Truman

by David McCullough

  The number of Americans attending the conference would be four times greater than at Yalta. Truman’s entourage included Byrnes, Leahy, Bohlen, Charlie Ross, Lieutenant Elsey and Captain Frank Graham from the Map Room; a physician, Captain Alphonse McMahon; a presidential valet, Arthur Prettyman, who had served Roosevelt; a Navy photographer; eleven Navy cooks and stewards; General Vaughan, Captain Vardaman, and, once again, Fred Canfil, the U.S. Marshal of Kansas City, who was temporarily attached to the Secret Service detail as a special bodyguard for the President. (Truman would take particular delight in introducing his burly former courthouse custodian to the Russians as Marshal Canfil, a title they took to signify military rank and so showed him utmost deference.) “He was the most vigilant bodyguard a President ever had,” Truman would say later. “While the conferences were going on, he would stand by a window with his arms folded and scowl out the window at everybody who passed…as if he would eat them alive if they bothered the President of the United States.”

  Food supplies, cases of liquor and wine, were flown in. A planeload of bottled water from France arrived daily. Because a planeload of pillows went astray, everybody below the rank of major general would be sleeping without one. So that Truman could maintain private communications with Washington, the Army had spent weeks installing wireless relays and teleprinter circuits across the 100 miles of Soviet-occupied territory separating the conference site from the American sector.

  Truman, Churchill, and Stalin were to be quartered in three of twenty-five large houses that had been commandeered and hurriedly refurbished in a wooded Berlin suburb called Babelsberg, beside Lake Griebnitz, three miles from Potsdam. The lakeshore community had survived comparatively undamaged and was now under the intensely watchful eye of thousands of Russian troops and security agents, in addition to swarms of British and American military guards. The green-capped Russian soldiers were everywhere, along streets and highways, at every crossroad, and along the lakefront. They would appear out of the trees, look about, then be gone again. In all, the Russian complement—military, diplomatic, and security—exceeded twenty thousand people.

  Truman was staying at Number 2 Kaiserstrasse, a three-story yellow-stucco villa on the lakeshore to be known as the “Little White House.” He was told it had belonged to the head of the Nazi movie industry, who had been sent to Siberia. In fact, it had been the home of a noted publisher, Gustav Müller-Grote, and his large family, whose tragic story Truman would only learn years later in an extraordinary letter from one of the sons. Built before the turn of the century, the house had been for years a gathering place for German and foreign scientists, writers, and artists.

  At the end of the war my parents were still living there, as indeed they lived there their whole lives. Some of my sisters moved there with their children, as the suburb seemed to offer more security from bombings…. In the beginning of May the Russians arrived. Ten weeks before you entered this house, its tenants were living in constant fright and fear. By day and by night plundering Russian soldiers went in and out, raping my sisters before their own parents and children, beating up my old parents. All the furniture, wardrobes, trunks, etc. were smashed with bayonets and rifle butts, their contents spilled and destroyed in an indescribable manner. The wealth of a cultivated house was destroyed within hours.

  Told only that the house was to serve a “prominent purpose,” the family was ordered to pack and be gone in an hour, after which the Russians stripped it of everything, including a library of rare books and manuscripts that were hauled away with a forklift truck to fill a bomb crater. The furnishings Truman found on arrival—dark, heavy Teutonic sideboards and tables, a huge carved desk, overstuffed chairs, a grand piano—had been confiscated elsewhere and rushed in at the last minute.

  An American correspondent who managed to get a look inside some weeks later called it a “nightmare of a house.” It was, wrote Tania Long of The New York Times, “oppressive and awesome in its gloom,” filled with depressing still-lifes and hideous lamps. Truman, too, would use the word “nightmare” to describe the interior, though with his interest in architecture he was bothered more by the exterior. Remembering how he had once been quartered in such places as lovely little Montigny-sur-Aube, he called the house a ruined château—ruined, he said, by a German need to cover up anything French. “They erected a couple of tombstone chimneys on each side of the porch facing the lake so they could cover up the beautiful chateau roof and tower,” he wrote in his diary. “Make the place look like hell but purely German….”

