by A. J. Baime
Lunch was served—salmon, corn bread, peas. Truman held a drink in his hand and admitted he was overwhelmed. He said he would make a statement before a joint session of Congress, in three days’ time. Some in the room thought it a bad idea—too soon after Roosevelt’s death. Truman had made up his mind. “I am coming and prepare for it,” he said. He then pleaded with these men for their help. They all knew him to be an honest, nose-to-the-grindstone worker. They also knew how unprepared he was to be the president of the United States, and that he had never coveted this “terrible job.” He was going to need their support, regardless of political party.
“I’m not big enough,” Truman told Senator George Aiken of Vermont on this day. “I’m not big enough for this job.”
When he walked out of Les Biffle’s office, a group of reporters had gathered. Truman knew these men well. They had been told: no interviews. But they came anyway to pay their respects.
“Well, isn’t this nice,” Truman said, again shaking hands two at a time. “This is really nice.”
“Good luck, Mr. President,” shouted one reporter.
When he heard these words, Truman’s eyes filled with tears. “I wish you didn’t have to call me that,” he said.
Jack Bell of the Associated Press remembered this moment poignantly: “We had called him Harry all the time. But we couldn’t do that. We couldn’t say ‘Harry’ and we couldn’t swallow enough to say ‘Mr. President,’ so we just addressed him as ‘You.’”
Truman made a statement that stunned those reporters, for even these seasoned Washington journalists had never heard a politician speak with such frankness. “I don’t know if any of you fellows ever had a load of hay or a bull fall on you. Last night the whole weight of the moon and stars fell on me.” He paused. “If newspapermen ever pray, pray for me.”
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At 2:30 p.m. on Truman’s first day in office, James F. Byrnes arrived at the White House. Blue-eyed Jimmy Byrnes, sixty-two, was a Washington legend, a South Carolina–bred New Deal Democrat who had never finished high school and had climbed the ranks as a lawyer before becoming an elected official on Capitol Hill. Career was Byrnes’s life; he was childless and had little time for distractions from his ambitions. Not nine months earlier, Byrnes had traveled to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, expecting the VP nomination, only to be scorned by Roosevelt. Byrnes had suffered the betrayal intensely, quitting his job as director of the Office of War Mobilization and leaving Washington for his home in South Carolina, where he had designs on a governorship.
Now FDR was dead. At ten minutes past midnight on the morning of April 13, Byrnes had cabled Truman: “If I can be of service call on me.” He had flown immediately to Washington, and now here he was in Truman’s office. As Truman would later learn, Byrnes was feeling no doubt that he could handle the presidency far better than Harry could. The presidency, Byrnes thought, should have been his.
They discussed “everything under the sun,” Truman recalled. He had heard that Byrnes had made shorthand notes of the meetings at Yalta between Churchill, Stalin, and Roosevelt. Byrnes agreed he could hand his notes over to Truman. Then Truman said he was considering Byrnes for secretary of state. The head of the State Department was next in line for the presidency, and the current secretary, Stettinius, had come from the private sector. If Truman were to die or become incapacitated, he wanted a successor who had held public office, who had been elected by the American people to serve. And he trusted Byrnes, who had nearly twenty-five years’ experience in Congress. Besides, Byrnes, like Truman, had come from humble beginnings.
Byrnes “practically jumped down my throat to accept” the job, Truman recalled. The current secretary of state was about to leave for the San Francisco United Nations Conference. The Byrnes appointment was as good as done but would have to remain a secret for the time being. It would soon become the worst-kept secret in Washington.
Before leaving Truman’s office, Byrnes brought up a taboo subject. “With great solemnity,” Truman recalled, “he said that we [the United States] were perfecting an explosive great enough to destroy the whole world.” Truman was aware of this extraordinary project’s existence, he told Byrnes, but he knew few details. Byrnes believed the new invention had potential not just as a military weapon but as a political one as well—that “the bomb might well put us in a position to dictate our terms at the end of the war,” as Truman recalled Byrnes saying.
