American Warlords

by Jonathan W. Jordan

  Daisy asked him to lean back in his chair, so he would not topple forward, but he couldn’t move. The room sprang to life as Lucy and Polly tilted the chair back and yelled for help. Daisy found a Secret Service agent and sent him to find Dr. Bruenn.

  Joe the Filipino and Arthur Prettyman, Roosevelt’s valet, picked up the president and carried him to his bedroom. They laid him on the bed and covered him with blankets. As they loosened his tie and fanned his face, his eyes rolled from side to side, flashing around the room with no sign of recognition.26

  Fifteen minutes later, Dr. Bruenn arrived to find the president cold and unresponsive. As the Roosevelt cousins withdrew to the cottage living room, Lucy Rutherford and Elizabeth Shoumatoff quietly gathered their things and left.27

  Over the next hour, Franklin Roosevelt’s body endured a slow collapse. Bruenn surmised that he had suffered a cerebral hemorrhage, and knew he could do nothing more. Roosevelt’s heart raced, his blood pressure skyrocketed, his pupils dilated unevenly, and he lost bladder control. As he lay in his rough cottage bed, his chest rose in deep, steady gasps—gasps that grew more shallow with each push of his straining lungs.28

  • • •

  One of young Franklin’s favorite pastimes was to pilot a small schooner up the coast to Campobello Island. He loved standing behind the wheel for hours at a time, inhaling the musky salt air, feeling the tilt of the deck under his feet as he tacked among the waves.

  After a long day aligning the boat’s bow with the winds, he would squint through the setting sun and pick out Campobello’s wooden pier. With a quick step, he would steady the rudder and hop from one line to the next, letting wind spill from the sails as the sheets played through his big, strong hands. As the schooner eased toward the rocky shore, he would clamber to the rail, ready to cast the last line over the beckoning moorings.

  The cable thrown, the boat tied to the dock, Frank Roosevelt could allow himself a moment of blissful, satisfied peace. He had stood his turn at the wheel through deep waters and brought his vessel home.

  At last, in the comfort of his old, familiar harbor, he could rest those tired legs.

  PART THREE

  Swords, Plowshares, and Atoms

  1945

  To entrust the winning of the war and the framing of the peace into the hands of any man with a limited outlook and without the experience needed for such a job would be the sheerest folly.

  —HARRY TRUMAN, FEBRUARY 22, 1944

  FIFTY-TWO

  TRUMAN

  THE PLANE FROM WASHINGTON FLEW HIGH OVER THE HUDSON RIVER AS IT threaded its way through upstate New York. Passing thick woods, hills, boulders, and towns that were ancient in Washington Irving’s time, the Air Force transport settled down on the runway at Stewart Field near West Point. Henry Stimson, George Marshall, and Ernie King clambered into a convoy of automobiles and rode along the Hudson’s west bank, through Cornwall, through Newburgh, across the river to Poughkeepsie, and finally to the tree-lined hamlet of Hyde Park. They were going to the final resting place of their wartime commander- in-chief.1

  The death of a president, like his life, is not entirely his own. When a president dies in office, his passing becomes a joint venture in which the public, a stakeholder, plays a dual role. It pours out its collective heart to the memory of a fallen leader, then casts him aside to get on with the nation’s business.

  In this operation, Marshall played the role of executive officer: Transporting Mrs. Roosevelt to Warm Springs. Safeguarding the president’s body as it returned by train to Washington. The procession from Union Station. The flag-draped casket on a caisson. The memorial service in the East Room. Banks of flowers, foreign dignitaries, press, and condolences from around the world. The last ride of Franklin Roosevelt, to his flower garden on Springwood’s placid grounds.2

  The ritual of committing Roosevelt’s mortal coil was presided over by the old rector of St. James’ Episcopal Church, the Roosevelt family chapel. At the burial site, a cordon of young West Point cadets braced at attention. Roosevelt’s casket, hastily purchased in Atlanta, was lowered into the ground and three precise volley cracks split the air. Beyond the hedges surrounding the garden, a band struck up a farewell rendition of “Hail to the Chief.”3

  Then he was gone.

