Now the laborer’s task is o’er;
Now the battle day is past;
Now upon the farther shore
Lands the voyager at last.
Father, in Thy gracious keeping
Leave we now Thy servant sleeping.
A lone plane circled overhead. Advancing with precision, a squad of cadets fired three rounds in the air, terrifying Fala. The little dog yelped, rolled over, and cringed. He was still trembling, looking frightened and lost, when the bugler blew taps.
***
Eleanor Roosevelt left slowly. In New York, wearing on her black dress the pearl fleur-de-lis Franklin had given her as a wedding present, she dismissed a gathering of reporters with four words. “The story,” she said quietly, “is over.”
TWELVE
A New World, Under a New Sun
At 6:30 on the warm morning of April 13, 1945—the Friday that My Day’s author submitted no column—Harry Truman stirred on his pillow at 1701 Connecticut Avenue N.W., roused by the dreamy feeling that some extraordinary urgency was awakening him. Then it hit him: he was President of the United States. He bounded out of bed in one motion and dove for his clothes as though ready for instant action, because, as he later wrote in his memoirs, watching Roosevelt had convinced him that “being a President is like riding a tiger. A man has to keep on riding or be swallowed…. I never felt that I could let up for a single moment.”
Truman was a hard rider, an up-with-the-sun Missouri farm boy with the mulish strength of the Middle Border, an incisive mind, and a deeper understanding of world history than most Presidents, including Franklin Roosevelt. Little of this was visible at the time. With “almost complete unanimity,” Time wrote, his friends “agreed last week that he ‘would not be a great President.’” Speaker Sam Rayburn saw Truman as a man “right on all the big things, wrong on most of the little ones.” Nothing big surfaced in the first hours of his Presidency, and the country was inclined to take the word of the Kansas City Star’s Roy Roberts for it that “Harry Truman is no man to rock the boat.” To Roberts and other conservatives the new President was a good-natured but poor politician, a dapper ex-haberdasher who delivered tepid speeches with singsong rhetoric and a flatter Midwest accent than Alf Landon’s. He would sit out Franklin Roosevelt’s fourth term, they told one another, and then return to obscurity.
That was how they typecast the new President, and that, in the beginning, was how he looked. Washington believed that he had landed on the 1944 ticket as a compromise candidate. Roosevelt never denied it. If memoirs are to be believed, he scarcely mentioned Truman to anyone after their joint victory. The consequence was that Truman came into office as the worst-prepared President in history.
All transitions have their awkward moments, and no one could be expected to match Roosevelt’s flamboyance, but his successor somehow gave the impression of a country cousin who had just arrived in Washington for a quick tour and was stunned by the thought of his own insignificance. As Truman himself recalled it, Secret Service agents arrived at his apartment that first morning and led him down the back stairs, yet despite their presence he kept forgetting that he was the chief executive. A newspaperman addressed him as “Mr. President,” and he winced; “I wish you didn’t have to call me that,” he said. In his first public statement after his hurried oath taking at the White House he had said, “It will be my effort to carry on as I believe the President would have done.” To him, as to most of his constituents, the man who had died in Warm Springs remained “the President.”
Arriving on the sidewalk that first Friday morning, he hailed an AP correspondent: “Hey, Tony, if you’re going down to the White House, you may as well hop in with me.” The Secret Service agents looked pained, and their displeasure turned to alarm when, downtown, he insisted upon walking to his bank. They were unaccustomed to a President who walked anywhere. News that the new chief executive was a pedestrian swept adjacent blocks, creating the greatest traffic jam in memory, and Truman ruefully conceded that his bodyguards were right—Presidents couldn’t go to banks; it had to be the other way round. He enjoyed the deference, but whenever his new duties were mentioned, he paled. “Boys, if newspapermen pray,” he told the White House press corps, “pray for me now.”
