The Accidental President

by A. J. Baime

  The First Lady and Early were now planning to fly to Warm Springs that night. Mrs. Roosevelt asked Truman if it would be “proper” to use a government airplane. “I told her as soon as I was sworn in I would order that all the facilities of the government should be at her command until the funeral was over,” Truman recalled.

  Early left the room and headed for the office of Jonathan Daniels, the White House press secretary, near the West Wing lobby. (Early had held this job for years and had recently resigned, yet he was so close with Roosevelt that he was still a White House fixture.) Early inquired as to whether there were any newsmen in the press gallery. There were not; they’d been told that there would be no more news from the White House that day, so they had departed. Early initiated a phone call to the three wire services—the Associated Press, the United Press, and the International News Service. When the three were on the line, Early said into the telephone, “I have a flash for you . . . The President died suddenly this afternoon.”

  “From then on there was no letup,” assistant press secretary Eben Ayers recorded in his diary. “Time ceased to mean anything.”

  ///

  The phone in the Truman residence at 4701 Connecticut Avenue rang at approximately 6 p.m. Margaret Truman picked up. She had been getting ready for a date and was wearing a new party dress with white gloves and dancing shoes. It was her father on the line. “In an odd, tight voice,” Margaret recalled, “Dad asked to speak to Mother. When I tried to kid with him in our usual way, he cut me off and ordered me to put Mother on the line.”

  Mrs. Truman took the phone. “Bess,” Harry told her, “I’m at the White House. President Roosevelt died about two hours ago in Warm Springs. I’m sending a car for you and Margaret. I want you here when I’m sworn in.”

  Bess Truman fell to pieces. This was exactly what she had feared the most—for her husband and for their family. They had never wanted this—she most of all. She walked the short hallway to the bedroom shared by her mother, Mrs. Wallace, and her daughter, Margaret. Margaret rushed to her mother and put her arm around her. “Mother,” Margaret said, “what’s the matter, what is it?”

  “President Roosevelt is dead,” Bess said.

  “Dead?”

  Margaret Truman watched her mother straighten her back and compose herself; from that moment forward, she never looked at her mother the same way again.

  “You’d better change your clothes,” Bess said to Margaret. “Pick out something dark. A car will be here in a few minutes to take us to the White House.”

  At almost the exact time Truman was on the phone with his wife, news of the president’s death hit the airwaves. At the New York headquarters of CBS Radio, John Charles Daly—the thirty-one-year-old reporter from The World Today—sat in the newsroom preparing for his 6:15 newscast as a children’s program called Wilderness Road piped into living rooms across the country. One of Daly’s assistants passed him a news flash from the teletype: FLASH WASHN—FDR DEAD.

  Breathlessly, Daly waited for confirmation, which quickly arrived, so he leaned over to the station’s engineer and said, “Cut! Give me the network.” Then he spoke firmly into a microphone, his words broadcast across the nation.

  “We interrupt this program to bring you a special bulletin from CBS World News. A press association has just announced that President Roosevelt is dead. All that has been received is just that bare announcement. There are no further details as yet, but CBS World News will return to the air in just a few moments with more information as it is received in our New York headquarters. We return you now to our regularly scheduled program.”

  Two minutes later NBC made a similar announcement, and ABC followed seconds after that.

  ///

  Minutes after 6 p.m., Truman walked along a hallway that led from the residential part of the White House, where Mrs. Roosevelt’s study was, to the executive offices. When he arrived at the Cabinet Room in the West Wing, he was the first one there. He had been in this room before, but only a few times. Upstairs in her private study, Mrs. Roosevelt remained secluded. She was scheduled to leave for Warm Springs at 7 p.m.

  Labor secretary Frances Perkins was the next to arrive in the Cabinet Room. Perkins was a legend among American women, as she was the only female ever to serve in the cabinet, and had held her position since 1933. No one had ever served as labor secretary longer. Perkins had no idea yet why she had been summoned, but she could sense tragedy the moment she stepped into the room.

