Heading on, the motorcade passed miles of ruin and desolation, bomb craters, blackened burned-out buildings, and seemingly endless processions of homeless Germans plodding along beside the highway carrying or dragging bundles of pathetic belongings. They were mostly old people and children who appeared to be headed nowhere in particular, with nothing but blank expressions on their faces, no anger, no grief, no fear, which Truman found extremely disturbing. At the end of the last war, when the President of the United States, Woodrow Wilson, came to Paris, exuberant crowds had acclaimed him as a hero and savior. Now most of those trudging past never bothered even to look up.
In the center of Berlin, or what had been Berlin, the world’s fourth largest city and capital of the Reich that was to have lasted a thousand years, the small presidential caravan moved down the famous old streets—Bismarckstrasse, Berlinerstrasse, and Unter den Linden, where the once celebrated Linden trees were no more. The Russians had cleared the main thoroughfares with bulldozers. Rubble on all sides was heaped two and three stories high, between the windowless, roofless hulks of bomb-gutted buildings. Everything was black with soot, and in the oppressive heat the smell of death and open sewers was nearly overpowering.
American and British bombers had laid waste to the city around the clock. Probably fifty thousand people had been killed, five times as many as in the London Blitz. Then, in April, came the Russian artillery and the Russian Army.
On Wilhelmstrasse, Truman’s car pulled up beside the Reich Chancellery and the shell-blasted stone balcony where Hitler had harangued his Nazi followers. Truman did not get out. “It is a terrible thing,” he began, knowing he was expected to say something, “but they brought it on themselves. That’s what happens when a man overreaches himself.” It was all he could find to say.
He saw the Brandenburg Gate and the wreckage of the Tiergarten, the city’s once beautiful central park. In 1939, to honor his fiftieth birthday, Hitler had paraded columns of troops and tanks here, before a crowd of 2 million cheering Berliners.
Slowly the motorcade moved on, winding past the ruins of the Sports Palace, where huge crowds had shouted “Hail, the Führer,” and “Leader, command, we follow,” as Propaganda Minister Goebbels asked if they were true believers in the “final total victory” of the German people; then past the giant, gutted Reichstag, seat of parliament, where a fire set by the Nazis in 1933 and blamed on the Communists had given Hitler the excuse he needed to seize dictatorial power.
Despite all they had read, all they had been told in advance, the photographs and newsreels they had seen, the visiting Americans were unprepared for the reality of conquered Berlin. “I never saw such destruction,” recorded Truman, who had seen his share in 1918. It was “absolute ruin.” To Admiral Leahy, whose military career had begun with the famous voyage of the old Oregon around the Horn to Cuba in 1898, it was a calamity against the civilized laws of war. At a notably subdued dinner that night they talked quietly among themselves of the horrible destructiveness of modern war, now “brought home,” as Leahy said, “to those of us who fought the war from Washington.” Truman was as low as he had felt in a long time.
I thought of Carthage, Baalbek, Jerusalem, Rome, Atlantis, Peking…[of] Scipio, Rameses II…Sherman, Jenghiz Khan [he wrote that night in his diary]…. I hope for some sort of peace—but I fear that machines are ahead of morals by some centuries and when morals catch up there’ll be no reason for any of it.
He kept thinking of the devastated people he had seen wandering in the debris. But they had brought it on themselves, they did it, he would write to Bess.
Churchill, on a tour of Berlin of his own that afternoon, had spent half an hour exploring the Chancellery, the site of Hitler’s bunker. (“This is what would have happened to us if they had won the war,” Churchill was heard to say. “We would have been the bunker.”) Truman had not wished to walk among the ruins, he said, because he would never want those unfortunate people to think he was gloating over them.
Because the reporters who had come to Berlin to cover the conference were excluded from all transactions of importance, denied access to the participants or even to the compound at Babelsberg, and provided with only occasional press releases by Charlie Ross, they had often to concoct stories from very little. Anne O’Hare McCormick speculated in a column for The New York Times that the mysterious Joseph Stalin, too, must have been there somewhere in Berlin that same afternoon, but had kept his presence unknown. It was hard to imagine the Soviet Generalissimo not wanting to survey the conquered city, she wrote, and she described all three men stalking about in the dust and wreckage.