Time was short, and again the president was left with little information about the Manhattan Project. He was also left with assurance that James F. Byrnes was about to become one of his most trusted advisors.
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Soon after Byrnes’s departure, Secretary of State Stettinius returned to Truman’s office for a final meeting of the day. This time Stettinius dove into the Moscow conundrum. He explained to Truman that relations with the USSR since the Yalta Conference had “deteriorated.” Truman understood this, and asked why. This was not an easy question to answer. The secretary of state asked if Charles Bohlen might be given an opportunity to speak; he was Roosevelt’s Russian interpreter and a respected State Department point of view on American-Soviet relations. Bohlen was shown in. “I had not met Truman at the time he became president,” Bohlen recalled. “He was an obscure vice-president, who got to see Roosevelt much less than I did and who knew less than I did about United States foreign relations.”
Bohlen gave an account of the ping-pong of cables between Stalin and Roosevelt, right up to the moment when Roosevelt lost consciousness the day before. Stalin appeared to be turning his back on many critical promises he had made at Yalta, and Poland had become the crux of the problem. Bohlen had been among the first wave of State Department officials to staff the Moscow embassy when it opened in 1934, and he had a keen understanding of the situation. The Soviets wanted control of Poland, and in spite of the perceived agreements at Yalta, they intended to have it. “For the Soviets,” Bohlen later wrote in his memoirs, “Poland was a question of life and death, as well as honor, because in thirty years it had twice served as an invasion corridor [for Germany to attack Russia].”
It would now be up to Truman to decide how to proceed with Stalin, and the new president made it clear that he intended to be firm with the Russians. “He gave me the impression,” the secretary of state wrote in his diary after this meeting, “that he thought we had been too easy with them.”
Stettinius had with him an extraordinary communiqué from Moscow, from Averell Harriman, the ambassador to the Soviet Union. Harriman explained in his cable to Truman how he had “a most earnest and intimate talk with Marshal Stalin.” The Soviet leader was shocked by the death of Roosevelt, and the event had evidently moved him to act. “In speaking of President Roosevelt and yourself,” Harriman wrote Truman, “Stalin said . . . President Roosevelt has died but his cause must live on and we shall support President Truman with all our forces and with all our will.”
According to Harriman’s report, Stalin had now agreed to send his number two, Vyacheslav Molotov, to the San Francisco United Nations Conference set to start in twelve days, as a gesture to Truman. The Russians had previously informed Roosevelt that Molotov would not attend, due to the faltering relations between the two countries. If the Russians did not attend the San Francisco conference, the United Nations was sure to fail. Now the Russians had agreed to send representation. The entire existence of the UN lived and died on this decision; already, it seemed, history had been made before Truman’s first day in office was over.
If Molotov was going to travel to the United States, Truman thought, he should come to Washington. A cable shot off to Moscow ordering Ambassador Harriman to set up the meeting, setting the stage for Truman’s first face-to-face with the Soviets.
Before Truman’s first day in office was over, chief of staff Leahy helped the president construct his first correspondence with Winston Churchill regarding the global emergency and the standoff on Poland.
“There are
. . . urgent problems requiring our immediate and joint consideration,” Truman wrote Churchill. “I have in mind the pressing and dangerous problem of Poland and the Soviet attitude . . . Our next step [is] of the greatest importance.”
15
AT DUSK, police and secret service locked down the building at 4701 Connecticut Avenue, so that Truman could enter his second-floor home. Never had this apartment felt so small. Margaret wrote in her diary that she had not left the place all day. “We have an army of secret service men around us at the apt. and everywhere we go,” she wrote. “Stayed in all day today.” As Truman wrote, “There was no escaping the fact that my privacy and personal freedom were to be greatly restricted from now on.”
