, who had decided to stay with Mrs. Roosevelt. Uniformed White House guards were at the doors.
Truman sat by himself in a brown leather chair, looking dreadful, “absolutely dazed.” When Bess came in, he crossed the room and took her hand. Little was said by anyone. Then, for what seemed an extremely long time, they all stood waiting while several of the staff went in search of a Bible. “It was a very somber group,” Stimson would record.
Bess, who had been crying almost from the moment she heard the news, dabbed repeatedly at her eyes with a handkerchief. Margaret would remember feeling as if she were going under anesthesia. None of it seemed quite real.
The only Bible to be found was an inexpensive Gideon edition with garish red edging to the pages. It had been in the desk drawer of the fastidious head usher, Howell Crim, a short, stooped, bald-headed man who now made sure it was properly dusted before placing it on the table. Truman would later tell his mother he could have brought Grandpa Truman’s Bible from his office bookcase had he only known.
He and Justice Stone took their places by the marble mantelpiece at the end of the room, beneath a portrait of Woodrow Wilson. Bess, Margaret, and the others filed in around them. A few reporters, photographers, and newsreel cameramen were told to come in. One of the staff recalled much milling about and confusion. The time on the clock on the mantel was 7:09, 2 hours and 24 minutes since Roosevelt’s death.
Truman glanced at the clock. “It said nine past seven when I started to swear the oath—I remember,” he later said. “I looked at it. And I remember the faces all around me….”
He picked up the Bible and held it in his left hand. He raised his right hand.
“I, Harry Shipp Truman,” Justice Stone began.
“I, Harry S. Truman,” Truman corrected him.
“…do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of the President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”
“So help you God,” added the Chief Justice.
“So help me God.”
His “sharp features taut,” as a reporter noted, Truman looked straight ahead through his thick, round glasses. The sudden, fervent way he kissed the Bible at the end of the ceremony impressed everyone present. It had all taken not more than a minute.
Afterward he asked the Cabinet to remain.
They were assembled about the table when Steve Early came in to say the press wanted to know if the San Francisco Conference on the United Nations would open as planned in twelve days, on April 25. As several in the room knew, Roosevelt had often sat alone at the same table looking at the Wilson portrait, pondering the tragedy of Wilson’s failure to create the League of Nations. The answer was emphatically yes, Truman said, making his first decision as President.
In his brief remarks to the Cabinet he said he intended to carry on with Roosevelt’s program and hoped they would all stay on the job. He welcomed their advice. He did not doubt that they would differ with him if they felt it necessary, but final decisions would be his and he expected their support once decisions were made.
Stimson, the senior member, said it was time to close ranks. When the meeting ended, Stimson remained behind. There was a matter of utmost urgency to be discussed, he told Truman. It concerned a new explosive of unbelievable power. But he gave no further details, which left Truman no better informed than before.
In his diary later that night, Stimson wrote that the new President had conducted himself admirably, considering the shock he had been through and how little he knew.
Truman, before leaving for home, remembered that Eddie McKim was in town and that they had a date to play poker that night at McKim’s room at the Statler. “I guess the party’s off,” Truman said, once the White House operator had McKim on the line.
By 9:30 he was back at 4701 Connecticut Avenue. Bess, Margaret, and Mrs. Wallace, he found, had gone to the apartment of neighbors next door, a general named Davis and his wife, where they were lingering over the remains of a turkey and cake. Margaret remembered her father saying little except that he had had nothing to eat since noon. Mrs. Davis fixed him a turkey sandwich and a glass of milk. Shortly, he excused himself, went to the apartment, and called his mother to tell her he was all right and not to worry. He then went to bed and, he later said, immediately to sleep.
Automobile traffic and streetcars passed beneath his open window as though nothing were different. People walking by took no more interest in the building than on other nights. Other residents, coming or going, some with dogs on leashes, were surprised to find reporters in the lobby and Secret Service men standing about.
The reporters had taken over two couches beside a stone fireplace. In a corner was the telephone switchboard for the building and a bank of mailboxes. Box 209 carried a printed card, “Mr. and Mrs. Harry S. Truman,” with “Margaret Truman” handwritten in ink below. The switchboard operator said she regretted very much that the Trumans would be leaving. “Such lovely people,” she said.