  • • •

  “My dear general,” Eleanor wrote Marshall the night of Roosevelt’s funeral, “I want to tell you tonight how deeply I appreciate your kindness & thoughtfulness in all the arrangements made. My husband would have been grateful & I know it was all as he would have wished it. He always spoke of his trust in you & his affection for you.”4

  The personal loss of the man they followed for more than twelve years left the American warlords with a lingering sadness, though not a profound one. Death had been stalking Roosevelt for some time, and most of his war leaders, civilian and military, commented at one time or another on his physical decline.

  Yet they could not shake—for the moment—the sense that the country had lost a friend. At Woodley a melancholy Henry Stimson wrote, “For all his idiosyncrasies our Chief was a very kindly and friendly man and his humor and pleasantry had always been the life of Cabinet meetings. I think every one of us felt keenly the loss of a real personal friend.” Leahy told his diary FDR’s death was “a personal bereavement to me in the loss of a devoted friend whom I have known and admired for thirty-six years.”5

  But the war would not tarry for any man’s death, and in the White House Cabinet Room on April 12, a short, bespectacled man who thought he would be playing poker that night was holding a Bible and repeating the oath of office to Chief Justice Harlan Stone. Marshall, Stimson, King, and Leahy returned to Washington to explain to an unplanned president what they had been doing to win the war.6

  Minutes after learning of Roosevelt’s death, an anxiety-ridden Harry Truman paid his respects to Eleanor in her second-floor sitting room. The First Lady, though obviously shaken, was, in her moment of grief, a tower of dignity and strength. With the uplifting spirit that had given heart to thousands of wounded soldiers and millions of America’s poor, she stood when Truman entered and put her hand on his shoulder.

  “Is there anything I can do for you?” Truman asked her.

  “Is there anything we can do for you?” she answered. “You are the one in trouble now.”7

  • • •

  Harry Truman was, in nearly every way, a different man from the glib glad-hander who had ruled the White House since 1933. Short, quick, plainspoken, he made no small talk, avoided no question. At ease among close friends, he lacked the instant familiarity that Roosevelt offered freely to one and all.

  Unlike Roosevelt, he believed the buck stopped in the Oval Office. As he later told Anthony Eden, “I am here to make decisions, and whether they prove right or wrong, I am going to make them.”8

  He had known the job of president might be thrust upon him prematurely. In August, before the election, FDR had his new running mate over to the White House for lunch and a photo session on the South Lawn. When he got back to his Senate office, a rattled Harry Truman told a friend that when Roosevelt “tried to pour cream into his tea, more went into the saucer than into the cup.” He added, “It doesn’t seem to be a mental lapse of any kind, but physically he’s going to pieces.”9

  The “juggler,” as FDR had called himself, refused to see the pieces crumbling, and he was, by his own design, the only man who knew what the right and left hands of his administration were doing. For twelve years he had fragmented information, ignored jurisdictional lines, and overlapped responsibilities. Secretive while being genial, concealing everything when being garrulous, Roosevelt rendered no concessions to his political or physical mortality by taking his vice president—any vice president—into his confidence.

  A year earlier, when deriding the qualifications of Roosevelt’s Republican opponents, Truman told the newspapers, “To entrust t
he winning of the war and the framing of the peace into the hands of any man with a limited outlook and without the experience needed for such a job would be the sheerest folly.” Yet FDR never showed Truman any of his secret cables with Stalin and Churchill. Truman had never seen the Map Room or even been told of its existence. He knew nothing of Allied strategy or the atomic bomb. Stimson knew the new president would be “laboring under the terrific handicap of coming into such an office where the threads of information were so multitudinous that only long previous familiarity could allow him to control them.”10

  So did Truman. After ad-libbing “So help me God” in the Cabinet Room on the night of April 12, he asked Stimson to bring his war chiefs to the Oval Office the next morning.11

