Truman

by David McCullough

  Senator Richard B. Russell, Jr., of Georgia, one of the most respected, influential figures in Washington, sent a telegram to Truman saying there must be no letup in the assault on the Japanese.

  Let us carry the war to them until they beg us to accept unconditional surrender. The foul attack on Pearl Harbor brought us into the war, and I am unable to see any valid reason why we should be so much more considerate and lenient in dealing with Japan than with Germany…. If we do not have available a sufficient number of atomic bombs with which to finish the job immediately, let us carry on with TNT and fire bombs until we can produce them…. This was total war as long as our enemies held all the cards. Why should we change the rule now, after the blood, treasure and enterprise of the American people have given us the upper hand?…

  Truman sent Russell a heartfelt answer written that same day, August 9:

  I know that Japan is a terribly cruel and uncivilized nation in warfare but I can’t bring myself to believe that, because they are beasts, we should ourselves act in that same manner.

  For myself I certainly regret the necessity of wiping out whole populations because of the “pigheadedness” of the leaders of a nation, and, for your information, I am not going to do it unless it is absolutely necessary. It is my opinion that after the Russians enter into the war the Japanese will very shortly fold up.

  My object is to save as many American lives as possible but I also have a human feeling for the women and children of Japan.

  That night, in his radio address on Potsdam, he made a point of urging all Japanese civilians to leave the industrial cities immediately and save themselves.

  “I realize the tragic significance of the atomic bomb,” he told the American people.

  Its production and its use were not lightly undertaken by this government. But we knew that our enemies were on the search for it….

  We won the race of discovery against the Germans.

  Having found the bomb we have used it. We have used it against those who attacked us without warning at Pearl Harbor, against those who have starved and beaten and executed American prisoners of war, against those who have abandoned all pretense of obeying international laws of warfare. We have used it in order to shorten the agony of war, in order to save the lives of thousands and thousands of young Americans.

  We shall continue to use it until we completely destroy Japan’s power to make war. Only a Japanese surrender will stop us.

  Reflecting on the future and “this new force,” he said with feeling: “It is an awful responsibility which has come to us.”

  On the morning Nagasaki was bombed, a crucial meeting of Japan’s Supreme Council for the Direction of the War had been taking place in Prime Minister Suzuki’s bomb shelter outside the Imperial Palace in Tokyo. The meeting was deadlocked, with three powerful military commanders (two generals and one admiral) arguing fervently against surrender. It was time now to “lure” the Americans ashore. General Anami, the war minister, called for one last great battle on Japanese soil—as demanded by the national honor, as demanded by the honor of the living and the dead. “Would it not be wondrous for this whole nation to be destroyed like a beautiful flower?” he asked. But when news of Nagasaki was brought in, the meeting was adjourned to convene again with the Emperor that night in the Imperial Library. In the end, less than twenty-four hours after Nagasaki, it was Hirohito who decided. They must, he said, “bear the unbearable” and surrender.

  The Japanese government would accept the Potsdam Declaration with the understanding that the Emperor would remain sovereign.

  Truman had been up early as usual the morning of Friday, August 10, and was about to leave his private quarters when, at 6:30, a War Department messenger arrived with the radio dispatch. Byrnes, Stimson, Leahy, and Forrestal were summoned for a meeting at 9:00. “Could we continue the Emperor and yet expect to eliminate the warlike spirit in Japan?” Truman later wrote. “Could we even consider a message with so large a ‘but’ as the kind of unconditional surrender we had fought for?”

  Stimson, as he had before, said the Emperor should be allowed to stay. He thought it the only prudent course. Leahy agreed. Byrnes was strongly opposed. He wanted nothing less than unconditional surrender, the policy Roosevelt and Churchill had agreed to at the Casablanca Conference in 1943, and he was certain the American people felt the same. The Big Three had called for unconditional surrender at Potsdam, he reminded them. He could not understand “why now we should go further than we were willing to go at Potsdam when we had no atomic bomb and Russia was not in the war.” Truman asked to see the Potsdam statement.

