The Accidental President

by A. J. Baime

  As Thomas Jefferson—America’s second VP and its third president—once said: “The second office of this government is honorable and easy. The first is but a splendid misery.”

  Part III

  * * *

  April–May 1945

  He came in like a man on a rocket.

  —Jonathan Daniels, White House press secretary

  I am alarmed and concerned over the Russian situation. It is deteriorating so rapidly that it is frightening.

  —State Department official Joseph Davies

  14

  ON THE MORNING OF APRIL 13, Truman awoke early as usual. His first day as president fell on the birthday of Thomas Jefferson—a good omen, he could only hope, for if he identified with any political philosophy at this point in his career, he was a Jeffersonian Democrat. As a man of routine, he walked out his apartment door to go on his morning walk. Outside, however, the world appeared a wholly different place. Police patrolled his apartment building’s hallways and the grounds outside. Increased secret service detail followed his every stride. Even the scattering pigeons seemed to see him in a new light. Truman was wearing a gray double-breasted suit, a dark tie, and black shoes, with a crisply folded pocket square poking out of his chest pocket. After a quick breakfast, he headed for the motorcade parked behind his building when he saw Tony Vaccaro, a political reporter for the Associated Press, standing nearby. Vaccaro was aiming for a scoop, and Truman obliged him.

  “Come on in, Tony,” Truman said, climbing into the back of a bulletproof limousine. “Let’s get started.”

  A bit stunned, Vaccaro got in. As a driver throttled for 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Truman asked Vaccaro for a favor. He wanted people to know that he was the same old Harry. He was worried he would not be able to see his friends anymore, particularly the boys from the 129th Regiment.

  “You know, if I could have my way, I’d have them all come in without knocking,” Truman said. The days when his war buddies could drop by to “strike a blow for liberty” were gone. “I’m going to miss all of that.”

  The president’s car cut through the morning traffic and pulled to a stop in front of the White House’s executive wing just before 9 a.m. As Truman stepped out, some two dozen photographers dove forward, camera flashes popping.

  “My,” Truman said, smiling, “I seem to be popular this morning.”

  A newsman asked if Truman had any statement.

  “No, nothing beyond what I said yesterday.”

  The White House was unusually crowded, especially at this early hour. Roosevelt had rarely left his bedroom before 9:30 a.m. “Men stood mob-thick in the big lobby of the Executive Offices,” recorded press secretary Jonathan Daniels. All eyes were on Truman as he walked at army pace through the corridors to his new office. “It was an amazing day,” Daniels recalled, “to see the transition from the aristocrat of Hyde Park to what those of us who had been with Roosevelt at that time thought was this little guy from Kansas City.”

  When Truman sat down in the president’s chair for the first time, he could see FDR’s presence everywhere his eye turned—Roosevelt’s maritime paintings crowding the walls, his stained ashtrays and canine statuettes all over the desk. Truman swung around in the chair “as if he were testing it,” Daniels recalled. “I felt a little sorry for him . . . It seemed still Roosevelt’s desk and Roosevelt’s room. It seemed to me, indeed, almost Roosevelt’s sun which came in the wide south windows and touched Truman’s thick glasses.”

  Truman was ready to begin the business of the day. He asked an assistant to clear FDR’s possessions from the desk and preserve them for Mrs. Roosevelt. Matthew Connelly was on hand to become the president’s confidential secretary. Outside the Oval Office, the staff moved about the maze of warrens tensely; many of them had worked for Roosevelt for twelve years. “They were confused, shocked, stunned,” recalled Connelly. “Because none of them knew [Truman] and he didn’t know any of them.” Assistant press secretary Eben Ayers spoke for all the White House staff that morning when he wrote in his diary, “I had no idea, and nobody else around of the old staff, had any idea of what was going to happen next.”

  Characteristic of Truman, he thought of his family, Bess in particular. She was succeeding the most influential First Lady the country had ever known. Now Bess would have to somehow fill Eleanor Roosevelt’s shoes. Truman phoned his secretary, Reathel Odum, in his Senate office, and asked that she report to the White House. When she arrived (“I was frightened to death,” she recalled), Truman asked her to go to the Connecticut Avenue apartment to help “the Boss.” Odum’s new job would be secretary to the First Lady.

  At 9:30 a.m. gangly Bill Simmons—who manned the Oval Office door—showed guests in to see the president: radio executive Leonard Reinsch, who had helped Truman with his public speaking during the vice presidential campaign, and Eddie McKim, the Omaha insurance man. McKim had been waiting for Truman in the Statler Hotel the night before, ready for a poker game, when he heard on the radio of FDR’s death. Truman got up from his desk and approached McKim, apologizing because, as one of his best friends, McKim should have been invited to witness the on-the-spot inauguration in the White House. For decades McKim had called his friend Harry, or sometimes Captain. But not today.

  “Well, Mr. President,” McKim said, “it doesn’t count what’s gone before. What counts is what happens now.”

  Truman returned to his seat. McKim stood in front of him, not knowing what to say.

  “Do you have to stand there?” Truman asked.

  “Well, Mr. President, I suddenly find myself in the presence of the president of the United States and I don’t know how to act.”