  There were no screens in the windows, and the mosquitoes, according to several in the party, were as plentiful as at Yalta. Bathroom facilities, in the words of the official log, were “wholly inadequate.”

  Still, Truman thought the place adequate under the circumstances, and was not told that the former owners were living in misery only a short distance away. His second-floor suite included a bedroom, living room, large office, and a porch with a view of the lake, which was narrow and winding and looked more like a river, with the woods beyond seeming very near at hand. On the lawn that sloped down to the water’s edge stood three or four American MPs in their white gloves and leggings. It was said the Russians had thrown some German soldiers into the lake who were too severely wounded to walk.

  Admiral Leahy was down the hall from the President; Secretary Byrnes and Chip Bohlen on the first floor. Charlie Ross, Vaughan, Vardaman, Canfil, and the Secret Service detail were on the third floor. The Map Room was set up in an L-shaped space off the stair landing, between the first and second floors. The telephone switchboard was in the basement.

  Truman arrived appearing rested and well prepared. The weather on the Atlantic had been so fair, the crossing so smooth, he had suffered not at all from seasickness. With the war in Europe over, there had been no need any longer for a zigzag course or darkened ship at night—all very different from his crossing in 1918—and this time he had the admiral’s cabin. There were movies on board and a number of “satisfactory” poker games with Ross, Vaughan, and some of the wire-service reporters who had been allowed to make the trip. Truman took early morning walks on deck and with binoculars watched gunnery practice. To the family in Grandview, he wrote of meeting a seaman on board named Lawrence Truman. “He comes from Owensborough, Ky., and is the great grandson of our grandfather’s brother. He’s a nice boy and has green eyes just like Margaret’s.”

  But the week at sea had been primarily a working session with Byrnes, Leahy, and Bohlen, all of whom had been closely associated with Roosevelt and at his side at Yalta. The President had squeezed facts and opinions out of them all day, Leahy later said. Bohlen, too, was struck by how Truman “stuck to business,” rarely taking up time with small talk. Averell Harriman would later find the President “astonishingly well prepared.”

  The central issues to be resolved at Potsdam were no different from those at Yalta: the political future of Eastern Europe (and Poland in particular); the occupation and dismantling of Germany; and a commitment from Russia to help defeat Japan, which Truman viewed as his main purpose in going. General Marshall and Admiral King had both stressed the need for Soviet action against Japan, to shorten the war and reduce American casualties. General MacArthur had twice insisted that Russian help was needed.

  Truman also had a pet proposal of his own for ensuring free navigation on all inland waterways and the great canals, an idea he was sure would go far to guarantee future peace in the world.

  But a further extremely important reason—in many ways the most important reason—for the meeting and for all the trouble and effort of coming so far was his need to get to know the other two of the Big Three (“Mr. Russia” and “Mr. Great Britain,” Truman called them), to see them face to face and size them up, and they him. As American as anything about this thoroughly American new President was his fundamental faith that most problems came down to misunderstandings between people, and that even the most complicated problems really weren’t as complicat
ed as they were made out to be, once everybody got to know one another. He knew also the faith Roosevelt had in personal diplomacy as a consequence of his two meetings with Stalin, at Teheran and Yalta.

  Truman had always wanted to succeed at whatever he undertook. There was no one who wanted to win “half so badly as I do,” he had confided to Bess years before, and he had not changed. He knew the value of preparation, of homework—especially if he felt out of his depth, if he were thrown in among and were to be judged by others who appeared to know so much more. “I’ve studied more and worked harder in the last three weeks than I ever did in my life,” he had written in 1918 from the elite artillery school at Montigny-sur-Aube, where everyone else in the class was a college graduate. “I’m going to be better informed on the transportation problem than anyone here,” he had vowed after coming to the Senate.

  But from boyhood he also prided himself in his gift for conversation. Given the chance to talk to people, he felt he could get pretty much anything he wanted. “Haven’t you ever been overawed by a secretary,” he had remarked only recently to a visitor in his office, “and finally, when you have reached the man you wanted to see, discovered he was very human?” He was sure that if he could meet Stalin and deal with him, then he could get to know Stalin and understand him; in this, like so many others before him, he was greatly mistaken.