  Forrestal thought that perhaps with different wording the terms could be made acceptable and this appealed to Truman.

  He decided against Byrnes. He decided, as he recorded in his diary, that if the Japanese wanted to keep their emperor, then “we’d tell ’em how to keep him.” The official reply, as worded by Byrnes, stated that the Emperor would remain but “subject to the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers.” If it was not unconditional surrender, it was something very close to it, exactly as Naotake Sato, the Japanese ambassador in Moscow, had warned Tokyo it would be a month before.

  At a Cabinet meeting that afternoon, Truman reported these developments in strictest confidence. The Allied governments were being notified. Meantime, he had ordered no further use of atomic bombs without his express permission. (One more bomb was available at the time.) The thought of wiping out another city was too horrible, he said. He hated the idea of killing “all those kids.”

  To Henry Wallace afterward, Truman complained of dreadful headaches for days. “Physical or figurative?” Wallace asked. “Both,” Truman replied.

  Attlee cabled his approval that evening, but the Australians were adamantly opposed. “The Emperor should have no immunity from responsibility for Japan’s acts of aggression…. Unless the system goes, the Japanese will remain unchanged and recrudescence of aggression in the Pacific will only be postponed to a later generation,” said the Australians, who had been excluded from Potsdam and who had fought long and suffered greatly in the war with Japan.

  At the same time shattering news was released in Washington, reminding the country that the war continued. On the night of July 29, the U.S.S. Indianapolis, the ship that had delivered the core of the Hiroshima bomb to Tinian, was torpedoed by a Japanese submarine. The ship sank in minutes, taking hundreds of its crew with it and leaving hundreds more drifting in the sea. They were there for days, many eaten by sharks. By the time rescue ships arrived, eight hundred lives had been lost.

  Chiang Kai-shek cabled his agreement the next morning, Saturday, August 11, and so, reluctantly, did the Australians. The Soviets appeared to be stalling in the hope of having some say in the control of Japan and to drive farther into Manchuria, but eventually Stalin, too, agreed. A formal reply was transmitted to Tokyo. Then the wait began.

  Bess Truman had arrived at the White House from Independence; after an absence of more than two months, a semblance of normal domestic life had resumed. On Sunday, Truman was at his desk writing a letter. It was his sister’s birthday. He would have written sooner, he told her, but he had been too busy. “Nearly every crisis seems to be the worst one, but after it’s over, it isn’t so bad….”

  To reporters his composure was extraordinary. He took it all, “the drama and tenseness, the waiting and watching of war’s end,” in “cool stride markedly lacking in showmanship and striking for its matter-of-factness.” Secretary Byrnes, who kept coming and going from the somber old State Department Building next door, seemed “a little frantic” by contrast. Rumors were everywhere. Peace was imminent. Crowds had gathered outside, expecting an announcement any moment.

  But Sunday passed without word from the Japanese. And so did Monday the 13th. Truman confided to his staff that he had ordered General Marshall to resume the B-29 raids. Late in the day Charlie Ross told reporters the staff would remain on duty until midnight.

  The wait c
ontinued the next morning. “It began like the days that had preceded it…reporters and correspondents jamming the press room and lobby, some of them worn and tired after hours of waiting and from the tenseness of the waiting and uncertainty,” wrote Eben Ayers. The crowds outside grew noticeably larger by the hour. Across Pennsylvania Avenue thousands of people filled Lafayette Square, the majority of them servicemen and women in summer uniforms.

  The answer reached the President at five minutes past four that afternoon, Tuesday, August 14. Japan had surrendered. At 6:10 the Swiss chargé d’affaires in Washington arrived at the State Department to present Secretary Byrnes with the Japanese text, which Byrnes carried at once to the White House.

