The Accidental President

by A. J. Baime

  “When the time comes that you can’t, you will hear from me first direct,” Truman said.

  (“Truman has a mind of his own,” Morgenthau wrote of this meeting in his diary. “The man has a lot of nervous energy, and seems to be inclined to make very quick decisions.”)

  The president cut out to Union Station at 9:45 a.m., where navy men in crisply pressed uniforms moved Roosevelt’s casket onto a caisson pulled by seven white horses, the casket covered in an American flag. The funeral procession crawled through the streets, turning west onto Constitution Avenue and past the Capitol, the casket surrounded by dozens of police officers on Harley-Davidson motorcycles. Crowds mobbed the sides of the streets, behind rows of soldiers holding rifles topped with bayonets. The president’s motorcade followed behind the casket, Truman sitting between Jimmy Byrnes and the former vice president and current secretary of commerce Henry Wallace. Mrs. Roosevelt rode in another car, and the crowds craned their necks to glimpse her. An estimated 300,000 people stood along the route to witness the procession. Truman would never forget the sight of the grief-stricken faces, many weeping without restraint. Above, two dozen B-24 Liberator bombers roared, striping a blue sky with trails of white exhaust.

  Nearing 4 p.m. the funeral services were set to begin in the White House’s East Room, a space that had seen its share of historic moments. The East Room had hosted numerous presidential family weddings over the decades. The funeral services for William Henry Harrison, Zachary Taylor, and Abraham Lincoln had taken place here. Theodore Roosevelt had hosted boxing matches in this room. Now it would be remembered as the site of Franklin Roosevelt’s White House funeral service.

  Mourners had already filled the room when Truman entered, with Bess and Margaret by his side. According to custom, people stood when the president of the United States walked into a room. This time no one did. “I’m sure this modest man did not even notice this discourtesy,” recalled Robert Sherwood, FDR speech writer, who was present. When Mrs. Roosevelt arrived, however, everyone stood. Flowers filled the corners of the room from floor to ceiling, and heat drew beads of sweat from the formally dressed mourners. The service began with “Faith of Our Fathers,” Roosevelt’s favorite hymn, and ended with the dead president’s most famed pronouncement, delivered in his first inaugural address: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”

  Later, at 10 p.m., a funeral train left Union Station on an all-night journey bound for Roosevelt’s home in Hyde Park, where he would be interred. The train was seventeen cars long, packed with high-powered government officials, the Trumans staying in Roosevelt’s train car, the Ferdinand Magellan. It was 9:30 a.m. when the train pulled into Hyde Park. Harry, Bess, and Margaret stood in the crowd as West Point cadets in scarlet capes moved the casket to Roosevelt’s final resting place. Few could forget the sight of Eleanor Roosevelt with her head bowed in the rose garden of the Roosevelt mansion on the Hudson River, as soldiers shoveled dirt into the grave.

  By noon, the Trumans were once again aboard the Ferdinand Magellan, headed back to Washington. Truman could see out the window thousands of Americans who had gathered along the railroad tracks to glimpse the train rushing by. “Old and young were crying on the streets,” he wrote in a diary. “Old Negro woman sitting down on curb with apron up was crying like she had lost her son. Most of the women and half the men in tears.”

  Truman spent most of the ride attempting to work on his speech, but he was interrupted constantly. “Now, the real politicking began,” recalled Margaret. “Every congressman and senator on the train was trying to get to see the president.” Truman had never enjoyed the gift of oration. In twenty-four hours’ time, he would make his presidential debut before Congress with a speech he hoped would spark confidence in the new administration. In all his life, he had never shouldered such pressure. That night, as he lay in his bed, he prayed that he would be up to the task.

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  When Truman entered the House Chamber in the Capitol on April 16, the day after FDR’s burial, the eyes of Washington were on him. He was greeted by a standing ovation. The applause for Truman was so loud it reverberated in the chamber’s nearly hundred-year-old bones. The time was 1:02 p.m. when Truman climbed the stairs to the podium, and when he looked out at the crowd, he spotted Bess and Margaret in the gallery, glancing at them so quickly, he could not see that tears were rolling from Bess’s eyes. “Dad was terribly nervous up there on the rostrum,” Margaret recalled. “He was always nervous before a speech, but this one, so enormously important, doubled his normal tension.” He put his lips before the podium’s microphones and started in, but Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn stopped him.

  “Just a minute, Harry,” Rayburn whispered, forgetting to address Truman as Mr. President. “Let me introduce you.” Rayburn turned and said at great volume, “The president of the United States!” Again, the room roared—senators, congressmen, military leaders, the justices of the Supreme Court.

  Had there ever been more of an underdog standing on this rostrum? The ovation was as much for Roosevelt as it was for Truman, but one got the sense that the American people wanted Harry Truman to succeed.

