The Accidental President

by A. J. Baime

  1

  IN THE FUTURE, Harry Truman would remember April 12 as the day “the whole weight of the moon and the stars fell on me.” He would recall the phone conversation that started it all, and the drive to the White House in the rain. He would recall standing in the Cabinet Room feeling utterly alone, while surrounded by men long accustomed to wielding extraordinary power, their faces stained with tears. He would recall how the thirty-five-word presidential oath—which saw “a transfer of power . . . unparalleled in history,” in his words—took hardly more than a minute to recite.

  When the day began, however, there was little hint that the events of April 12 would shock the world. It began as an ordinary day, if such a thing could exist in America’s capital city during the fourth full year of world war.

  Truman awoke on his eighty-second day as vice president in his second-floor apartment at 4701 Connecticut Avenue. He was a man of precise routine, beginning with sunrise. He did not just get up at the crack of dawn, his friend and military aide Harry Vaughan liked to joke. “He’s the man who cracks the dawn.” Truman had spent much of the previous four years moving from hotel room to hotel room, train car to train car, and there were many solitary nights in Washington. He was a man who suffered loneliness with intensity, so he fancied the days when he woke with his wife next to him (they kept separate beds, as was custom at the time), and his daughter in the next room.

  Here was his living room, with his familiar chair in the corner next to his piano, his phonograph and favorite records. (“Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, Mendelssohn . . . beautiful harmonies that make you love them,” he described this music.) Here was his reading lamp and bookshelf full of favorites—a biography of his hero Andrew Jackson by Marquis James and a study of the ancient world called Plutarch’s Lives, among others. In the small kitchen, bare white walls framed a back door, which held a hook where Mrs. Truman hung her apron.

  The Trumans’ five-room apartment cost $120 a month. Harry and his wife of twenty-five years, Elizabeth “Bess” Wallace, shared one bedroom, while their only child, twenty-one-year-old Margaret, shared the other with Bess’s mother, Mrs. Madge Wallace, who had never liked Harry very much. In a town full of East Coast money and stuffed pinstriped suits, guests of the Trumans gathered quickly that the family had little means. The press made colorful headlines of the fact that Bess Truman had no maid; the VP’s wife did her own cooking and washing. (The Trumans’ bank account measured $4,251.12 on this day, though more than $3,000 was owed to the Hamilton National Bank of Washington, from a loan.)

  Truman chose a double-breasted gray suit with wide lapels, a white shirt, a spotted dark bow tie, and a pocket square folded so three corners poked out in perfectly pressed edges. He was unaware of the importance of this day’s sartorial choices, that photographers would capture him in these clothes at the most important moment of his life. He liked a morning walk—120 paces a minute, “regular Army marching speed,” as he said, every step like a hammer driving in a nail. He was the first VP assigned secret service detail. “You had to get up early,” recalled one secret service man, “because he came out at six o’clock or six-fifteen a.m.” On this morning, it was humid and misty, the thermometer headed up to 87 degrees F. Truman had come of age long before the first motorcar’s engine had cracked the silence of his midwestern plains, and the modernity that met his eye during his morning walks never ceased to fascinate him.

  “Look at that thing lift up!” he shouted once while walking through Washington just after sunrise, pointing at an airplane roaring overhead. “It’s one of the miracles of our age how a big, heavy thing like that will lift up off the ground . . . I can hardly believe my eyes when I see it.”

  His wife made him breakfast most mornings (he liked toast and bacon, sometimes an egg, with an occasional medicinal shot of bourbon and rarely any coffee). Then he made for the black Mercury state car idling out front, where his driver, Tom Harty, and a secret service man awaited. The car routinely swung by George Washington University, where Truman dropped his daughter off. Margaret—whom he called Margie with a hard g—was a junior majoring in history, though her great passion, like her father’s, was for music. On this morning she was feeling nerves, for she had an exam in her History of Philosophy course (she would score a B−). Then Truman’s driver motored on to the Senate Office Building, which sprawled stark white and regal along Constitution Avenue, just north of the Capitol.

