The Accidental President

by A. J. Baime

  Truman played a small role in the 1944 election. “In the scheme of American politics there is nothing less important than a Vice-President unless it is a Vice-Presidential nominee,” noted George Allen, who wrote many of Truman’s campaign speeches. “He was nobody’s darling.” The focus of the election was the towering figure of Franklin Roosevelt, who defeated Republican Thomas Dewey to win an unprecedented fourth term. And so Harry Truman had become the vice president.

  The job was “a graveyard of politicians” in Washington parlance, traditionally disparaged by the men who held it. The VP before Truman, Henry Wallace, bragged that he had never had so much time to work on his tennis game. “The Vice President has not much to do,” Truman said, referring to himself as a “political Eunuch.” When asked what he would do with his “spare time,” he answered: “Study history.”

  But he did more than that. To keep busy, he attended ball games, teas, banquets. When Rocky Graziano knocked out Philadelphia’s Billy Arnold in the third round at Madison Square Garden, Truman was ringside. At a National Press Club party in Washington, the vice president regaled guests with his talent on the piano keys, while sitting atop the piano itself was Hollywood’s latest sensation, Lauren Bacall, bearing down on the VP with a most suggestive gaze. A soldier standing nearby could not believe his eyes, muttering: “Anything can happen in this country!”

  Only the vice president’s most inner circle knew that Truman suffered acute anxiety. He had failed to crack the inner circle of Roosevelt’s trusted advisors and in fact knew almost nothing about what was going on in the Oval Office. During his eighty-two days as VP leading up to April 12, 1945, Truman had visited the president on official business just twice. He was terrified by what he saw. According to the Washington rumor mill, Roosevelt had suffered a stroke, a heart attack, cancer of the prostate, a nervous breakdown—the story changed every day. Truman had seen little of the president, but he had seen enough to know that the rumors about FDR’s ill health were rooted in fact. When a reporter reminded Truman that just one heartbeat separated him from the White House, he squirmed and said, “Don’t say that. I don’t let myself think of it.”

  One day not long after his vice presidential inauguration in January 1945, Truman was at the White House for a tea, and he’d brought along his friend Eddie McKim. On the way out, McKim stopped Truman at the White House gate. “[I] told him to turn around and take a look at that place,” McKim recalled. “That was where he was going to be living.”

  Truman stared at the stately building. Here was where the very essence of world power was wielded. “I’m afraid you’re right, Eddie,” he responded. “And it scares the hell out of me.”

  “He knew that . . . he would be president before the term was out,” recalled close confidant and political advisor Harry Easley. “He said he was going to have to depend on his friends . . . He knew that he was going to be the president of the United States, and I think it just scared the devil out of him. I think it frightened him, even the thought of it.”

  ///

  At roughly 3 p.m. on April 12, Truman entered the Senate Chamber. Since 1859, senators had gathered in this room to debate policies that shaped American law. Ugly steel girders had been erected to hold up pieces of cracked ceiling four years earlier, and due to the war emergency, they were still there. The chamber held ninety-six desks for the ninety-six senators, two from each of the forty-eight states, all facing the dais where the president of the Senate (the VP) presided. Freshman senator Leverett Saltonstall of Massachusetts had been sitting in for the VP on the dais.

  One reporter present watched Truman enter that afternoon: “We saw Harry Truman come in, cross to the Republican side and go into an obviously friendly huddle with Alexander Wiley [senator of Wisconsin] and Ken Wherry [Nebraska]. We watched him for a moment, enjoying as always his enjoyment of other people and theirs of him . . . [Truman] is a fine fellow, presiding like some trim, efficient, keen-minded businessman, which is just what he looks like, with his neat appearance, heavy-lensed glasses, and quick, good-humored smile.”

  The Senate was pitched in an argument over a Mexican water treaty. Senator Wiley took the floor. “I feel somewhat hesitant to speak on the subject of the treaty now before the Senate,” he said, before launching into an endless font of words, which drifted into the tobacco cloud that hung over the chamber with all the relevance of the ashes in the ashtrays. Sitting on the dais, Truman seized the moment to write a letter to his mother and his sister.

  “Dear Mamma and Mary,” he began, “I am trying to write you a letter today from the desk of the president of the Senate while a windy Senator from Wisconsin is making a speech on a subject which he is in no way familiar . . . We’ve had a week of beautiful weather but it is raining and misting today.”

  A reporter named Allen Drury, the Senate correspondent for the United Press, was sitting in the Senate gallery observing. He leaned over to a colleague, Tony Vaccaro, who held the same position for the Associated Press. “You know,” Drury said, “Roosevelt has an awfully good man in that Truman when it comes to dealing with the Senate, if he’ll only make use of him.”

  “He doesn’t make use of him though,” came the reply. “Truman doesn’t know what’s going on. Roosevelt won’t tell him anything.”