  (The document would have arrived ten minutes sooner but for the fact that a sixteen-year-old messenger, Thomas E. Jones, who picked it up at the RCA offices on Connecticut Avenue to deliver it to the Swiss legation, had been stopped by the police for making a U-turn on Connecticut.)

  Just before 7:00 P.M., reporters jammed into Truman’s office for the announcement. Truman stood behind his desk. Seated beside him, or standing in back, were Byrnes, Leahy, Bess, most of the Cabinet, and Sue Gentry of the Independence Examiner, who happened to be in town and had accepted an invitation to tea with Bess that afternoon. Truman had told her to stick around because she “might get a story.” (“He’d just been for a swim,” she remembered. “And I thought, ‘Isn’t it wonderful that he could be relaxed and go take a swim!’ ”)

  It was still bright daylight outside, because of the summer clock. In Lafayette Square at least ten thousand people were congregated, held in check only by a thin line of police barriers and Military Police alone Pennsylvania Avenue.

  Truman looked crisp and formal in a double-breasted navy blue suit, blue shirt, silver-and-blue striped tie with matching handkerchief. There was some shuffling among the reporters. Truman, smiling, said hello to one or two. A Secret Service man announced, “All in.” Klieg lights were turned on for the newsreel cameras. Truman glanced at the clock. At exactly seven, his shoulders squared, he began reading slowly and clearly from a sheet of paper held in his right hand: “I have received this afternoon a message from the Japanese government…. I deem this reply a full acceptance of the Potsdam Declaration which specifies the unconditional surrender of Japan.” General MacArthur had been appointed the Supreme Allied Commander to receive the surrender.

  The reporters charged for the door. Truman and Bess returned to the living quarters, but the celebration outside kept growing.

  In Grandview, Missouri, in the living room of her small clapboard house, Martha Ellen Truman excused herself to take a long-distance phone call in another room.

  “Hello…hello,” a guest heard her begin. “Yes, I’m all right. Yes, I've been listening to the radio…. Yes, I’m all right…. Now you come and see me if you can…. Yes, all right…. Goodbye.”

  “That was Harry,” she said returning through the door. “Harry’s a wonderful man…. I knew he’d call. He always calls me after something that happens is over…”

  In Lafayette Square someone had started a conga line. Within minutes throngs of people had broken past the barriers and MPs and surged across the street to crowd the length of the White House fence. Streetcars and automobiles stranded in the mob were quickly covered with sailors in white who clambered on top for a better view. Everyone was cheering. Bells were ringing, automobile horns blaring. The crowd set up a chant of “We want Truman! We want Truman!”

  With the First Lady beside him, the President went out on the lawn to wave and smile. He gave the V-sign as cheer after cheer went up. “I felt deeply moved by the excitement,” he remembered, “perhaps as much as were the crowds….” He and Bess returned to the house, but the call for him continued, so he came out again onto the porch to make a few impromptu remarks over a microphone.

  “This is a great day,” he began, “the day we’ve been waiting for. This is the day for free governments in the world. This is the day that fascism and police government ceases in the world.” The great task ahead was to restore peace and bring free government to the world. “We will need the help of all of you. And I know we will get it.” Another roar of approval reverberated through the trees, as it would have whatever he said.

  He crossed the lawn again, coming closer this time to the high iron fence, beaming, waving until his arm ached, the crowds growing ever more exuberant, in what was to be the biggest night of celebration Washington had ever seen. Half a million people filled the streets. The crush around the White House grew to fifty thousand or more. As reported in the papers the next day, one jubilant soldier flung his arms around a civilian, shouting, “We’re all civilians now!”