A widely repeated story in Washington that the switchboard at 4701 Connecticut Avenue was the busiest in town that night—because news of Roosevelt’s death and Truman’s swearing in meant there would soon be an apartment available in the building—is apparently apocryphal.
To the country, the Congress, the Washington bureaucracy, to hundreds of veteran New Dealers besides those who had gathered in the Cabinet Room, to much of the military high command, to millions of American men and women overseas, the news of Franklin Roosevelt’s death, followed by the realization that Harry Truman was President, struck like massive earth tremors in quick succession, the thought of Truman in the White House coming with the force of a shock wave. To many it was not just that the greatest of men had fallen, but that the least of men—or at any rate the least likely of men—had assumed his place.
“Good God, Truman will be President,” it was being said everywhere. “If Harry Truman can be President, so could my next-door neighbor.” People were fearful about the future of the country, fearful the war would drag on longer now. “What a great, great tragedy. God help us all,” wrote David Lilienthal, head of TVA. The thought of Truman made him feel physically ill. “The country and the world don’t deserve to be left this way….”
The fact that Roosevelt had died like Lincoln in the last stages of a great war, and like Lincoln in April, almost to the day, were cited as measures both of Roosevelt’s greatness and the magnitude of the tragedy. But implicit also was the thought that Lincoln, too, had been succeeded by a lackluster, so-called “common man,” the ill-fated Andrew Johnson.
Stettinius, who as Secretary of State was next in line now to succeed to the presidency, wondered privately if the parallel was not closer to what followed Woodrow Wilson, after the last war, if the country was in for another Harding administration, with cheap courthouse politicians taking over.
Senators, according to the conventional wisdom, didn’t make strong presidents. Harding had been the only other President drawn from the Senate thus far in the century and the feeling was he had been taken from the bottom of the barrel. Theodore Roosevelt, Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, even Coolidge had all been governors. And governors, from experience, knew something about running things.
In a house at Marburg, Germany, three American generals, Eisenhower, Bradley, and Patton, sat up much of the night talking about Roosevelt and speculating on the sort of man Truman might be. All three were greatly depressed. “From a distance Truman did not appear at all qualified to fill Roosevelt’s large shoes,” Bradley wrote. Patton was bitter and more emphatic. “It seems very unfortunate that in order to secure political preference, people are made Vice President who are never intended, neither by Party nor by the Lord to be Presidents.”
It had been an unusually difficult day for the three commanders, even before the news about Roosevelt. They had seen their first Nazi death camp, Ohrdruf-Nord, near Gotha. As they bid good night to one
another, an aide recalled Eisenhower looking deeply shaken.
For thousands of men in the ranks, as for many at home, the question was not so much was Truman qualified, as who was he.
In the chill of dawn in Germany, a private named Lester Atwell remembered, his battalion had been lined up for breakfast beside a country road:
“Men”—an officer came quickly along the line…“I have an announcement to make: President Roosevelt died last night.”
“What?” You heard it from all sides. “What? President Roosevelt? Roosevelt’s dead?” We were astounded.
The officer’s voice continued. “We don’t know any particulars, except that he’s dead. I think it was very sudden. Probably a stroke. Truman, the Vice-President, will take over.”
“Who? Who’d he say?”
“Truman, ya dumb bastard. Who the hell you think?”
There were some, however, who, facing the prospect of a Truman presidency, felt confident the country was in good hands. They knew the man, they said. They understood his origins. They had seen how he handled responsibility and knew the inner resources he could draw on. As before and later in his life, confidence in Harry Truman was greatest among those who knew him best.
“Truman is honest and patriotic and has a head full of good horse sense. Besides, he has guts,” wrote John Nance Garner to Sam Rayburn, who was himself assuring reporters that Truman would make a good, sound President “by God,” because, “He’s got the stuff in him.” To arch-Republican Arthur Vandenberg, writing the night of April 12, Truman was “a grand person with every good intention and high honesty of purpose.” Could Truman “swing the job?” Vandenberg speculated in his diary. “I think he can.”
Asked years later what his feelings were when he realized Truman was President, John J. McCloy, the Assistant Secretary of War, said, “Oh, I felt good. Because I knew him. I knew the kind of man he was.”
David McCullough Library E-book Box Set Page 457