In perspective his behavior seems natural. The death of the great leader had unnerved everyone; yesterday Truman had been sworn in—after a frantic search for a Bible—by a confused Chief Justice who thought the new President’s middle name was Shippe, when in fact the S stood for nothing. Afterward Truman had impulsively kissed the Bible. At that time he knew no more about prosecution of the war than the average reader of the Washington Post—which, in fact, had been his principal source of information. Roosevelt had told him nothing. Truman had never been in the White House war room. It is astonishing to reflect that during his first day in office he had never heard of an atomic bomb, while Joseph Stalin knew almost everything about the Manhattan Project. Stimson had tried to take the new President aside for a quick briefing, but there wasn’t time then. On the second day, as Truman tells it, “Jimmy Byrnes came to see me, and even he told me few details, though with great solemnity he said that we were perfecting an explosive great enough to destroy the whole world.” Truman, from Missouri, just stared. Nearly two weeks were to pass before he would be properly briefed on the developments at Los Alamos, and then Admiral Leahy, speaking once more as an explosions expert, would snort that the project was a complete waste of taxpayers’ money, “the biggest fool thing we have ever done.”
Washington sophisticates were diverted by anecdotes of Truman’s artlessness, though the stories lacked the malice of anti-Roosevelt lore and were sometimes funny. After attending a concert, the new President was invited backstage to meet the virtuoso. Vice President Truman had been photographed playing an upright piano with Lauren Bacall, looking very leggy, perched on top of it, and the virtuoso murmured politely, “I understand that you, too, play the piano, Mr. President.” The President replied modestly, “Oh, no, not like you, maestro.” The true significance of such stories is that President Truman could laugh at them, too. Ridicule couldn’t touch him. He knew what he was, a rare trait in Washington, and was proud of his lack of ostentation, an even rarer one.
To be sure, he did lack grace, tact, brilliance, charisma. But millions who had been daunted by FDR’s remote grandeur were delighted by HST’s earthiness and unpretentiousness. Roosevelt hadn’t told his own wife that he was going to run against Hoover, but after taking the oath Truman phoned his ninety-one-year-old mother in Grandview, Missouri. After that first flash from Warm Springs, the family home in Grandview had been under siege by reporters and photographers who phoned, rang the doorbell, and peered in windows. The elder Mrs. Truman ignored them. She did come to the phone for her son. “Mama, I’m terribly busy,” he said. He assured her everything would be all right, but said, “You probably won’t hear from me for some time.” Reaching home, laden with documents, he followed Bess and Margaret to the apartment of a hospitable family next door. In his words: “They had a turkey and then gave us something to eat. I had not had anything to eat since noon. Went to bed, went to sleep, and did not worry any more that day.” The Trumans wouldn’t have dreamed of troubling the White House kitchen, or sending out to a restaurant. As in most Depression families, caution with money had become ingrained in their lives. In his faithful weekly letter to Missouri he described how he had learned of FDR’s death with humility—“When I arrived at the Pennsylvania [sic] entrance to the most famous house in America, a couple of ushers met me”—and told of problems with the Connecticut Avenue apartment: “Our furniture is still there and will be for some time…. But I’ve paid the rent for this month and will pay for another month if they don’t get the old White House redecorated by that time.” He ended:
I have had a most strenuous time for the last six days. I was sworn in at 7:09 p.m. Eastern War Time Apr. 12 and it is now 9 p.m. April 18th. Six days President of the United States! It is hardly belie
vable. This day has been a dinger, too. I’m about to go to bed, but I thought I had better write you a note. Soon as we get settled in the White House you’ll both be here to visit us. Lots of love from your very much worried son and bro.
HARRY
Awaiting Eleanor Roosevelt’s departure, the new First Family was living out of suitcases in Blair House, diagonally across Pennsylvania Avenue from the Executive Mansion. In her diary, Margaret was breathless: “It is perfectly beautiful. All old and priceless. Visiting dignitaries stay here. Dad is the first President to do so.” But then, she was always euphoric these days—“Mother, Dad and I went to the Walter Reed chapel today,” reads her entry for April 22. “Then we called on General Pershing! Such excitement!” The pejoratives “campy” and “square” were unknown in 1945, but “corny” was, and jaded Washingtonians applied it to Margaret and her natty father, who wore double-breasted gray suits with two-toned wingtip shoes, and opened his first coast-to-coast address by forgetting Sam Rayburn, so that the Speaker had to interrupt him with a hoarse, “Wait, Harry, until I introduce you.” “To err,” Washington said wittily, “is Truman,” Very little was known about Bess Truman until a reporter found a county employee in Independence, Missouri, who had grown up with her. “She was a great girl,” Henry P. Chiles said enthusiastically. “She was the first girl I ever knew who could whistle through her teeth.”
Harry Truman was usually indifferent to criticism. Slurs on his wife and daughter were another matter. The most celebrated incident followed Margaret’s debut as a professional singer in Constitution Hall. Paul Hume, the Washington Post music critic, wrote that the President’s daughter “cannot sing very well,” was “flat a good deal of the time,” and “communicates almost nothing of the music she presents.” Minutes after that day’s copy of the Post reached the White House this holograph was dispatched to Hume:
I have just seen your lousy review of Margaret’s concert…. It seems to me that you are a frustrated old man…. Some day I hope to meet you. When that happens you’ll need a new nose, a lot of beefsteak for black eyes, and perhaps a supporter below.
H.S.T.
Margaret was humiliated. She told the press, “I am absolutely positive that my father wouldn’t use language like that,” and then ran upstairs in tears. HST humbly acknowledged that “Sometimes the frailties of the human get the better of me” (Hume opened his next recital review with “If I may venture to express an opinion”), and the episode was written off by everyone except those Republicans, Congressman Richard M. Nixon among them, who said they thought Presidents should conduct themselves with greater dignity.
To Truman’s critics he was a joke, and a poor one at that. Roosevelt had at least behaved like a chief of state. He could never have forgotten himself long enough to excoriate a music critic or, as in another ill-tempered Truman missive, say that the Marine Corps had “a propaganda machine that is almost equal to Stalin’s.” Outside Washington, HST behaved like a Legionnaire at a national convention. In Florida he wore a white cap, crazy-colored Hawaiian shirts, and carried an outsize cane. En route to Fulton, Missouri, with Winston Churchill, he donned an engineer’s cap and gaily drove the locomotive. In Kansas City he hopped into Frank Spina’s barbershop and reminded Frank, “None of that fancy stuff. I don’t want anything that smells.” The press recorded it all, including his farewell kiss to his mother before boarding the Sacred Cow and her last words: “You be good, but be game, too.”
In the days and weeks after FDR had been lowered into the earth at Hyde Park, no one expected much of the new President, and only a handful slowly reached the conclusion that by any standards HST was both good and game. In the White House war room, Marshall and Leahy found that they never had to tell him anything twice. Troop units, names of warships, battle plans, enemy dispositions, logistics data—he retained it all and cited it in his own concise appraisals. Before his first week had ended, he had tackled the prickly Palestine problem, was preparing for the first U.N. conference in San Francisco, had shaken up Washington’s bureaucracy, and made three cabinet changes. He almost countermanded Eisenhower and sent GIs into Berlin and Prague; it was one of the few times in his life he didn’t play a hunch, and the postwar history of Europe would have been far different if he had. In Moscow, Ambassador Averell Harriman, knowing almost nothing of his new boss, had boarded an embassy plane and flown across Asia, Europe, and the Atlantic—a record at the time—to be sure Truman wasn’t beguiled by Stalin’s deceit. On Monday, April 23, Harriman was admitted to the oval office and met the new President:
I had talked to Mr. Truman for only a few minutes when I began to realize that this man had a real grasp of the situation. What a surprise and relief this was! He had read all the cables and reports that had passed between me and the State Department, going back for months. He knew the facts and the sequence of events, and he had a keen understanding of what they meant.
Roosevelt had tried to charm the Russians. Truman was blunt. When V. M. Molotov entered the oval office with Andrei Gromyko, the President said briskly that the United States and the United Kingdom had observed every Yalta covenant, but that honoring vows wasn’t a one-way street. Molotov replied that the Soviet Union had been equally faithful to its word. Not in Poland, it hadn’t, Truman shot back, and he wanted Molotov to know here and now that as long as Red puppets sat in eastern Europe, Poland would not be admitted to the U.N. Moreover, he hoped that sentiment would be conveyed to Stalin in exactly those words. Molotov answered indignantly, “I have never been talked to in my life like this.” Truman said dryly, “Carry out your agreements and you won’t get talked to like this.” Afterward Harriman, who had lurked in the background, recalled, “He got quite rough with Molotov, so much so, in fact, that I was becoming a little concerned. But I must say I was quite proud of the new President.”