  Truman had walked the Senate Office Building’s hallways happily for nearly a decade now. The building’s striking symbols of power were quotidian to his eye: the Corinthian rotunda with its coffered dome, the nearby twin marble staircases that led to the Caucus Room, inside which the hearings over the sinking of the RMS Titanic had been held years earlier. Tourists came from all over to walk this building’s corridors and to taste the famous bean soup in the cafeteria, which lived up to the billing.

  On the second floor the sign on the door to suite 240 greeted Truman each morning: THE VICE PRESIDENT.

  ///

  “I used to get down here to the office at 7 o’clock,” Truman had written of his routine just the day before, on April 11. “But now I have to take Margaret to school every morning and I don’t get here until 8:30 . . . By that time I have to see people one at a time just as fast as they can go through the office without seeming to hurry through.” There were always “curiosity seekers” aiming to “see what a V.P. looks like and if he walks and talks and has teeth.”

  The vice president’s staff included four stenographers and one secretary, Reathel Odum, who was at the ready on the morning of April 12. Truman dictated a letter to his sister-in-law May Wallace about her dog. “I imagine Spot is getting fatter and fatter. I have gained nine pounds myself.” And another letter to an old friend, James Pendergast in Kansas City, who was asking for help with a small matter involving the War Production Board. “They are a contrary outfit,” Truman dictated. “We will see what we can do right away.” (This latter letter would not be mailed until the following morning, and Truman would write in longhand at the bottom: “Since this was dictated I’m Pres. of the U.S. . . . Pray for me with all you have.”)

  Truman had not gotten used to the fact that, as vice president, he had almost nothing to do, and whatever string he pulled in Washington left him open to political attacks. He held the second-highest elected office in government, and yet his only official duty was to serve as president of the Senate. He was to monitor proceedings in the Senate Chamber in the Capitol; his most important job on most days was to crack his gavel to signal the recess. In the rare case that senators voted to a tie on an issue, the VP would cast the deciding vote. For Truman, this had happened only once, two days earlier. He had voted against a bill amendment “with all the brisk eagerness of someone who is bored to death,” recalled one reporter present. It was custom for a senator to sit in the VP’s place on the dais in the chamber, so there was no urgency for Truman to get there at any particular hour.

  An old army buddy of Truman’s—Eddie McKim, an Omaha insurance salesman—showed up at the VP’s office on this morning. McKim was in town on business, staying at the Statler Hotel. Truman took him to lunch around noon in the office of the secretary of the Senate, Leslie Biffle of tiny Piggott, Arkansas. Biffle’s office was affectionately called “Biffle’s Tavern,” where the bar was stocked and congressional chatter was always on the menu. Afterward Truman and McKim drummed up an evening plan.

  “Don’t you think we ought to have a little game tonight?” Truman said, referring to his favorite pastime, poker.

  “Yes, I think so. Where do you want to play?”

  Truman suggested McKim’s hotel. The Statler was one of the first chain hotels, and the first to advertise a bathroom in every room. Truman jotted down a list of players he wanted McKim to gather. The conversation, as McKim remembered it:

  “How’s your whiskey supply?” the VP asked.

  “Well, it’s nonexistent,” McKim said.

  “I’ve
got some new whiskey over in the Senate Office Building office,” Truman said. “You go over there and get what you think we’ll need.”

  The VP turned and headed for the Senate Chamber, where he would make an afternoon appearance. McKim headed off to stock the liquor and ready the game—a game that would never be played.

  ///

  Around the globe, extraordinary developments were unfolding on April 12. The U.S. Ninth Army reached the Elbe River on the western front, fifty-seven miles from Berlin. As the Allies were soon to find out, the Elbe was to play a strange and important role in shaping the future of Europe. Soviet forces had surrounded the Nazis at Vienna and were closing in on Berlin from the east. A simple read of the newspaper gave enough information for most Americans to understand that Nazi Germany was nearing collapse. The conquering Allied armies had made shocking discoveries as they marched toward Hitler’s bunker in Berlin.

  Eighty miles northeast of Frankfurt on the morning of April 12, the supreme commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force, General Dwight Eisenhower, stepped through the gates of the Ohrdruf death camp, witnessing for the first time the horrors of the Nazi Final Solution. Flanked by Generals George Patton and Omar Bradley, with dozens of military police, army officers, and infantrymen trailing behind, Eisenhower took it all in—the visions and odors of death and torture assaulting his senses.