  Soon others arrived: Secretary of Commerce Henry Wallace of Iowa, who had been in a dentist’s chair when he learned of FDR’s death, and White House chief of staff Admiral William Leahy, who had been sitting in his bedroom at his Florida Avenue apartment when he heard the radio announcement. Secretary of War Henry Stimson, Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal, Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, Speaker of the House Rayburn and the attorney general, Frances Biddle—one by one they appeared. Amidst the crowd, Steve Early stood with tears streaking down his clenched jaw. One present remembered seeing Roosevelt’s daughter Anna Boettiger: “Her face was a study—grim. Her chin was up, but it was all she could do to hold herself together.”

  Sitting at the conference table was Harry Truman. “In the long Cabinet Room,” remembered press secretary Jonathan Daniels, “[Truman] looked like a little man as he sat waiting in a huge leather chair.”

  Most of the cabinet officers who were in town had arrived by 6:10, along with numerous members of the press. “The Cabinet was assembling,” recalled State Department official Joseph Davies, who had just arrived himself. “All was confusion . . . The shock of the tragedy was very evident. Everyone seemed more or less numb. There was one fact which impressed me very much, and that was the grief which could be found in the faces of even the hard-boiled news and radio men. Their faces were set. In some instances, tears streamed down the faces of men who obviously were exercising all of their will to maintain self-control.”

  Truman stood and called the meeting to order. “It is my sad duty to report that the president died [at] 5:48,” he said. “Mrs. Roosevelt gave me this news, and in saying so she remarked that ‘he died like a soldier.’” He continued, “I want every one of you to stay and carry on, and I want to do everything just the way President Roosevelt wanted it.”

  Nobody said anything, so Truman nodded to the secretary of state. Stettinius stumbled through a statement, saying that all the cabinet members would be behind Truman. Treasury secretary Henry Morgenthau spoke up: “Mr. Truman, I will do all I can to help, but I want you to be free to call on any one else in my place.” The secretary of agriculture, Claude Raymond Wickard, seconded Morgenthau’s sentiment.

  The attorney general had already summoned Chief Justice of the Supreme Court Harlan F. Stone to administer the presidential oath, but Stone had not yet arrived. The founding fathers had written the thirty-five-word oath in article 2, section 1 of the Constitution. Once those words were recited, the new president would assume his duties. Awkward moments passed while various people went hunting through the White House for a Bible. Truman preferred to use the Bible his grandfather had given him, which was sitting at that moment on a shelf in his Senate office. There was no time to fetch it. The one produced was an inexpensive Gideon edition found in the desk drawer of White House head usher Howell Crim. As the group awaited Chief Justice Stone, Truman approached the secretary of war, Henry Stimson, and asked that he arrange for the top military advisors to report to the White House for a morning meeting the following day. “He spoke very warmly of the work we were doing,” Stimson recorded.

  The chief justice arrived at about six thirty. A few minutes after that, Bess and Margaret Truman appeared. Their journey had been a strange one; by the time they had readied themselves to leave the Connecticut Avenue apartment building, a crowd had gathered out front. Secret service had led them out the back door, and even there, newsmen barraged them with camera flashes. As Bess entered the Cabinet Room, she looked “sad and a li
ttle frightened,” according to press secretary Jonathan Daniels.

  As the crowd assembled, Truman pulled Secretary of State Stettinius aside and asked him if he thought it appropriate for a photographer to capture the moment when he took the oath. Truman’s ninety-two-year-old mother was at home in Grandview, Missouri, and he was wishing she could be there. Stettinius agreed it would be fine. Truman admitted he was bewildered, and Stettinius eyed him sadly. As the secretary of state wrote in his diary: “I told him that he had a job with the greatest responsibility of any one man in the world . . . I said somehow a person is given an inner strength to arise to any occasion and said that I had full confidence that the American people would rally around and see us through.”

  Truman responded that he would do his best.