  On visits to Washington to see Roosevelt during the war, Winston Churchill had made a point of meeting those senators who were known to have influence. The junior Senator from Missouri, however, had not been on the prime minister’s list. So, while Truman and Churchill had maintained steady correspondence in recent months, and talked by phone, the morning of Monday, July 16, 1945, when the familiar stout figure arrived at Number 2 Kaiserstrasse, marked their first meeting. Churchill had wanted his call on the President to be the first order of business. Truman had named the hour—11:00 A.M.—and Churchill arrived on the dot.

  Churchill, too, had landed at Gatow the previous afternoon and was staying in a comparably large, if more attractive, lakeside house nearby. With him now were Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, whom Truman had met, Sir Alexander Cadogan, the Permanent Under Secretary of Foreign Affairs, and the prime minister’s daughter and driver, Mary Churchill, who was dressed in the uniform of a junior commander in the Auxiliary Territorial Service and who told Harry Vaughan her father had not been up this early in ten years.

  Nor had Churchill prepared himself for the Big Three conference in anything like the way Truman had. He had bothered with no briefings, he came with no agenda. He required neither, he felt. He had spent a holiday near Biarritz painting, as his way of preparing for Potsdam.

  Churchill was in the seventy-first year of a life in which he had seen and done more than all but a few. He had been a cavalry officer, foreign correspondent, a prisoner of war in South Africa, head of the British Board of Trade, and First Lord of the Admiralty as early as 1911. He was the author of nineteen books, a painter, husband, father, ardent holiday bricklayer. Once, needing cash, he made $50,000 on a lecture tour in just five months. Born in a palace, he was the son of a lord, the grandson of a duke. His mother, as everyone knew, was an American, the brilliant, beautiful Jenny Jerome of New York. In politics he had begun as a Conservative, changed to a Liberal, switched back to a Conservative again. He had overcome political defeat and disgrace, survived his own recurring dark moods, and being struck down and nearly killed by an automobile in New York. As prime minister through the war, as the pungent, indomitable voice of British resolve, he had become the British lion incarnate, and the great words were his words, not the artifice of a ghost. “The nation had the lion’s heart,” he would say. “I had the luck to give the roar.”

  The scowl, the familiar upraised V-sign and jutting cigar, his command of the English language had made him a surpassing symbol and clearly one of the great figures of the age. If asked who in the world they most admired, now that Roosevelt was gone, most Americans would have said Churchill, and probably, after some thought, Truman would have, too. Yet the prospect of sharing the spotlight with such a man was extremely unsettling. Behind all of Truman’s privately expressed apprehension over coming to Berlin was a great deal of plain stage fright—anxiety accentuated by memories of Churchill and Roosevelt together, posing for pictures, commanding attention and affection as few men ever had, and always with perfect confidence and obvious regard for one another. Roosevelt and Churchill had met nine times and exchanged, by Churchill’s count, 1,700 messages. On visits at the White House, the prime minister had made himself so at home that Mrs. Roosevelt decided it was time an official guest residence be established, which led to the acquisition of Blair House. (If one favorite Washington story can be believed, she had found the prime minister padding down the hall in his nightshirt sometime before dawn one morning, a cigar and brandy in hand, saying he had still more to discuss with Franklin and must wake him at once.) He and Roosevelt saw the history of their times as Homeric drama and they the lead players, two professionals perfectly cast and at the top of their form.

  “It is fun to be in the same decade with you,” Roosevelt had told him, and in a recent letter to Truman, Eleanor Roosevelt had written how important it was that he get along with Winston. He should talk to him about books, she advised, or let him quote from his marvelous memory of everything from nonsense rhymes to Greek tragedy.

  But Churchill had aged. He looked old, he sounded tired and disheartened. The empire he had led with such verve was nearly bankrupt, a great power no longer. On July 5, there had been a general election, the result of which would not be known for another ten days, when the soldier vote was in. The election could have been put off, but Churchill had gone ahead with it on the advice that his popularity was at a peak. While others were confident his victory would be substantial, he, privately, was not so sure.