  • • •

  Roosevelt’s footsteps echoed across the stage, but most of the actors sitting in the Oval Office on the morning of April 13 had changed since the war’s first dreadful weeks. Stimson was still there, but in the secretary of the navy’s chair sat Jim Forrestal. With Marshall was Admiral King, who had taken the place of the exiled Betty Stark. Leahy had been ambassador to Vichy when Pearl Harbor was attacked, and Arnold, on inspection in Europe that day, was a full member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a name that did not exist in 1941.12

  And for the first time since the war began, the president’s chair was occupied by a man other than Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

  Leahy explained the function of the Joint Chiefs to the new president. At Stimson’s suggestion, Marshall and King gave short summaries of the state of the war. Marshall said Eisenhower would send Patton’s army into Czechoslovakia. Bradley was driving toward the Elbe River for his rendezvous with the Red Army, and Montgomery was moving on Lübeck on the Baltic coast.

  King described the Pacific. Air bases were operating on northern Luzon and cutting off Japan’s oil, food, and metal. Iwo Jima’s capture three weeks earlier had put American fighter escorts within range of Japan, and the Tenth Army was making steady progress on Okinawa. Total casualties for all services to date were nearly 800,000.

  Truman told the group he was impressed by the high command’s effectiveness. “If the South had had a staff organization like that,” he said, “the Confederates would have won the Civil War.” He asked a few questions, then thanked the men for their help. He said he was satisfied with the war’s progress and wanted no major changes in its prosecution. The meeting was brief and efficient, and the war chiefs left the overwhelmed president to face his next meeting.13

  On their way back to the Pentagon, Stimson and Marshall quietly compared impressions of the new commander-in-chief. Stimson was cautious but optimistic. Marshall was more guarded. “We will not know what he is really like until the pressure really begins to be felt,” he said.

  King, for his part, felt good about the new man. Truman was a straight shooter, like himself, and apparently didn’t give a damn whose feathers he ruffled when he was right. King liked that. Three months into Truman’s tenure he would tell Lord Moran, “Watch the president. This is all new to him, but he can take it. He is a more typical American than Roosevelt, and he will do a good job, not only for the United States but for the whole world.”14

  Unlike FDR, Truman was an Army man. He had been a battery commander at the Meuse-Argonne in the First World War. He kept his commission in the Army Reserve, and between the wars, he commanded the reservist 381st Artillery Regiment. Shortly after Pearl Harbor, he spoke with Marshall about resigning from the Senate to serve in the Army—a path Marshall advised against—and as chairman of the Truman Committee, he kept a watchful eye on military affairs.15

  That Army influence was felt as Truman put his stamp on the executive office. Naval scenes in the presidential study were replaced with prints of airplanes; an Andrew Jackson bust took the place of a Dutch ship model. Knickknacks on FDR’s desk—pigs, donkeys, and other odd mementos—were swept away, replaced by a model cannon, a clock, and pen sets. From a glance around the study, Navy men like Forrestal and King could see that their greatest ally, the meddling, whimsical late commander-in-chief, had vanished.

  Truman also turned his broom on the old guard. Harold Ickes, Frances Perkins, and Francis Biddle were soon gone. Henry Morgenthau resigned shortly after Truman refused to bring him to Germany to meet with the Big Three.* Others soon left. The country was the same, the policies were the same, but Harry Truman’s tone would be very different from the one Roosevelt’s New Dealers had grown up with.16

  While Roosevelt’s monumental ego had been at home among the Churchills and MacArthurs of the world, the humble Harry Truman didn’t cotton to showmen in uniform. He valued the Marshalls and Eisenhowers, men who put duty above status, far more than the “Mr. Prima Donna, Brass Hat, Five Star MacArthur,” as he told his diary. “Don’t see how a country can produce such men as Robert E. Lee, John J. Pershing, Eisenhower, and Bradley and at the same time produce Custers, Pattons, and MacArthurs.”17

  But since the Pattons and MacArthurs were fighting the war’s battles for the moment, Harry Truman would leave that burden to Henry Stimson and George Marshall.