  2

  AT 9:30 a.m. on April 12, Franklin Roosevelt lay in his bed in his vacation cottage in rural Warm Springs, Georgia, with a breakfast tray and a copy of the morning’s Atlanta Constitution, the area’s local paper. His usual newspapers—the New York Times, the New York Herald Tribune, the Baltimore Sun, and the Washington Post—had been held up in the mail pouch from Washington. And so he was perusing the Atlanta paper when, outside his bedroom door, he heard loud laughter. He recognized the voice of his maid Lizzie McDuffie and called out her name. She appeared shyly in his doorway, apologizing for making so much noise.

  “Oh no, no,” said the president. “But what in the world were you laughing about?” With his back propped up on a pillow, Roosevelt tilted his head and looked down his nose through his round spectacles, his familiar conversational gaze.

  “Well, Mr. Roosevelt,” Lizzie said, “do you believe in reincarnation?”

  “Do I believe in what?”

  “Reincarnation.”

  The president thought for a moment, quietly considering the afterlife. Then he did what he so often did in his press conferences: turned the question on its asker, without revealing his feelings on the matter. “Well tell me, do you believe in reincarnation?”

  “I don’t know if I do or not,” the maid said. “But in case there is such a thing, when I come back I want to be a canary bird.”

  McDuffie remembered this moment vividly. “He looked at me from head to foot—I weighed about two hundred pounds then—and he burst out into peals of laughter . . . He looked at how fat I was and said, ‘A canary bird!’”

  The maid thought Roosevelt was looking healthier on the morning of April 12 than he had of late. But then, she thought, he always looked his best in the morning. He seemed to age impossibly quickly as each day passed, as if the clock inside him was moving too fast.

  Roosevelt had arrived in Warm Springs two weeks earlier, on March 29, for a long rest. His cottage was situated near pools of natural spring water where victims of paralysis had come for years to bathe in hopes of soothing the symptoms of polio and other diseases, and there was a hospital nearby where patients received medical care. This hospital was one of the few places where Roosevelt would allow the public to see him in his wheelchair, for he believed he could lift these patients’ spirits by rolling out from behind the façade that hid his disability from the rest of the world. He had first come to Warm Springs in 1924, hoping for some miracle cure for his polio, a miracle that had never come. But he loved the place, so he built a six-room white cottage with four colonnades out front in 1933 (the year he took office) and visited often with his dog, Fala, to recuperate from the stress of his job. All the rooms were on one floor
, easily maneuvered by wheelchair. Due to the white paint and the colonnades out front, the cottage became known as “the Little White House.”

  Now sixty-three years old, Roosevelt had led the nation through the Great Depression and World War II, achieving a new kind of presidential iconography. He had become almost a paternal figure for the American public; he had served as chief executive for so long, many soldiers fighting in the military could not remember any other president during their lifetimes. “There were times,” White House chief of staff Admiral William Leahy wrote, “when I felt that if I could find anybody except Roosevelt who knew what America wanted, it would be an astonishing discovery.”

  The responsibilities of the presidency were crushing. After 4,422 days in office, Roosevelt had found it difficult to maintain his energy. He suffered hypertension and heart disease, not to mention chronic sinus pain. He was losing weight alarmingly. Privately, the president’s doctor, Admiral Ross McIntire, had described his condition as “God-awful.” On the night before his chat about reincarnation with his maid Lizzie, Roosevelt had dined with Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau in the Little White House. Morgenthau and Roosevelt had been friends for years.

  “I was terribly shocked when I saw him,” Morgenthau described that dinner. “I found he had aged terrifically and looked very haggard. His hands shook so that he started to knock over glasses. I had to hold each glass as he poured out the cocktail . . . I have never seen him have so much difficulty transferring himself from his wheelchair to his regular chair, and I was in agony watching him.”

  The president’s martinis—an alchemy for which he took great pride—revived him, and Morgenthau noted that FDR had partaken of the caviar with zest.

  Now, the next morning, Roosevelt lay in his bed awaiting the mail pouch to come in from the White House, so the day’s business could get under way. In the afternoon he planned to attend a barbecue that locals and White House correspondents were throwing for him, in the village of Warm Springs. Already, suckling pigs were sizzling over an open fire, and secret service agents were scoping out the terrain. It was just the kind of thing the president needed to boost his spirits.

  “Oh, I don’t feel any too good this morning, Lizzie,” the president told his maid. He touched the back of his head, complaining of a headache.

  ///

  An alarming entanglement in world affairs confronted the president during his stay at Warm Springs—a development he had kept secret from the American people. Relations between the Soviet Union and the United States had taken an abrupt and dangerous turn.

  For the past four years, Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, British prime minister Winston Churchill, and Roosevelt had forged a most unlikely partnership, waging war together to defeat the Axis powers. Churchill had famously named this partnership “the Grand Alliance.” As grand as it was, it joined as allies the Soviets and Americans, two nations with gravely contrasting political ideologies. The relationship between the United States and the USSR was so complex, the State Department’s filing cabinets were jammed tightly with position papers, few in agreement.