  It would become part of the mythology of the Truman presidency in time to come that Churchill, at their first meeting, thought little of Truman, an idea amplified by Churchill himself in a famous toast years later on board the presidential yacht. “I must confess, sir, I held you in very low regard,” he would begin. “I loathed your taking the place of Franklin Roosevelt….” But in fact Truman made a strong impression from the start. They talked for two hours, and, according to Truman, no business of the conference was considered; but walking back to his own quarters afterward, Churchill told his daughter how much he liked the new President. “He says he is sure he can work with him,” Mary Churchill wrote to her mother. “I nearly wept with joy and thankfulness, it seemed like divine providence. Perhaps it is FDR’s legacy. I can see Papa is relieved and confident.”

  Asked later by his friend and physician, Lord Moran, if Truman had ability, Churchill replied that he thought so. “At any rate, he is a man of immense determination,” Churchill said. “He takes no notice of delicate ground, he just plants his foot down firmly upon it.” To make his point, Churchill jumped a little off the wooden floor and brought both bare feet down with a smack.

  Truman’s impressions, recorded at the day’s end in his diary, were not so favorable, however. As the White House butler, Alonzo Fields, had noted, commenting on Bess, flattery did not go far with the Trumans.

  We had a most pleasant conversation [Truman wrote of Churchill]. He is a most charming and a very clever person—meaning clever in the English not the Kentucky sense. He gave me a lot of hooey about how great my country is and how he loved Roosevelt and how he intended to love me etc. etc. Well…. I am sure we can get along if he doesn’t try to give me too much soft soap.

  Stalin, meanwhile, was nowhere to be seen. Where he was, or why, were not known, but the opening of the conference had to be postponed a day.

  In the time since Truman had left Washington, the Japanese ambassador in Moscow, Naotake Sato, on orders from Tokyo, had begun discussions with the Soviets on the possibility of bringing an end to the war. On July 12, the Japanese Minister of Foreign Affairs, Shigenori Togo, sent
a “Very Secret, Urgent” radio message to Ambassador Sato stating that the Emperor was “greatly concerned over the daily increasing calamities and sacrifices faced by the citizens of the various belligerent countries” and that it was “His Majesty’s heart’s desire to see the swift termination of the war.” His Majesty wished to send Prince Konoye as a special envoy to Moscow to talk.

  Sato responded that it was pointless talking about peace with the Soviets. Such proposed negotiations were entirely unrealistic, he stressed. Molotov was not interested. “In the final analysis,” Sato bluntly told Togo, “if our country truly desires to terminate the war, we have no alternative but to accept unconditional surrender or something very close to it.”

  The messages were intercepted by American monitors (the Japanese code having been broken years before) and promptly reached Truman. And so, importantly, did Tokyo’s repeated warnings to Sato that Japan would not consent to unconditional surrender.

  Also available to the President was a Combined Intelligence Committee report warning that the Japanese might try to cause dissension among the Allies by just such peace overtures. And even had there been no such warning, there was for Truman, as for others trying to appraise the situation, the bitter memory of Japanese peace talks in Washington in December 1941 at the very time of the attack at Pearl Harbor.

  On the afternoon of the 16th, his schedule open, Truman decided to see Berlin. A motorcade assembled in the drive outside Number 2 Kaiserstrasse and in ten minutes, with Byrnes and Leahy beside him in the back seat of an open Lincoln, he was speeding down the empty four-lane Autobahn. The day was stifling hot and the wind came as a great relief.

  Halfway to the city they met the entire American 2nd Armored Division deployed for his inspection along one side of the highway, a double row of Sherman tanks and halftracks reaching as far as the eye could see. The motorcade drew up, Truman got out. It was the largest armored division in the world, he was told, and a spectacle of military power such as he might only have imagined until now. He climbed into a halftrack, and to review the formation rode standing, slowly, for twenty minutes, down a line of soldiers and equipment for a mile and a half—“good soldiers and millions of dollars of equipment, which has amply paid its way to Berlin,” he thought.