  Ohrdruf spread out across the flat landscape under an iron-gray sky, with crude wooden barracks standing near the camp’s perimeter, which was lined by gunner towers and barbed wire fences. It was the first concentration camp liberated by the Allies that had prisoners still living onsite. Like innumerable other Americans, Eisenhower had read of these death camps; now the general was seeing the evidence with his own eyes. He felt it his “duty” to witness the camp’s “every nook and cranny.”

  In the camp’s center courtyard, dozens of human bodies lay where they had fallen, victims of point-blank gunshots less than two weeks earlier. The Nazis had done this work as they fled Ohrdruf. As Eisenhower would later learn, some twelve thousand prisoners from Ohrdruf had been forced on a death march to Buchenwald, some forty-five miles away, as the Allied troops closed in. In one section of the camp, Eisenhower saw a makeshift crematorium with piles of charred remains. Living inmates with the strength to move demonstrated for the fifty-four-year-old Texas-born general how they had been tortured by the Nazis. Others stared at Eisenhower silently, too fatigued to move the muscles in their faces. The experience, as the general would later recall, strengthened the sense of justice that had been the driving force of his work.

  After Eisenhower’s visit he and his fellow generals reconvened at Patton’s nearby field headquarters. Eisenhower cabled the army chief of staff in the Pentagon, General George C. Marshall.

  “The things I saw beggar description,” he wrote on April 12. “The visual evidence and verbal testimony of starvation, cruelty and bestiality were so overpowering as to leave me a bit sick.”

  He urged Washington to organize a group of American journalists to come to Europe to begin documenting these horrors at once. There were still those who claimed “the stories of Nazi brutality were just propaganda,” Eisenhower believed. “I felt that the evidence should be immediately placed before the American and British publics in a fashion that would leave no room for cynical debate.”

  In the Far East, the war was raging on Okinawa—a Pacific atoll less than half the size of Rhode Island. Tens of thousands of U.S. troops had landed there eleven days earlier, on Easter Sunday, April 1. In time this battle would pit some 541,000 troops from the U.S. Tenth Army against the 110,000-man Japanese Thirty-Second Army. Through history’s looking glass, Okinawa would become known as the last massive human combat maelstrom of its kind on earth. The Washington Post on this morning, April 12, reported “furious ground fighting . . . the hottest of any Pacific campaign.”

  At the headquarters for the Twenty-First Bomber Command on the island of Guam in the South Pacific, Major General Curtis LeMay was preparing to unleash a mission of B-29s over mainland Japan, to strike the heart of Tokyo with incendiary bombs. The night before (April 11 in Washington, April 12 in the South Pacific), LeMay’s Mission 63 had laid waste to the Nakajima aircraft factory in Tokyo. According to LeMay’s official report: “Total roof area damaged or destroyed amounted to approximately 886,900 sq. feet. Or 48.2% of the total roof area.” That mission had used conventional bombs. However, the mission of April 13 (April 12 in Washington) would use incendiaries—firebombs.

  LeMay had recently emerged as the American military’s most controversial man, due to his March 1945 firebombing campaigns—the destruction of Japanese urban areas with bombs that spewed sheets of unquenchable flames. He was known for sending men on missions that seemed impossible. “My idea of what was humanly possible,” he later wrote, “sometimes did not coincide with the opinions of others.” His B-29 Superfortresses—327 four-engine bombers loaded with incendiaries—would take off at roughly 6 p.m. Guam time. As Harry Truman was going about his day on April 12, Curtis LeMay was preparing to burn miles of Tokyo to the ground.

  ///

  In Washington, DC, on this morning of April 12, armies of workers were shuffling through the offices of innumerable federal buildings, fighting their own private wars. This was “Washington Wonderland,” a wartime boomtown where jobs were easy to find and apartments nearly impossible.

  The city had changed vastly during the war years. More than 280,000 Americans had moved into the district seeking work. Well more than half were women hunting jobs as clerks and typists, for paychecks hard to match in their hometowns as far off as Texas and California. In one year during the war twenty-seven new office buildings went up in the nation’s capital. The federal government employed 3.4 million civilians, with enough committees and organizations to fill seventeen pages in fine print in the Congressional Directory. Washington was a city of bureaucratic madness, ruthless ambition, and tried-and-true patriotism, a city stretched to its limit with every kind of tension—overworked, overcrowded, under-slept, racially charged.