  ///

  At the gates of the White House, crowds began to gather. Many would remember this moment for the manner in which blacks and whites stood grieving next to one another, the color of their skin suddenly irrelevant. Rain clouds had moved on and the evening had turned dark and balmy. From behind the White House gates, the crowds could see the mansion’s crystal candelabra flickering in the window in the main entrance hallway. They were left to wonder how the drama was unfolding inside. Across the street from the White House, in Lafayette Square, where Roosevelt used to light the national Christmas tree in the years before the war, some two thousand more had gathered. Newsboys darted through the crowds like minnows, handing out extras, moving people to huddle under streetlights so they could read the fine print.

  Inside the White House, at 7:08 p.m., Chief Justice Stone and Harry Truman took their places facing each other by the Cabinet Room’s mantel, underneath a clock that marked the time. The twenty-eighth president of the United States, Woodrow Wilson, looked on, from within his portrait on the wall. Truman held an index card with the oath printed on it, to make sure he spoke the thirty-five words exactly as the founding fathers had written them. Others in the room formed a semicircle behind the vice president and Chief Justice Stone. Standing inches to Truman’s left was his wife, Bess. She looked as if her husband were stepping not into the office of the presidency but to the gallows. Directly behind her was Margaret. Along with the secretary of labor, they were the only three women present. Truman held the Bible in his left hand and placed his right hand on top of it. The index card with the oath was also atop the Bible, where Truman could see it. A silence fell over the room, and Chief Justice Stone began.

  “I, Harry Shipp Truman,” he said, thinking wrongly that the S. stood for Truman’s mother’s maiden name, which it did not.

  “I, Harry S. Truman,” the vice president said, correcting the judge.

  “Do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of the president of the United States . . .”

  As Truman uttered these words, the others looked on. “In that moment of actual succession, he seemed almost sacrilegiously small,” press secretary Daniels said of Truman. A photographer captured the scene, but when it was over the chief justice told Truman that he had failed to raise his right hand while he held the Bible. And so the oath was repeated. Truman uttered the final words “firmly and clearly,” as one in the room remembered.

  “So help you God,” Justice Stone said.

  “So help me God,” Truman responded.

  He kissed the Bible, then he turned to Bess and Margaret and kissed them both. He was no longer Harry. He would never be just Harry again.

  Following an exhausting amount of solemn hand shaking, Truman felt a tug on his arm. “Mr. President, will you come with me.” It was a White House aide he did not know (assistant press secretary Eben Ayers), and along with Steve Early, Truman left the Cabinet Room. His wife and daughter followed, along with the secretary of state. In the quiet confines of the White House Red Room, Truman had a moment to gather his thoughts. Stettinius asked him if the San Francisco conference should be called off. This was the international meeting in which representatives of governments from all over the world were set to gather in less than two weeks, to attempt to form a charter for the new United Nations peace organization. Truman was emphatic: the conference should go on. And with that, he had made his first decision as president. Soon afterward, he delivered his first statement as president, which was handed to members of the press at 8:10 p.m.: “The world may be sure that we will prosecute the war on both fronts, east and west, with all the vigor we possess to a successful conclusion.”

  Bess and Margaret headed home in a secret service car, and Truman remained behind. It was then that the secretary of war, Henry Stimson, asked to speak to him alone “about a most urgent matter,” as Truman would later recall.

  Stimson was a towering figure in Washington. Statesman, former Wall Street lawyer, the only Republican serving in FDR’s cabinet, he was well into his seventy-seventh year. A member of the old moneyed East Coast establishment, he was a Victorian throwback who spoke as if he had walked out of a Henry James novel. There was a matter of terrific importance to discuss, Stimson told Truman, a matter of grave secrecy. “He wanted me to know about an immense project that was under way,” Truman later recalled, “a project looking to the development of a new explosive of almost unbelievable destructive power.” Truman had heard whispers of some strange military program that was costing taxpayers millions. But he had no knowledge of the details.