Back from Hyde Park, Truman had invited Byrnes to join the new cabinet as Secretary of State, and Byrnes, in the President’s words, “almost jumped down my throat taking me up on it.” Dean Acheson, the new Undersecretary of State, wrote his son on April 30, “The new President has done an excellent job.” By chance, he went on, he and Truman had spoken at length just two days before Roosevelt’s death, and Acheson had “for the first time got a definite impression of him. He is straightforward, decisive, simple, entirely honest…. I think he will learn fast and will inspire confidence. It seems to me a blessing that he is the President and not Henry Wallace.”
Marshall, Leahy, Harriman, and Acheson were among the early converts. Others took longer, and some had to be all but struck on the head with a blunt instrument, a skill at which HST was proficient. He had decided to appoint an old Missouri friend, John W. Snyder, as Federal Loan Administrator, and he called in Jesse Jones, the former head of the agency, to tell him the news. Jones was startled. He had expected to be consulted. He asked, “Did the President make the appointment before he died?”
“No,” replied Truman. “He made it just now.”
***
In late April the Geneva Tribune ran a headline: EVENTS SEEM TO BE SUCCEEDING ONE ANOTHER WITH GREAT RAPIDITY. They certainly were. The Führer’s death was announced May 1, and that evening Julie Andrews saw London alight after dark for the second time. Berlin fell May 2. Later in the day the Germans in Italy surrendered. Two days later Wehrmacht commanders capitulated in Holland, Denmark, and northwest Germany. Then, on May 7, General Alfred Jodl and his staff signed unconditional surrender documents at Reims while Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel was going through the same painful ceremonies under the eye of Soviet Marshal Georgi Zhukov in Berlin. It was a half-hour before midnight. For the first time in modern history the entire armed forces of a nation, officers and enlisted men alike, on land, at sea, and in the air, had become prisoners of war. During the following week all commanders in all armies moved troops, had orders cut, and synchronized watches for a common cease-fire, and suddenly it was V-E Day—May 8, 1945, Harry Truman’s sixty-first birthday. The President was
on the air at 9 A.M. (Churchill in London and Stalin in Moscow were giving their people the news at the same instant). His first words were, “The Allied Armies, through sacrifice and devotion and with God’s help…” Hardly anyone remembered what he said after that. They were in the streets, in Times Square, hurling bales of ticker tape out Wall Street windows, dancing in the Chicago Loop, on Boston Common, at Hollywood and Vine, around Indianapolis’s war monument and on Washington’s Mall, on campuses and in war plants, wherever there was room to dance and sometimes where there was none: department store windows, telephone booths, elevators. Men wanted to kiss, women wanted to be kissed, and for one long moment they felt entitled to forget that other, more complicated war with an empire larger than Germany’s and even more determined to fight on until every member of its race was extinct—taking with them the largest possible number of Japan’s enemies. V-E Day hadn’t dampened Tokyo’s morale. The emperor was still divine; sacrificing your life in his name continued to be a guarantee of immortality. To all peace feelers Tokyo made the same reply; capitulation was and always would be out of the question.
***
History had been moving at breakneck speed since the relief of Bastogne on December 26, and since the momentum was to continue through September, survivors of that time are understandably hazy about the sequence of events. Many had no time for news anyhow. Fighting men were still in replacement centers, canteens, hospitals, cockpits, or on warships. They were mourning their dead, convalescing from military surgery, rereading mail from home, collecting autographs for short snorters, fighting boredom. At home their wives and mothers welcomed home crippled GIs or pored anxiously over casualty lists. In these circumstances, commentators often spoke to deaf audiences, piles of newspapers were thrown out unread, and months merged into a bewildering kaleidoscope.
The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972 Page 55