  In just three months in office Harry Truman had been faced with a greater surge of history, with larger, more difficult, more far-reaching decisions than any President before him. Neither Lincoln after first taking office, nor Franklin Roosevelt in his tumultuous first hundred days, had had to contend with issues of such magnitude and coming all at once. In boyhood Truman had pored over the pages of Great Men and Famous Women and Plutarch’s Lives and concluded that men made history, and he had never changed his mind. He remained old-fashioned in this as in other ways. But if ever a man had been caught in a whirlwind not of his making, it was he. “We cannot get away from the results of the war,” Stalin had said at Potsdam, and it was just such results that had beset Truman since the night he raised his right hand and took the oath of office beneath the Wilson portrait. The launching of the United Nations, the menacing presence of the Red Army in Eastern Europe, Britain’s bankruptcy, the revealed horrors of the Holocaust, the wasteland of Berlin, the advent of the nuclear age in New Mexico, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki—all were the results of the war, as indeed was his own role now, if one accepted the premise, as most did, that it was the strain of the war that killed Franklin Roosevelt.

  What was most striking about the long course of human events, Truman had concluded from his reading of history, were its elements of continuity, including, above all, human nature, which had changed little if at all through time. “The only new thing in the world is the history you don’t know,” he would one day tell an interviewer. But clearly unparalleled power and responsibility had been thrust upon him at one of history’s greatest turning points, and the atomic bomb, the looming shadow of the mushroom cloud, were absolutely “new things” in the world. The old rules didn’t apply any longer. Europe was a ruin, Britain finished as a world power, Asia devastated and in a state of horrendous confusion. And who was to say about Stalin?

  Only once did Truman suggest that history might be something other than he cared to say, that history had its own kind of direction and force—the “greater-than-man force” that Willa Cather wrote of, when describing the start of the earlier world conflict and its effect on the lives of so many small-town men such as he from the heartland of America. In a letter to his mother on August 17, Truman spoke of the past few days as a “dizzy whirl” in which he stood at the center trying to do something.

  “Everyone had been going at a terrific gait,” he wrote, “but I believe we are up with the parade now.”

  Part Four

  Mr. President

  11

  The Buck Stops Here

  Look at little Truman now

  Muddy, battered, bruised—and how!

  —Chicago Tribune

  I

  “Everybody wants something at the expense of everybody else and nobody thinks much of the other fellow,” Truman wrote to his mother and sister at the beginning of autumn, 1945.

  There were more prima donnas per square foot in public life in Washington than in all the opera companies ever to exist, he told them another day, writing at his desk in October when the trees outside the White House had begun to turn.

  On a bunting-draped platform at an American Legion fair at Caruthersville, Missouri, he said that after every war came an inevitable letdown. Difficulties would follow. “You can’t h
ave anything worthwhile without difficulties.” Mistakes would be made. No one who accomplished things could expect to avoid mistakes. Only those who did nothing made no mistakes.

  All Americans must cooperate, he said, dedicating a dam at Gilbertsville, Kentucky. It was time for everyone to “cut out the foolishness” and “get in harness.”

  A war President no longer, he was finding the tasks of peace more difficult and vexing than he ever imagined. “We want to see the time come when we can do the things in peace that we have been able to do in war,” he had said with such conviction in July, at the small military ceremony in the cobbled square in Berlin. “If we can put this tremendous machine of ours…to work for peace, we can look forward to the greatest age in the history of mankind.” But how? How possibly now, when no one wanted to cooperate any longer?

  His troubles had begun with his first postwar message to Congress, only days after the Japanese surrender ceremonies on board the battleship Missouri in Tokyo Bay. Sent to the Hill on September 6, the message was 16,000 words in length (the longest since the Theodore Roosevelt era) and presented a 21-point domestic program that included increased unemployment compensation, an immediate increase in the minimum wage, a permanent Fair Employment Practices Committee, tax reform, crop insurance for farmers, a full year’s extension of the War Powers and Stabilization Act, meaning the government would keep control over business, and federal aid to housing to make possible a million new homes a year.

  We must go on. We must widen our horizon further. We must consider the redevelopment of large areas of the blighted and slum sections of our cities so that in the truly American way they may be remade to accommodate families not only of low-income groups as heretofore, but every income group….