No record of the family’s conversation at the dinner table exists, but surely Harry, Bess, Margaret, and Mrs. Wallace knew they had to pack their bags and fast. They would leave their furniture behind for the time being. Mrs. Roosevelt was still living in the White House. Truman decided to move the family to the Blair House, an official residence normally used to house visiting dignitaries, until Eleanor Roosevelt could move her possessions out of the home where she and her husband had lived for more than twelve years.
Truman had read more words on this day than he ever dreamed possible, but that evening he settled down to a new routine: wading through documents long into the night, his exhausted eyes straining to soak up page after page of information. Earlier in the day the secretary of state had placed a thick memorandum on the desk of Matthew Connelly, a memo that aimed to “bring [Truman] up-to-date on the vital developments.” It provided a snapshot of the global playing field and a crash course in international relations. Truman read the memo that night, when he could do so without interruption.
Great Britain—the United States’ most important ally—was first on the memo’s list. Britain was a nation suffering a grave identity crisis. “The British long for security but are deeply conscious of their decline from a leading position to that of the junior partner of the Big Three,” the State Department document noted. Churchill had exhibited a deep animosity and growing paranoia toward the Russians. “The British government has been showing increasing apprehension of Russia and her intentions,” the document read. Churchill was a trustworthy friend, but it must never be forgotten that he held Britain’s interests paramount, at whatever cost to his allies.
France was next on the list. Paris required construction of a new government following liberation from the Nazis. General Charles de Gaulle had taken power, but he was an erratic figure obsessed with national and personal prestige. France, therefore, had “from time to time put forward requests which are out of all proportion to their present strength and have in certain cases . . . showed unreasonable suspicions of American aims and motives.”
National policy toward Germany prioritized the following goals: destruction of the Nazi regime, punishment of war criminals, banishment of Hitler’s military government, and the prevention of any military manufacturing whatsoever. The American, Russian, and British governments had agreed that Germany would be divided into sectors after the Nazi surrender. Each of the three nations would govern its own sector, with France subsequently given a fourth sector. Thus the mechanics of post-Nazi occupation were roughly in place. That aside, the future of this nation was still a subject of debate in Washington and abroad. What would become of Germany, post-Hitler?
The State Department document pointed out serious problems in Italy, notably Yugoslavia’s occupation of an important piece of the nation’s northeast around Trieste. Further issues plagued Austria and Argentina. “A problem of urgent importance to the United States is that of supplies for areas liberated from enemy occupation,” the document pointed out. “The chaos and collapse which may result in these countries from starvation, unemployment and inflation can be averted principally by making available essential civilian supplies.” If the peoples of bombed-out Europe could not obtain food and coal for heating, they would become easy prey for “extremist groups”—for communist revolution.
The most pressing problem, the State Department document pointed out, was clearly Russia and its control of Poland. As Truman later explained the situation: “The plain story is this. We and the British wanted to see the establishment in Poland of a government truly representative of all the people. The tragic fact was that, though we were allies of Russia, we had not been permitted to send our observers into Poland. Russia was in full military occupation of the country . . . and had given her full support to the so-called Lublin government—a puppet regime of Russia’s own making.”
Stalin had placed his signature next to Roosevelt’s and Churchill’s on the Declaration on Liberated Europe, at Yalta in February. He had agreed in contract that nations liberated from the Nazis would have the opportunity to “create democratic institutions of their own choice.” Now the Russians were boldly flouting democracy in Poland. Truman knew from his time in the Senate how sensitive Congress was to the Polish matter. The freedom of people to choose their own government was the kernel of the ideology for which United States and British soldiers had fought and died in this war. As Senator John Danaher of Connecticut had said on the Senate floor not long before, “There are literally thousands upon thousands of boys of Polish extraction who . . . are fighting all over the world in the firm belief that they are going to help restore the pre-war borders of the homeland of their parents.” Representative John Dingell of Michigan: “We Americans are not sacrificing, fighting, and dying to make permanent and more powerful the Communistic Government of Russia and to make Joseph Stalin a dictator over the liberated countries of Europe.”