There are moments when the drama of our times seems to focus on a single scene. The meeting at Potsdam is one of those moments. We can hardly take in the sense of what happened until it is spelled out in a picture like this. The picture of three men walking in a graveyard. They are the men who hold in their hands most of the power in the world….
Yet the devastation of Berlin was small scale compared to what had become possible that same afternoon of Monday, July 16. What Truman did not yet know, what none of them knew, was that at a remote part of the Alamogordo Air Base in the desert of New Mexico, at 5:29 in the morning (1:29 in the afternoon in Berlin) there had been a blinding flash, “a light not of this world,” from the first nuclear explosion in history. Stimson received word at his Babelsberg quarters that evening at 7:30, a top-secret telegram from George Harrison in Washington, which Stimson took directly to Truman.
“Operated on this morning,” it said. “Diagnosis not yet complete but results seem satisfactory and already exceed expectations.” Details would follow.
II
“Promptly a few minutes before twelve, I looked up from the desk and there stood Stalin in the doorway,” wrote the President in his diary.
It was midday, Tuesday, July 17, and from the high window behind Truman’s shoulder, sunlight streamed into the room. A gilt-framed Victorian still-life of fruit and a dead duck hung over a small marble mantelpiece. His desk—a monstrous, deeply carved affair with huge clawed feet—had been positioned at an angle, facing the door, in the corner of a large Oriental rug. With the Generalissimo were Molotov and the interpreter, Pavlov.
Stalin had arrived the night before and was staying in a thickly wooded area closer to Potsdam, but this, like the time of his arrival and the fact that he had traveled by train more than 1,000 miles from the Kremlin, were all kept secret. It was said he had been detained by official business. The truth was he came late primarily to accentuate his own importance.
Had Truman been outside waiting for Stalin’s arrival, he would have seen a dozen heavily armed Russian guards materialize out of nowhere and surround the house, then, in minutes, the appearance of a long, closed Packard with bulletproof glass so thick that the figures inside were only a blur. As Stalin got out of the car, Harry Vaughan came bounding down the front steps to greet him like a fellow Rotarian, as George Elsey remembered. The Russian guards outside the yellow house were not quite sure what to do.
“I got to my feet and advanced to meet him,” continues Truman’s diary account. “He put out his hand and smiled. I did the same, we shook, I greeted Molotov and the interpreter….”
Joseph Vissarionovich Djugashvili—Stalin, “the Man of Steel”—was the single most powerful figure in the world. He was the absolute dictator over 180 million people of 170 nationalities in a country representing one sixth of the earth’s surface, the Generalissimo of gigantic, victorious armies, and Harry Truman, like nearly everyone meeting him for the first time, was amazed to find how small he was. “A little bit of a squirt,” Truman described him, Stalin standing about 5 feet 5.
He was dressed simply in a lightweight khaki uniform with red epaulets and red seams down the trousers, and he wore no decorations except a single red-ribboned gold star, the Order of the Hero of the Soviet, over the left breast pocket, which gave him a kind of understated authority. His small, squinty eyes were a strange yello
w-gray and there were streaks of gray in his mustache and coarse hair. He was badly pockmarked, his color poor—he had what in high Soviet circles was known as “Kremlin complexion,” an unhealthy, indoor pallor made worse by a recent illness—and his very irregular teeth were darkly tobacco-stained. Truman had been told of his crippled left arm, the result of a childhood accident, but this was not especially noticeable. A chain smoker, Stalin held his cigarette in his right hand and gestured with his right hand only. He had unusually large, powerful-looking hands—hands as hard as his mind, Harry Hopkins once said.