  • • •

  On April 23, Truman called Stettinius, Stimson, Forrestal, Harriman, and his military chiefs into the Oval Office. It was Poland, he told them. The Russians were calling for recognition of the Lublin faction at the United Nations conference, and United Nations recognition would legitimize the pro-Soviet party in the eyes of the world. It was a blatant violation of the Yalta agreement, which required Lublin’s communists to include exiles and other non-communist groups.18

  Truman was furious at Soviet temerity. Leahy had shown him some blunt, almost nasty cables from Molotov and Stalin, and he was ready to return those sentiments in Kansas City street language. The Americans, he thundered, would proceed to San Francisco exactly as planned, and would not recognize the Lublin delegation. “If the Russians did not wish to join us they could go to hell,” he said.19

  Four years earlier—two days after Hitler invaded Russia—Senator Truman had told reporters, “If we see that Germany is winning we ought to help Russia and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany and that way let them kill as many as possible.” President Truman was constrained to deal with Stalin in a way that Senator Truman was not, but now the two big pillars of the U.S.-Soviet alliance—a common enemy and Roosevelt’s personal diplomacy—had tumbled to the ground. Truman was a different man, and he was not going to let the red dictator step one inch beyond the line Roosevelt had drawn.20

  The diplomat in Stimson saw the United States heading down a dangerous path. He explained to Truman that while the Soviets had been frustrating to deal with in small matters, on large ones, such as military offensives, they had kept every promise and were often better than their word. Without knowing the importance the Soviets attached to Lublin faction, the men sitting in the president’s office could not foresee the consequences of a hard line on Poland. Besides, Stimson added, outside the United States and Great Britain, virtually no country had any real understanding of what free and fair elections really meant.21

  A sour-looking Forrestal told Truman the Soviets wanted all of Eastern Europe, and Stalin obviously did not think the United States would respond with force. “If the Russians were to be rigid in their attitude,” he said, “we had better have a showdown with them now than later.” Stettinius, Harriman, and Leahy came down on Forrestal’s side.22

  Outnumbered by the hawks, a worried Stimson saw the administration pushing a confrontation with a great power while they had a war against Japan to finish. “Then to my relief,” he wrote, “a brave man and a wise man spoke and said that he, like me, was troubled.”23

  Marshall, who had sat quietly through the discussion, said he would like to mention some military considerations. For a time, Soviet participation in the war against Japan would be useful. He remarked, “The Russians had it within their power to delay their entry into the Far Eastern war unti
l we had done all the dirty work.” A break with the Soviets now, he said, would have serious military consequences as the Americans prepared to invade Japan and had to think of a million Japanese soldiers in China and Manchuria.24

  As before, the meeting ended with Truman thanking his men for their views. Siding with Stettinius, Leahy, and Forrestal, he concluded that in this early stage, America should hold fast “to our understanding of the Crimean agreements.” The emerging diplomatic war, like the dying World War, would begin with Poland.25

  •

  As Truman was meeting with his war chiefs, SS Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler was informing Sweden’s Count Bernadotte that Adolf Hitler had suffered a cerebral hemorrhage and had only a few days to live. Himmler was correct in a manner of sorts, though the cause of Hitler’s cerebral hemorrhage was a piece of lead spinning through his dark and troubled brain.* On the second of May, Stalin announced the capture of Berlin, and General Alexander in Italy notified London that German troops there, some 600,000 in all, were being directed to surrender.26

  The collapse of lines east, south, and west impelled Hitler’s successor, Grossadmiral Karl Dönitz, to put out peace feelers to the west. Terrified of a Russian occupation, the German high command hoped to leave an open door for fellow Germans to escape a revenge-fueled spree of pillage, rape, and murder by Stalin’s conquerors. Dönitz’s emissaries begged Eisenhower for a truce in the west that would let them fight a rearguard action in the east.

  Following to the letter the “unconditional surrender” formula laid down by Roosevelt, Eisenhower refused to accept a separate peace. The Third Reich’s will to resist crumbled, and General Alfred Jodl, on behalf of the German high command, signed the instrument of surrender. On the morning of May 7, Eisenhower cabled Marshall: