On April 27, fifty miles south of Berlin, American and Russian troops met at the Elbe. A day later came word that Mussolini had been killed by partisans, his body strung up by the feet like a slaughtered pig. On Tuesday, May 1, Hamburg Radio broke the sensational news that Hitler, too, was dead, by his own hand in the command bunker in Berlin. On May 2, the day Berlin fell to the Red Army, the President had to call a press conference to say there was no truth to the rumor of a final German surrender, though Churchill kept hinting at peace within the week.
The Postmaster General and the Secretary of Labor wished to retire. The Attorney General did not, but Truman wished he would. The Director of the Bureau of the Budget needed more of the President’s time. The Secretary of War returned to go over a list of names for the special committee on S-1.
It would be hard to imagine a President with more on his mind.
From Grandview, Missouri, all the while, came a series of memorable letters from Mary Jane Truman—to keep Harry abreast of the trials she was enduring.
April 24, 1945
Dear Harry,
We have received so much mail I cannot remember all the details…. We try to read all about what you are doing and have kept up pretty well so far. I’ve lost seven pounds the last week, but no wonder, breakfast is the only meal we have had on time since you went into office…. someone called for pictures yesterday of Mamma, said he was an artist from Washington. I told him I was sorry but Mamma had had all the pictures she could pose for at present….
Mary Jane’s recurring theme through much of what she wrote was the considerable disservice he had done to them by becoming President. Of immediate concern was whether he could get home for Mother’s Day or whether she and Mamma would have to come to Washington, as he had suggested.
May 1, 1945
Dear Harry,
I do hope that you can come, but if not I feel sure we can persuade Mamma to make the trip. And please tell me if you have any suggestion to make about what you would like me to bring in the way of clothes, for I want to look my best and also get Mamma fixed up all right too and it’s a pretty large order on such short notice….
May 7, 1945
Dear Harry,
I arrived home yesterday and found Mamma well and very much inclined to go Friday if possible. I had planned to go in [to Kansas City] today to get whatever is necessary, but it’s pouring down rain and I have lost my voice, so Dr. Graham said I should stay in. Why do such things have to happen when I have so much to do? I am hoping and hoping that I can get everything ready to go Friday. However, you call me Wednesday instead of me putting the call through. If you can, call early as you can, for if I cannot go shopping tomorrow and Wednesday I don’t see how I can get it all done….
Understandingly, he wrote, “You both have done fine under this terrible blow.”
The five-year-long war in Europe, the most costly, murderous conflict in history, ended on May 7, when the German High Command surrendered to the Allied armies. The terms were signed at 2:40 A.M., in a brick school-house at Reims, Eisenhower’s headquarters. The surrender was unconditional.
Churchill had wanted to make the announcement at once, but Stalin, with the situation on the Russian front still uncertain, insisted they wait. Truman agreed that the announcement would be made by all three Allies at the same time the following morning, May 8, V-E Day.
He broke the news to reporters in his office at 8:30. At 9:00, from the Diplomatic Reception Room where Roosevelt had so often broadcast to the country, he spoke to the largest radio audience yet recorded.
This is a solemn but glorious hour. I only wish that Franklin D. Roosevelt had lived to witness this day…. We must work to finish the war. Our victory is but half-won….
In a separate statement he called on Japan to surrender, warning that “the striking power and intensity of our blows will steadily increase,” and that the longer the war lasted the greater would be the suffering of the Japanese people, and “all in vain.” Unconditional surrender, further, did “not mean the extermination or enslavement of the Japanese people.”
New York, London, Paris, Moscow, cities around the world, had erupted in wild celebration, but not Washington, where it was raining and thousands of government workers, having listened to the broadcast, remained at their desks. “I call upon every American to stick to his post until the last battle is won,” Truman had said.
May 8 was his sixty-first birthday. He had been President for three weeks and four days. The day before, Mrs. Roosevelt had moved out of the White House and the Trumans moved in, “with very little commotion,” as he later wrote, “except that Margaret’s piano had to be hoisted through a window of the second-floor living room.” To move Mrs. Roosevelt out had required twenty Army trucks. To move the Trumans from Blair House across the street had required only one.
III
The “Russian situation” concerned Truman more than he let on. Patience must be the watchword if there was to be peace in the world, he wrote to Mrs. Roosevelt, knowing that she, like some others, was apprehensive about his approach to the Russians. To Joseph E. Davies, former ambassador to Moscow, he described how he had given Molotov a “straight one-two to the jaw,” but then asked, “Did I do right?” The Russians, Truman told Henry Wallace, were “like people from across the tracks whose manners were very bad.” Wallace had begun to worry that Truman was reacting too quickly, without sufficient information and thought.
Truman had made a sudden, arbitrary move to cut back on Lend-Lease not only to Russia but to France and Great Britain, as soon as the war in Europe ended. Ships already under way had been recalled. Apparently he signed the order without reading it, going on the word of State Department officials that Roosevelt had approved. It was a serious blunder, and he had quickly to countermand his own order.
Some nights he was so exhausted he went to bed at eight. One morning, after staying up much of the night to read the Yalta agreements again, he said that every time he went over them he found new meanings. “His sincerity and his desire to do what is right is continually evident,” observed Eben Ayers.
In a top-secret telegram sent on May 6, even before the German surrender, Churchill had urged that the British and American armies “hold firmly” to their present positions in Germany and Eastern Europe and not pull back to the occupational line agreed to earlier with the Russians, It was essential, Churchill said, to “show them how much we have to offer or withhold.” On May 9, Truman responded, saying, “it is my present intention to adhere to our interpretation of the Yalta agreements.” In Germany this would mean withdrawing from the Elbe back as much as 150 miles, to as far west as Eisenbach.
On May 11 came two more cables from the prime minister, setting forth his anxieties over the Russians and the future of Europe. “Mr. President, in these next two months the gravest matters in the world will be decided,” he said in the first cable. “I fear terrible things have happened during the Russian advance through Germany to the Elbe,” he said in the second. Russian domination in Poland, eastern Germany, the Baltic provinces, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, a large part of Austria, would constitute “an event in the history of Europe to which there has been no parallel.” It was essential that the Allied armies not withdraw from their present positions “until we are satisfied about Poland and also about the temporary character of the Russian occupation of Germany,” as well as “the conditions to be established” in the rest of Eastern Europe. All such matters, Churchill warned, could only be settled before American forces withdraw from Europe “and the Western world folds up its war machines.”
In a telegram of May 12, Churchill’s tone grew still more alarming:
I am profoundly concerned about the European situation…. I learn that half the American air force in Europe has already begun to move to the Pacific Theater. The newspapers are full of the great movements of the American armies out of Europe. Our armies also are under previous arrangements likely to undergo
a marked reduction. The Canadian Army will certainly leave. The French are weak and difficult to deal with. Anyone can see that in a very short space of time our armed power on the continent will have vanished except for moderate forces to hold down Germany.
Meanwhile what is to happen about Russia?
“An iron curtain is drawn down upon their front,” Churchill continued, using a new expression for the first time. “We do not know what is going on behind.”
Both men agreed to the importance of meeting somewhere soon with Stalin, though Truman felt that for domestic political reasons he should not leave Washington until after June 30, the end of the fiscal year. In the meantime, he would send Harry Hopkins to see Stalin.
Writing to an old friend in Independence on May 13, a month to the day since he took office, Truman said, “It is a very, very hard position to fall into as I did. If there ever was a man who was forced to be President, I’m that man…. But I must face the music, and try to the best of my ability. You just keep on praying and hoping for the best.”
Calling on Truman on May 14, to discuss the joint meeting with Stalin, Anthony Eden was struck by his “air of quiet confidence in himself.”
“I am here to make decisions,” Truman said, “and whether they prove right or wrong I am going to make them.”
“To have a reasonably lasting peace the three great powers must be able to trust each other and they must themselves honestly want it,” he wrote privately. “They must also have the confidence of the smaller nations. Russia hasn’t the confidence of the small nations, nor has Britain. We have.” Then, in frustration, he added, “I want peace and I’m willing to fight for it.”