  It was a telling moment. This was how it was going to be from now on.

  Across the country, journalists in every city were chronicling the end of an epoch and, with the incoming administration, the beginning of a new age of anxiety. “No man ever came to the Presidency of the United States under more difficult circumstances than does Harry S. Truman,” a Los Angeles Times columnist wrote. The Wall Street Journal on this morning called Truman’s job an “almost superhuman task.” “Riding to work this morning,” Senator Vandenberg of Michigan wrote in his diary, “I got to wonder whether the country wasn’t just as anxious and perplexed about the future as I was.”

  Less than a month before his sixty-first birthday, Truman was the oldest man to become president since James Buchanan (1857–1861), and only the second president from west of the Mississippi River (Herbert Hoover, born in Iowa, being the first). He was the seventh vice president to ascend to the top office following the chief executive’s death, the first being John Tyler in 1841, who took on the moniker “His Accidency.” Only this time the new president was inheriting more power than any had ever possessed upon entering office, in the midst of the biggest war ever known. As the Supreme Court justice Robert H. Jackson uttered in a eulogy for Roosevelt on this day, April 13, 1945: “No Alexander, or Caesar, or Hannibal, or Napoleon, or Hitler, ever commanded such an aggregation of physical force.”

  The United States was a nation of some 140 million people. The military numbered 12,096,651 according to the latest War Department figures (army, army air forces, navy, marines, coast guard)—5,403,931 of whom were currently deployed overseas. As of March 31, the current world crisis had cost the U.S. Army 802,685 casualties (killed, wounded, and prisoners of war) and the navy 93,392.

  If Truman had one strength coming into the White House, it was his intimate knowledge of the home front, how the United States had become a boiling industrial machine. At the beginning of the war, Roosevelt had imagined an “Arsenal of Democracy” that would provide the tools of war for all the Allied armies, built on assembly lines according to mass-production principles that were themselves uniquely American. “Every single man, woman, and child is a partner in the most tremendous undertaking of our American history,” Roosevelt had said two days after Pearl Harbor. Now, on April 13, 1945, that dream had been realized. War
production had reached its absolute peak. In every corner of the country, industrial miracles were at work.

  In one factory, situated in what had been open fields and orchards just five years earlier, Ford Motor Company was churning out B-24s at a rate of one per hour, turning what had been the nation’s largest and most destructive bomber aircraft at the beginning of the war into the most mass-produced American military aircraft of all time (and still to this day). The Kleenex company was building machine gun mounts; a casket factory was making airplanes; an orange juice squeezer company was now at work on millions of bullet molds. In New Orleans one man, Andrew Higgins, was designing and building so many naval vessels, Hitler would call him “the new Noah.” The United States was producing 45 percent of the world’s armaments and nearly 50 percent of the goods. Factories had produced so many airplanes, jeeps, tanks, ships, submarines, and amphibious vehicles, Joseph Stalin had declared the United States “the country of machines.”

  Truman was now chief executive of all this industrial and military might. The power was tangible in the Oval Office, radiating from the national symbolism that now surrounded him: the American flag standing tall, and the bald eagles, the nation’s official emblem, woven into cascading blue window shades behind his desk. He had only a few classes of formal education beyond high school, but as Washington officials were soon to find out, he was remarkably educated. His lifetime’s reading had familiarized him with the triumphs and tragedies of innumerable world leaders. Now he had become one of them.

  ///

  At 10:15 a.m. Secretary of State Stettinius arrived with the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the war cabinet. Truman knew these men—towering figures, the brain trust of American military power—but only superficially.

  General George C. Marshall, sixty-five, was not only the army’s chief of staff, he was a man whose military judgment was rarely challenged, even by the likes of Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin. As Secretary of War Henry Stimson was to say of Marshall that summer: “I have seen a great many soldiers in my lifetime and you, sir, are the finest soldier I have ever known.” Marshall had been busy this morning, hurling all the resources of the Pentagon into a state funeral for Roosevelt, which was to begin in roughly twenty-four hours. (Already, Roosevelt’s body was traveling by train from Warm Springs to Washington, the route guarded by two thousand soldiers dispatched from Fort Benning.)

  Also sitting before Truman: Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal, fifty-three, a man of extraordinary intensity and nervous energy. A former amateur boxer, Forrestal had a flattened nose and was known for his complete lack of sense of humor. (In four years’ time, he would suffer a nervous breakdown and hurl himself to his death from a hospital window.) The group also included seventy-seven-year-old Secretary of War Henry Stimson, bleary-eyed insomniac and the deeply respected elder statesman of the bunch, and Fleet Admiral William Leahy, the president’s chief of staff and the nation’s highest-ranking military officer. The military men came in uniform, while the civilians (the secretaries of navy, war, and state) wore suits.

  Every one of these men except Truman was a product of wealth and the best schools, from Yale and Princeton to the United States Naval Academy, and all could sense the tension in the room. As Leahy recorded, “One cannot yet see how the complicated critical business of the war and the peace can be carried forward by a new president who is completely inexperienced in international affairs.”