Bohlen, who was standing by to translate for Truman, thought Stalin had aged greatly in just the few weeks since he and Hopkins had met with him in Moscow. Stalin moved slowly, stiffly, spoke little and in a very low tone. To Truman he seemed an old man, yet there was less than five years difference in their age. Born in abject poverty in Georgia in 1879, Stalin was the son of a semi-literate, drunken shoemaker and a doting mother who took in laundry. Initially, before turning revolutionary, he had studied for the priesthood.
Truman, in his freshly pressed double-breasted gray suit and two-toned summer shoes, looked a picture of vitality by contrast.
They sat in overstuffed chairs, flanked by Byrnes, Molotov, Bohlen, and Pavlov. Truman told Stalin he had been looking forward to their meeting for a long time. Stalin agreed solemnly that such personal contact was of great importance. In an effort to ease the tension, Byrnes asked Stalin about his habit of sleeping late. Stalin said only that the war had changed many of his habits. Truman tried an informal reference to Stalin as Uncle Joe, the nickname Roosevelt had used, but this too fell flat with the humorless Russian.
Truman said he hoped to deal with stalin as a friend. He was no diplomat, Truman went on. He would not beat around the bush. He usually said yes or no to questions after hearing all the argument. Only then did stalin appear pleased.
They talked briefly of the defeat of Germany, stalin saying he was sure Hitler was alive and in hiding somewhere in Spain or Argentina. Then, abruptly, and entirely on his own initiative, Stalin said that as they had agreed at Yalta, the Soviets would be ready to declare war on Japan and attack Manchuria by mid-August. He had already assured the Chinese that Russia Recognized Manchuria as part of China and that there would be no Soviet interference with internal political matters there.
Truman said he was extremely pleased. But Stalin, as if to be sure Truman understood, repeated that by the middle of August the Red Army would be in the war with Japan, “as agreed at Yalta,” to which Truman expressed his every confidence that the Soviets would keep their word.
At this point Harry Vaughan slipped into the room to ask Truman in a whisper if he was going to invite “these guys” to lunch.
What was on the menu Truman whispered. Liver and bacon, vaughan said. “If liver and bacon is good enough for us, it’s good enough for them,” Truman replied.
When he asked Stalin to stay, Stalin protested, saying it would be impossible. “You could if you wanted to,” Truman said. And Stalin stayed—for creamed spinach soup, liver and bacon, baked ham, Julienne potatoes, string beans, pumpernickel bread, jam, sliced fruit, mints, candy, cigars, which Stalin declined, and a California wine that he went out of his way to praise.
Truman thought the whole occasion went well, exactly because it was so spur of the moment and informal. He liked Stalin, he decided, “and I felt hopeful that we could reach an agreement satisfactory to the world and to ourselves,”
But Stalin nearly always made a good impression of foreigners. Churchill, who once called Russia “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma,” and who warned both Roosevelt and Truman repeatedly of the Russian menace to Europe, confessed still to liking Stalin the man. Roosevelt had been convinced almost to the end that he could get along with “Uncle Joe.” “The truth is,” wrote Jimmy Byrnes, recalling Stalin’s performance at Yalta, “he is a very likeable person.” Joseph E. Davies, who had been ambassador to Russia briefly and would be at Truman’s side daily at the potsdam conference table, had said in a superficial and immensely popular book, Mission to Moscow, published in 1941, that Stalin was uncommonly wise and gentle. “A child would like to sit on his lap and a dog would sidle up to him,” wrote Davies. Even Eisenhower, after a visit to Moscow later that summer, would describe Stalin in much the same fashion, as “benign and fatherly.”
Truman, as he wrote, found Stalin to be polite, good-natured, businesslike, “honest—but smart as hell.” There had been not a hint of contention between them. The conference hadn’t even begun, yet already Truman had achieved his main objective, as he recorded triumphantly in his diary. “He’ll be in the Jap War on August 15. Fini Japs when that comes about…. I can deal with Stalin.”