  The United States, under Roosevelt’s direction, had opened its first embassy in Moscow in 1934, establishing diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union for the first time. In the next few years State Department staff in Moscow had witnessed the Great Purge—the bizarre disappearance and subsequent murder of so-called dissidents in the Soviet Union under Stalin’s orders. Many of these victims, it seemed, were innocent of any crime. The Soviet dictator was intent on rooting out the slightest hint of political challenge, and paranoia gripped a populace of some 170 million people. “The purge was everywhere,” remembered the Moscow embassy’s Charles Bohlen. “The number of arrests, exiles, and executions would eventually reach 9 to 10 million—the figure now generally accepted . . . I found no evidence for a conclusion that [Stalin] was mentally unbalanced in the usual sense of the term, although obviously there must have been something wrong with a man who would send millions of people to senseless deaths.”

  George Kennan, another young diplomat among the first wave of Americans at the Moscow embassy, came to the following conclusion: “Never—neither then nor at any later date—did I consider the Soviet Union a fit ally or associate, actual or potential, for this country.”*

  When the United States entered World War II, however, the Allies had accepted Stalin’s partnership, as he supplied millions of Red Army troops to fight the Nazis—far more, in fact, than the United States or Britain. The U.S. State Department’s first official memo on this subject shot straight to the heart of the matter: “In the opinion of this Government . . . any defense against Hitlerism, any rallying of the forces opposing Hitlerism, from whatever source these forces may spring, will hasten the eventual downfall of the present German leaders, and will therefore redound to the benefit of our own defense and security.” Or, as Churchill put it, “If Hitler invaded Hell, I would make at least a favorable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons.”

  The first U.S. ambassador to Moscow, William Bullitt, had warned that Stalin’s intentions would ultimately conflict with the Americans’. “Stalin’s aim is to spread the power of communists to the end of the earth,” Bullitt cabled Roosevelt in August 1943. “Stalin, like Hitler, will not stop. He can only be stopped.”

  Roosevelt believed that the United States and the Soviet Union would emerge from the war as close allies. “I just have a hunch that Stalin is not that kind of man . . . He won’t try to annex anything and will work with me for a world of democracy and peace,” Roosevelt had told Bullitt. “It’s my responsibility and not yours, and I’m going to play my hunch.”

  Now, in April 1945, with victory in Europe in sight, a disagreement had caused a potential break between the Americans and Soviets. It appeared that the president had been wrong about Stalin. A ping-pong of cables across the Atlantic between Roosevelt and Stalin formulated the first direct wartime confrontation between the two leaders and the two nations.

  The problems began just after the last meeting of the Big Three—Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin, at Yalta in February 1945—where the three leaders formulated military strategy to end Nazi resistance and to map out postwar Europe. FDR had returned from that conference reporting terrific optimism. “The far reaching decisions we took at Yalta,” he cabled Stalin, “will hasten victory and the establishment of a firm foundation for a lasting peace.” Right after Yalta, however, the new ambassador to the Soviet Union, Averell Harriman, began to raise red flags in his Washington communiqués. The mood in Moscow had shifted suddenly and darkly, as if by a switch.

  The most immediate issue was the fate of Poland. The Soviets had installed a puppet regime in Poland, which the Red Army had recently liberated from the Nazis. At Yalta the Soviets had agreed that Poland would hold free elections “in about one month” to create its own democratic government representative of the people—according to the rules governed by Yalta’s Declaration on Liberated Europe, which Joseph Stalin had signed. Those elections never occurred. In fact, Poland’s government was a thinly veiled Sovietized regime controlled by Stalin himself. Moscow ambassador Harriman believed that hundreds if not thousands of American war prisoners were stranded in Poland, and U.S. officials were barred from getting inside to inquire about their condition. The Soviets would not allow it.

  “I am outraged,” Harriman cabled Roosevelt on March 14, 1945, two weeks before the president arrived at the Little White House in Warm Springs.

  Two days later Churchill cabled the president: “At present, all entry into Poland is barred to our representatives . . . An impenetrable veil has been drawn across the scene . . . There is no doubt in my mind that the Soviets fear very much our seeing what is going on in Poland.”

  Stalin had agreed at Yalta to allow the United States to set up military bases in Hungary. Now he went back on his promise and was refusing to allow American representatives into the territory. Then came news that two of Stalin’s deputies ha
d entered Romania and had ousted Romania’s leader. King Michael was given two hours and five minutes to inform the Romanian people that their political leader, General R˘adescu, would be replaced by a man more friendly to the Russian government, Petru Groza. Meanwhile, all American planes in Soviet-controlled territory had been grounded.

  The Soviets’ domination of eastern European countries threatened the very ideology that American and British soldiers had fought and died for during this war. “I feel certain that unless we do take action in cases of this kind,” Ambassador Harriman cabled Roosevelt, “the Soviet Government will become convinced that they can force us to accept any of their decisions on all matters and it will be increasingly difficult to stop their aggressive policy.”

  On March 29, the day Roosevelt arrived at Warm Springs, he cabled Stalin. “I cannot conceal from you the concern with which I view the developments of mutual interest since our fruitful meetings at Yalta,” Roosevelt communicated. “I must make it quite plain to you that any solution which would result in a thinly disguised continuance of the present Warsaw regime would be unacceptable and would cause the people of the United States to regard the Yalta agreements as having failed.”