  “If you want a friend in Washington,” Harry Truman once said, “get a dog.”

  The city appeared different from other capitals in warring nations, from London to Berlin to Tokyo. Washington had not been bombed. There were no scars of war, with the exception of the wearied faces of men and women who had lost their sons and husbands, and the wounded soldiers struggling by in wheelchairs and on crutches.

  Washington was a uniquely American metropolis, in that it was dreamed up on paper before its first brick had been laid. The founding fathers wrote in article 1, section 8 of the U.S. Constitution of a “District (not exceeding ten Miles square) as may . . . become the Seat of the Government of the United States.” The “federal city” rose out of the rural banks of the Potomac River starting in the days of George Washington’s administration, with edifices meant to project all the magnificence of ancient Rome (the Supreme Court Building, the United States Capitol), buildings that had in fact no ancient history at all.

  “It abounds in phonies,” White House press secretary Jonathan Daniels wrote of the city. “There are Negro messengers, Irish politicians, Jewish lawyers, demagogues who sometimes look like statesmen, and statesmen who often act like demagogues . . . Frustration is often normal. Ambition is standard. Envy can be malignant in a town in which everybody can know everybody else’s pay.”

  Nothing symbolized the federal government’s wartime work frenzy more than the new Pentagon, the largest office building on earth, situated on the other side of the Potomac River from the White House next to the Arlington National Cemetery. Completed in 1942, it stood five stories high, with 6.5 million square feet of offices, enough space to keep an army of janitors waxing the floors all year long. But Washington’s greatest symbol had long since become its current president—the first “four termer.” As the Washington writer W. M. Kiplinger put it: “I’ve never known any President who was as omnipresent as this Roosevelt.
”

  ///

  Like most Americans, Harry Truman was mystified by his rise to number two in Roosevelt’s administration. Most Americans knew little about the vice president. Those who did know some things smelled a strong whiff of American mythology. Truman had first come to Washington under dubious circumstances in 1934, elected to the U.S. Senate thanks to the support of a Kansas City political machine widely known to be corrupt. Truman had served as an obscure senator for the most part, until he burst onto the national scene by complete surprise—to America, and to himself—less than a year earlier at the 1944 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. There he was chosen as Roosevelt’s running mate on the Democratic ticket, against Thomas Dewey of New York/John W. Bricker of Ohio.

  Even the most connected politicos could not agree as to how this had happened. According to Democratic National Committee secretary George Allen, one of the organizers of the convention in Chicago: “It is one of the episodes in American history that will baffle scholars of the future because no two accounts of it agree completely and some vary widely.”

  According to a national poll published just as the Chicago convention was set to start in July 1944, only 2 percent of Democratic voters hoped to see Truman as the VP nominee on the ticket with Roosevelt, with five other names ahead of him on the list. Not long before Truman was chosen, Roosevelt had said of the senator from Missouri, “I hardly know Truman.”

  “I knew almost nothing about him,” Admiral William Leahy, FDR’s chief of staff, said of Truman. Even at the height of the 1944 campaign, as the VP nominee toured the nation stumping for Roosevelt, “Truman [was] still unknown to millions despite [the] fanfare,” according to the Washington Post. Only 55 percent of Americans could name Roosevelt’s running mate, according to a national poll.

  Through the reams of press coverage that emerged during the campaign, Americans learned in 1944 that Truman had spent much of his life farming in obscurity, and that he had once been a haberdasher in Kansas City, selling hats and socks to well-to-do customers before going out of business, suffering lawsuits in the process from which it took several years to recover financially. He had served commanding troops in the field in Europe during World War I. His middle initial—S.—stood for nothing, exactly. His parents could not agree on his middle name when he was born in rural Missouri, except that it should begin with an S (referring to the names of Truman’s grandfathers, Solomon Young and Anderson Shipp Truman). Americans also were well acquainted with the story of how Harry Truman’s political patron—“Boss” Tom Pendergast, who was much responsible for the Missourian’s rise to national politics—had been imprisoned, and was now serving time in the federal penitentiary at Leavenworth, Kansas, for fraud.