  The secretary of state asked to be heard. “Take as long as you want,” Truman said. Stettinius brought up the United Nations Conference in San Francisco. It was less than two weeks away.

  “I have decided that I shall not go to San Francisco,” Truman said. Roosevelt had appointed a delegation, to be led by the secretary of state himself. “You will go to San Francisco and conduct the meeting with great success,” Truman said to Stettinius. “If you wish me to deliver a message, I shall be glad to do so.” Stettinius agreed that this would be appropriate. The secretary also suggested that Truman should meet personally with Prime Minister Churchill, as soon as possible.

  “Do you wish me to take steps to push that along?” Stettinius asked.

  “Any steps you take to encourage an early visit by Winston Churchill to this country will be a great service,” Truman said, tacitly stating that it would be the British leader’s duty to come to America, not the other way around.

  Marshall and Leahy then spoke, outlining the current military situation. “They were brief and to the point,” Truman recalled. They believed it would take at least six more months to defeat Germany, while operations in the Pacific would take longer. It would take another eighteen months to bring Japan to her knees, the Joint Chiefs believed. There was a lot of war left to fight. All of the top military officials agreed that Japan would have to be taken by an invasion of ground forces. The success of Operation Overlord, the D-day invasion of Europe, buttressed this argument. The invasion of Japan—code name Operation Downfall—was now in the planning phase inside the offices of the Pentagon.

  Truman said he thought he should make a statement before Congress, to assure the peoples of the world that he would carry on the policies of Roosevelt, and that the campaign to force unconditional surrender on the Germans and Japanese would continue with all the resources the Allies could bring. All agreed it was a good idea. And so Truman’s first message to Congress was scheduled for Monday, in three days’ time. All in this room knew, the announcement of Truman’s speech would ignite intense anticipation, for it would be the new president’s debut on the national stage.

  With that, the secretaries and Joint Chiefs of Staff took their leave. As General Marshall and Secretary of War Stimson exited the White House together, Stimson used the word “favorable” to describe his impression of Truman.

  “We shall not know what he is really like,” General Marshall responded, “until the pressure begins to be felt.”

  In Truman’s office, Admiral Leahy remained behind to talk one-on-one. As the top military advisor to Roosevelt, Leahy was suffering through this grim day. He had enjoyed a special connection with Roosevelt for many years, the common language being the love of sailing and the sea. Notoriously stiff and cranky, Leahy was defined to the core by his navy uniform. He had lived, it seemed, for lifetimes on the cutting edge of this war, serving as ambassador to Vichy France during the Nazi occupation and then chief of staff to the president. At sixty-nine he was considerably older than Truman, and he possessed more up-to-date military information than any other American, on any given day. As a military man, he understood the chain of command, but privately he could not help expressing his dismay at reporting to a chief executive he believed to be a “bush leaguer.” Since shortly after Pearl Harbor, Leahy said, he was the man who met with Roosevelt each morning to report on military affairs.

  “I want you to do the same for me,” Truman said. “I should like very much for you to remain in the office for so long as it is necessary for me to pick up the strands of the business of the war with which you are familiar, and with which I am not.”

  Leahy only knew how to do his job one way, he told Truman. “If I am to remain as your Chief of Staff,” he said, “it will be impossible for me to change. If I think you are in error I shall say so.”

  “That,” Truman said, “is exactly what I want you to do. I want you to tell me if you think I am making a mistake. Of course, I will make the decisions, and after a decision is made, I will expect you to be loyal.”

  ///

  At exactly 12:15 p.m. secret service logged Truman out of the White House. It would take a long time before the president would get used to the amount of activity that hinged on his decision to go anywhere, at any time. He headed to Capitol Hill and found himself walking through the Capitol’s hallways surrounded by armed guards, through corridors where he had walked alone for a decade.

  Surprised faces turned to him, and he smiled uncomfortably, entering the familiar office of Les Biffle—“Biffle’s Tavern.” Inside, senato
rs and congressmen greeted him—Senate majority leader Alben Barkley of Kentucky, House majority leader John W. McCormack of Massachusetts, Senate minority leader Wallace H. White of Maine, House minority leader Joseph Martin of Massachusetts, Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn, and about a dozen other senators. Truman shook their hands two at a time. These men had not expected him, and were told only at the last moment that he would be arriving. “It shattered all tradition,” Senator Vandenberg wrote in his diary. “But it was wise and smart.”

  For years Roosevelt had employed wartime powers to exclude Congress from much decision making, causing friction between the executive and legislative branches. These congressmen now believed that Truman—their great friend from the Senate—would reverse this trend and put power back into their hands. “It means that the days of executive contempt for Congress are ended,” Vandenberg wrote in his diary, “that we are returning to a government in which Congress will take its rightful place.”

  Truman, meanwhile, saw the situation from the other side. He knew that as president he would have interests that were bound to clash with those of his friends on Capitol Hill. As he would later say: “[A] president who didn’t have a fight with Congress wasn’t any good anyhow.” Now was the time to lay a foundation of goodwill. (Later this day Truman sent a messenger with the last box of cigars he had in his Senate office to Vandenberg—one of the most powerful of the ninety-six—with a note: “Our swan song.”)