To Hopkins, he advised using either diplomatic language with Stalin or a baseball bat, whichever would work.
The Hopkins mission had been urged by Bohlen and Harriman, who had flown back to Washington from San Francisco greatly distressed that the United Nations conference was in trouble. Molotov was heading home. Hopkins, it was thought, might succeed in patching things up, since he would be seen by Stalin as both someone who had been close to Roosevelt and who had worked hard all along for a policy of cooperation with Russia. Hopkins could also handle arrangements for the Big Three conference. Though still gravely ill, Hopkins had at once agreed to go.
Meantime, accompanied by Mary Jane, ninety-two-year-old Martha Ellen Truman had arrived for her first visit ever to Washington, after her first flight in an airplane, for a first look at her oldest son since he had become President.
Truman had sent the presidential plane for them, the same four-motored, silver C-54, nicknamed The Sacred Cow, that had carried Roosevelt to Casablanca, Teheran, and Yalta, and to Truman’s delight Mamma was a hit with the Washington press from the moment she stepped from the plane. “Oh, fiddlesticks!” she exclaimed, seeing how many had turned out to meet her. Had she known there would be such fuss, she said, she never would have come. Small and bent, but “chipper as a lark,” she wore a large orchid on the lapel of a dark blue suit and a blue spring straw hat trimmed with a gardenia.
In the car on the way to the White House, Margaret asked Mamma teasingly if she would like to sleep in the Lincoln bed. Mamma, her Confederate blood rising, said if that was the choice she would prefer the floor. Truman thought she would be most comfortable in the Rose Guest Room, where so many queens had stayed, but his mother found the bed too high, the room too fancy. Offering it to Mary Jane, she chose a smaller room next door.
She had arrived in time for Mother’s Day. She stayed a little more than a week, and charmed everyone at the White House. “Oh, you couldn’t help but like her,” Secret Service agent Floyd Boring would remember. “She was point blank, you know.” The second Sunday, a brilliant, blue-sky day with the Capitol dome and Washington Monument gleaming in sunshine, Truman took her for a cruise on the Potomac in the presidential yacht.
Working with J. B. West and a Kansas City decorator, Bess was transforming the private quarters of the White House. Rooms were scrubbed, painted, furniture repaired or discarded. New furniture was purchased (mostly reproduction antiques). New curtains and draperies were installed, walls hung with paintings (landscapes primarily) borrowed from the National Gallery. Bess’s mother moved in, taking a guest room over the North Portico. Reathel Odum, from Truman’s Senate office, who was to serve both as Bess’s personal secretary and as a companion for Mrs. Wallace, was given a room beside Mrs. Wallace.
Truman, Bess, and Margaret had separate rooms. Truman slept in an antique, canopied four-poster in the President’s Bedroom, the room Roosevelt had used, just off the large, central oval room on the south side, which, again like Roosevelt, Truman would use as his private study. It was in this oval room that John Adams had held the first White House reception on New Year’s Day 1801, and that Roosevelt had met with Bob Hannegan, Ed Flynn, and the others on the steaming July night less than a year earlier to decide who was to be number two on the Democratic ticket.
Bess had two rooms—sitting room and bedroom—adjoining the President’s Bedroom, while Margaret was across the hall from her mother, in a corner room overlooking Pennsylvania Avenue. “My bedroom is pink with antique white furniture. Deep pink draperies and white window curtains,” Margaret wrote happily in her diary. “It also has a fireplace and mirror. High (25 ft.) ceilings.” She was the first young resident in the White House since the Wilson years and concerned mainly at this point with final exams at George Washington University.
For exercise, Truman had begun using the swimming pool Roosevelt had had built on the ground floor. Truman tried to do six or eight laps in his choppy, self-styled sidestroke, head up to keep his glasses dry, and hoped to get to where he could swim a quarter of a mile.
In the evening before dinner, he and Bess would relax with a cocktail in the so-called “sitting hall,” but as J. B. West remembered, it took a while for the staff to learn their tastes.