That Stalin was also secretive to the point of imbalance, suspicious, deceitful, unspeakably cruel, that he ruled absolutely and by terror and secret police, that he was directly responsible for destroying millions of his own people and the enslavement of many millions more, was not so clearly understood by the outside world at this point as it would be later. Still, the evil of the man was no secret in 1945. In a February issue, published just before Yalta, Time magazine had noted that Stalin and his regime had deliberately caused the deaths by starvation of at least 3 million peasants and liquidated another 1 million Communists who opposed his policies. Facts are stubborn things, said the article, borrowing a line from Lenin, and these were the facts. Actually the facts were more horrible. Probably 5 million peasants had died; probably 10 million had been sent to forced labor camps. “I was remembering my friends,” the composer Shostakovich once remarked, “and all I saw was corpses, mountains of corpses.”
Stalin himself had told Churchill in 1942 that “ten millions” of peasants had been “dealt with.” At one point in 1940, during the Hitler-Stalin Pact, he had had many thousands of Polish officers murdered, in what became known as the Katyn Forest Massacre. In truth, “Uncle Joe” was one of the great mass murderers of all time, as much as Ivan the Terrible (his favorite czar), as much nearly as Adolf Hitler.
Yet, wrote Bohlen, “There was little in Stalin’s demeanor in the presence of foreigners that gave any clue of the real nature and character of the man.” Stalin had perfected a talent for disguise:
At Teheran, at Yalta, at Potsdam and during the ten days I saw him during the spring of 1945 with Hopkins, Stalin was exemplary in his behavior. He was patient, a good listener, always quite in his manner and in his expression. There were no signs of the harsh and brutal nature behind this mask….
The mask was the artifice of an accomplished actor and it rarely slipped. Once was at Teheran. Churchill had been arguing that a premature opening of a second front in France would result in an unjustified loss of tens of thousands of Allied soldiers. Stalin responded, “When one man dies it is a tragedy. When thousands die it’s statistics.”
Twenty years in politics had taught him a thing or two about people, Truman thought. He had only to look a man in the eye to know. “I was impressed by him,” he would write of Stalin, remembering this first meeting. “…What I most especially noticed were his eyes, his face, and his expression.”
With the lunch over and the opening session of the conference not scheduled to begin until five o’clock, Truman went upstairs in the “nightmare” house and took a nap.
III
The first of the plenary sessions of the Potsdam Conference, last of the wartime meetings of the Big Three, code-named “Terminal,” was held in the Cecilienhof Palace at Potsdam, the former summer residence of Crown Prince Wilhelm of Prussia, which had served more recently as a military hospital, first for the Germans, then the Russians. A sprawling two-story, ivy-covered stone building in the neo-Tudor style, it looked very like a vast English country house, with gardens extending to the lake and an inner court where the Russians had planted a giant star of red geraniums.
The oak-paneled reception hall, a cavernous, dim space lit by heavy wrought-iron chandeliers, served
as the conference room. The color scheme was dark red, black, and gold, and the effect rather foreboding, except for one immense window two stories tall looking onto the gardens and lake.
At the center of the room was a circular conference table 12 feet in diameter, covered in a burgundy cloth, and around it, evenly spaced, were fifteen chairs, five each for the three countries. The three chairs reserved for Churchill, Stalin, and Truman were immediately identifiable by their larger size and an incongruous pair of gilded cupids perched on the back of each. Additional chairs and several small desks were arranged in a larger circle behind, these for other members of the delegation, advisers and specialists, who would come and go as different topics arose.
To enter the room, the three leaders had their own separate doors, each of these heavily guarded by Russian soldiers. When everybody was assembled, the guards withdrew, the doors were closed.
Though wearing the same gray suit as earlier, Truman had put on a fresh white shirt and a bow tie. Churchill, like Stalin, was in a summer-weight khaki uniform and as they took their places, he lit up an eight-inch cigar. Stalin was carrying a briefcase, which he tossed onto the table, as if to say he was ready for business.
Truman sat with Byrnes and Leahy on his right, Bohlen and Davies on the left. In Churchill’s group now was Clement Attlee, Churchill’s Labor Party opponent in the general election, whom the prime minister had decided to include in the national interest, in the event that Attlee turned out to be his successor.
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