If Stalin was to succeed in installing a puppet government in Poland, what was to stop him from doing so again, in all the other eastern European nations liberated from Hitler’s grasp?
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Roosevelt’s casket was scheduled to arrive in Washington on the morning of April 14, Truman’s second full day in office. Truman was to meet the train at Union Station. Beforehand, he squeezed in early morning appointments, in a continued attempt to gather the reins of government. He had outlined the broad strokes of the speech he would give before a joint session of Congress in two days’ time, and set a speech-writing team to work in a White House conference room, poking his head in to monitor the progress.
Everywhere in the White House, chaos reigned. “I doubt that there have been few more dramatic, confused moments in American history than the ingress of the people who saw power in their hands under Harry Truman,” wrote press secretary Jonathan Daniels. “There were weird people [in the White House] like a fellow named McKim. I, at this time . . . had the feeling that the aristocracy of Democracy had passed away and the Pendergasts of politics were pouring in.” That feeling was palpable all over the West Wing. “There is a feeling of an attempt by the ‘gang’ to move in,” assistant press secretary Eben Ayers wrote in his diary. “Missourians are most in evidence . . . I have no desire to remain here if we are to have a Democratic ‘Harding administration,’ as some are hinting.” (President Warren G. Harding is remembered for Pendergast-style scandals, notably the Teapot Dome scandal of the early 1920s.)
First to see the president officially on April 14 was John Snyder, a St. Louis banker and one of Truman’s closest personal friends and poker buddies. Truman needed to appoint a new federal loan administrator, and he told Snyder he was the man for the job.
“I don’t think you ought to appoint me to that job,” Snyder said, sitting uncomfortably in the president’s office. “I’m not sure I’m the right man.”
“I think you are the right man,” Truman said. “I’m sending your name to the Senate.”
Jimmy Byrnes was in the room, and said, “Harry, you forget who you are. You’re the president of the United States. Order him to do it.”
Later Truman called Jesse Jones, a powerful New Dealer who had until recently served as secretary of commerce. Truman said “the President” was appointing Snyder as federal loan administra
tor.
“Did he make that appointment before he died?” Jones said, thinking of Roosevelt.
“No,” Truman answered, incredulously. “He made it just now.”
A quick meeting with Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau followed. For years Morgenthau had served as one of Roosevelt’s most trusted advisors and in fact had been Roosevelt’s neighbor in Hyde Park, New York. Like Roosevelt, Morgenthau was East Coast establishment, raised by a wealthy diplomat father and educated at the finest academic institutions (the Dwight School in Manhattan, then Cornell). Of late, Morgenthau had come under fire for his theories on how Nazi Germany should be handled after surrender—the so-called Morgenthau Plan, which would strip Germany of all its industrial assets, leaving an agrarian nation in the wake with no ability to form a military or any other sort of industrial enterprise. The plan was a subject of heated debate in Washington. The Treasury secretary was the only Jewish cabinet member, and thus many suspected his Morgenthau Plan to be more about vengeance than cogent policy. Nevertheless, he greeted Truman soberly on the morning of April 14.
Truman said, “I think I admired Mr. Roosevelt as much as you did.”
“I don’t think that’s possible,” Morgenthau awkwardly returned. He said, “I feel this war very strongly. I have one son with General Patton and another in the Pacific, and his ship has just been torpedoed for the second time. My first idea is to win the war and then I want to win the peace.”
“That’s what I want to do,” Truman said.
Conversation steered toward the matter at hand. Morgenthau was a man of extraordinary power who knew more about the world’s financial ebb and flow probably than any other individual alive. Truman asked for a full report on the finances of the war and the nation. As Morgenthau moved for the door, Truman said, “Now I want you to stay with me.”
“I will stay just as long as I think I can serve you,” Morgenthau answered.