On an evening when Bess first ordered old-fashioneds, the head butler, Alonzo Fields, a proudly accomplished bartender, had fixed the drinks his usual way, with chilled glasses, an ounce of bourbon each, orange slices, a teaspoon of sugar, and dash of bitters. But the night following she had asked that the drinks not be made quite so sweet and so Fields had tried another recipe.
This time she waited until morning to complain to J. B. West. They were the worst old-fashioneds she had ever tasted. She and the President did not care for fruit punch. West spoke to Fields, who, the third night, his pride hurt, poured her a double bourbon on ice and stood by waiting for the reaction as the First Lady took a sip.
“Now that’s the way we like our old-fashioneds,” she said, smiling.
Fields, a tall, handsome black man, would later say of Mrs. Truman that she would “stand no fakers, shirkers or flatterers,” and that the only way to gain her approval was to do your job as best you could. “This done, you would not want a more understanding person to work for.”
J. B. West, who had grown up in Iowa, found her down-to-earth and personable, “correct but not formal.” He liked her. “Like most Midwestern women I’d known, her values went deeper than cosmetics.”
The President impressed him as someone who knew who he was and liked who he was. And as a family all three were extremely fond of each other. “They were essentially very private people who didn’t show affection in public,” West wrote. “But they did everything together—read, listened to the radio, played the piano, and mostly talked to each other.” In twelve years Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt had never been in residence in the White House alone. Rarely had they ever taken a meal together.
The full staff for the main house—butlers, cooks, maids, doormen, plumbers, carpenters, electricians, gardeners—numbered thirty-two, of whom the highest ranking were the head usher, Howell Crim; the First Lady’s social secretary, Edith Helm; and the housekeeper, elderly, gray-haired Henrietta Nesbitt, a favorite of Mrs. Roosevelt’s, who had charge of the food and who was the only one who appeared to be a problem, since
the food was uniformly dreadful. Ira Smith, who was Chief of Mails, had first come to work as a messenger at the White House in 1897. Samuel Jackson, the President’s personal messenger, had begun his duties during the Taft administration, as had John Mays, the head doorman.
Truman got along splendidly with them all. In time he knew everyone’s name and all about their families and years of service in the house. If there were guests, he would introduce each of the servants, something none of them had ever known a President to do before.
“He knew when a stenographer’s baby caught a cold; when a White House servant lost a relative,” Merriman Smith, White House correspondent for United Press, would remember. “He thought it was hilarious when LeRoy, the White House leaf-raker whom he knew and liked, fobbed himself off as an important official and was shown a box at Hialeah (Florida) race track.”
One story would be told for a long time. On the night of the German surrender, May 8, Truman’s birthday, the head cook, Elizabeth Moore, had baked him a cake. Dinner over, Truman had gone to the kitchen to thank her, and as Alonzo Fields would note, this was the first time a President had been in the White House kitchen since Coolidge, who had been in and out so often it was said he was only being nosy—to see no handouts were being given away.
“I always felt that he [President Truman] understood me as a man, not as a servant to be tolerated,” Fields would write, “and that I understood that he expected me to be a man…. President Roosevelt was genial and warm but he left one feeling, as most aristocrats do, that they really do not understand one.”
Harry Hopkins had told Truman he had made a mistake ever asking the Roosevelt Cabinet to stay. A President ought to have his own people around him, Hopkins lectured. Now the changes began.
Bob Hannegan, to no one’s surprise, was named Postmaster General, the traditional reward for a party chairman, to replace the ailing Frank Walker, who had talked of retirement since before Roosevelt’s death. Lewis Schwellenbach, Truman’s old Senate friend and confidant, was to be the new Secretary of Labor, succeeding Frances Perkins, who had been the first to tell Truman she wished to step down. For Secretary of Agriculture, after the resignation of Claude Wickard, he picked Congressman Clinton Anderson of New Mexico. To replace Roosevelt’s aristocratic Attorney General, Francis Biddle of Philadelphia, he named a relatively unknown Texan, Tom Clark, an assistant attorney general who had run the Criminal Division.
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