  In fact, the matter was so top secret, Stimson explained, he could reveal nothing more as of yet. “That was all he felt free to say at the time,” Truman recalled, “and his statement left me puzzled.”

  After this brief meeting with Stimson, Truman had a moment to sit alone and think. He wrote in a diary of this moment:

  I was very much shocked . . . I did not know what reaction the country would have to the death of a man whom they all practically worshiped. I was worried about reaction of the Armed Forces. I did not know what affect the situation would have on the war effort, price control, war production and everything that entered into the emergency that then existed. I knew the President had a great many meetings with Churchill and Stalin. I was not familiar with any of these things and it was really something to think about but I decided the best thing to do was to go home and get as much rest as possible and face the music.

  When Truman walked out the White House door to the motorcade awaiting him, he heard the traditional reception clerk’s bark for the first time: “The President has left his office.” The motorcade left the Executive Mansion’s grounds, through the South Gate.

  4

  ALL OVER THE GLOBE THAT NIGHT, world leaders and humble citizens alike attempted to digest the news—the most revered of all men was gone.

  “It finally crushed him,” one of FDR’s top speechwriters, the playwright Robert Sherwood, wrote. “The ‘it’ was the awful responsibility that had been piling up and piling up for so many years. The fears and the hopes of hundreds of millions of human beings throughout the world had been bearing down on the mind of one man.”

  Part of the shock was the idea of the person who had now taken FDR’s place. “Good God!” it could be heard in taverns, on buses, and in living rooms around the country. “Truman will be President!”

  Already, radio stations by the hundreds were airing tributes to the fallen leader. In Truman’s home state of Missouri, a close friend by the name of Tom Evans had gone on the air. “I realize,” he told listeners, “that because of [Truman’s] humble beginnings . . . there may be some apprehension today about our country’s future. I wish I could speak personally to every man who feels that apprehension and say to him: You have no cause to fear.”

  Senators and statesmen sat with strong drinks distilling the world’s anxiety into the ink in their diaries. “The gravest question-mark in every American heart is about Truman,” Michigan senator Arthur Vandenberg wrote that night. “Can he swing the job?”

  In Moscow, Ambassador Harriman phoned Stalin’s number two in the Kremlin, Vyacheslav Molotov, at 1 a.m. Surprised by the call, Molotov insi
sted on coming straight over to confer with the ambassador in person at the U.S. Embassy. “He seemed deeply moved and disturbed,” Harriman recorded in a cable sent to the White House the next morning. “He remained for some time talking about the part President Roosevelt had played in the war and in the plans for peace . . . I have never heard Molotov talk so earnestly.”

  Molotov expressed consternation over the new American president. “Do you know this new President Truman?” he nervously queried Ambassador Harriman. “What is he like?”

  In Berlin, in his secret bunker, Adolf Hitler had spent the previous few days in desperate straits. The Nazi empire was all but crushed by the Allies, and Hitler was on the brink of nervous collapse, his hands shaking so violently, he found it difficult to sign his name on official documents. When he heard the news of Roosevelt’s death, he rushed at once to his production chief, Albert Speer. “We have the miracle I always predicted!” the führer ranted. “The war isn’t lost . . . Roosevelt is dead!”

  When Prime Minister Churchill received the news, he felt “as if I had been struck a physical blow.” “Indeed, it may be said,” Churchill later wrote, “that Roosevelt died at the supreme climax of the war, and at the moment when his authority was most needed to guide the policy of the United States.”

  In Germany, the supreme commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force, General Dwight Eisenhower, sat with Generals George Patton and Omar Bradley at Patton’s field headquarters that night, rifling through packages of cigarettes. “We pondered over the effect the president’s death might have upon the future peace,” Eisenhower recalled. “It seemed to us, from the international viewpoint, to be a most critical time to be forced to change leaders.” General Bradley recalled: “We talked for nearly three hours [in the middle of the night]. It seemed an irreplaceable loss . . . None of us knew Truman or much about him. He came from my home state, Missouri, but I had to confess almost complete ignorance.”