  He began. “Mr. Speaker . . . Members of the Congress . . . It is with a heavy heart that I stand before you, my friends and colleagues in the Congress of the United States. Only yesterday we laid to rest the mortal remains of our beloved president Franklin Delano Roosevelt. At a time like this words are inadequate. The most eloquent tribute would be a reverent silence. Yet, in this decisive hour, when world events are moving so rapidly, our silence might be misunderstood and might give comfort to our enemies.” Truman spoke of Roosevelt (“no man could possibly fill the tremendous void left by the passing of that noble soul”), the war (“we dare not permit even a momentary pause in the hard fight for victory”), and the role of the United States in a world engulfed in violence, death, and outrageous acts of evil.

  “Today, the entire world is looking to America for enlightened leadership to peace and progress,” Truman said. “All of us are praying for a speedy victory,” he told his audience. “Every day peace is delayed costs a terrible toll . . . Our demand has been, and it remains . . . unconditional surrender.”

  The speech ended with a prayer, a quote from King Solomon: “Give therefore thy servant an understanding heart to judge thy people, that I may discern between good and bad; for who is able to judge this thy so great a people?” Truman had but a fraction of FDR’s gift for oratory, but his voice was steady and firm. For twelve years the president who addressed the world from this pulpit spoke in the intonations of the moneyed East Coast establishment. This voice was different. It was the voice of a common man, asking God for guidance, and the response was the loudest affirmation Truman’s ears had ever encountered.

  Secret service logged the president back into the White House at 2:37 p.m., which already made him late for his afternoon meetings. He had been gone from his office only a little over two hours. Much of the afternoon would be spent worrying over the Russians.

  On this day Truman met with British officials for the first time, notably Churchill’s foreign minister, Anthony Eden, and together they finalized wording for a communiqué to Joseph Stalin—Truman’s first direct communication with “the Man of Steel” regarding the situation in Poland. The cable was titled “Personal and Secret from the President and the Prime Minister for Marshal Stalin,” and it pleaded with the Soviet leader to back down on his position. “The British and United States Governments have tried most earnestly to be constructive and fair in their approach and will continue to do so,” the communiqué read. The cable was signed in all capital letters: TRUMAN.

  But the friction with the Soviet Union had grown only more heated. The day that Truman addressed Congress, he received reports of a meeting between ambassador to Moscow Harriman and Stalin, in the Kremlin, a meeting that grew so acrimonious, one American official present noted that Harriman and Stalin had nearly come to physical blows. Stalin accused the
Americans of using army aircraft in Poland to aid the anticommunist Polish underground, now organizing an uprising against the Soviets. Harriman thundered back that Stalin’s information was false, that he was accusing the Americans of treachery, and thus he had insulted the integrity of the commander of the United States Army, General Marshall. “You’re impugning the loyalty of the American high command and I won’t allow it,” Harriman yelled at the Soviet dictator. “You are actually impugning the loyalty of General Marshall.”

  Meanwhile, Harriman had gotten a firm commitment that Vyacheslav Molotov would meet with Truman. The Soviet number two would leave Moscow the following day (April 17), traveling the longer route over Russia rather than over Europe, out of fear for his safety. En route to the San Francisco conference, Molotov would make an appearance in Washington on the twenty-first, in five days’ time.

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  That night Truman left the White House to the now familiar chant from the usher in the lobby: “The President has left his office.” During the day, Bess, Margaret, and Mrs. Wallace had moved out of the Connecticut Avenue apartment and into the elaborately furnished Blair House, diagonally across the street from the White House on Pennsylvania Avenue, so Truman decided to walk to his new home. This threw his secret service detail into a fury of last-second preparations. The yellow four-story stucco Blair House dated back to 1813 and had played host to numerous visiting dignitaries during the war, from King Peter II of Yugoslavia to General Charles de Gaulle. But never had a president of the United States lived in it, even temporarily.

  In his new study that night, Truman got a chance to catch up on correspondence. Letters had begun to pour into the White House mailroom from friends in Missouri; these missives would arrive by the bushel for days to come. “Little did you think when you were first elected Judge of the Eastern Division of the Jackson County Court, or did your fellow townsmen ever think, that you would become President of the United States,” wrote Rufus Burrus, a Jackson County lawyer. “You are a good man, Harry,” wrote C. D. Hicks, a St. Louis railway equipment manufacturer, “and God will direct you.” Of all the missives Truman received from his Missouri friends, none were likely to move him the way Eddie Jacobson’s did. “You know that I am not the praying type,” his old haberdashery partner wrote, “but if ever we did pray, we did on the night of April 12. The task you inherited is unequalled in world’s history.”

  Truman wrote his mother and sister from the Blair House on the night of April 16. “I have had the most momentous, and the most trying time anyone could possibly have, since Thursday, April 12th. My greatest trial was today when I addressed the Congress. It seemed to go over all right . . . Things have gone so well that I’m almost as scared as I was Thursday when Mrs. R told me what had happened. Maybe it will come out all right.” He signed the letter, “Your very much worried son + bro, Harry.”

  16

  THE DAILY SCHEDULE of the president could be described in a word: relentless. As Truman wrote in his memoirs, “Being President is like riding a tiger. A man has to keep on riding or be swallowed.” “It takes about 17 hours a day,” he said on another occasion. “And then you get as much sleep as you can, start over again and do the next 17 hours as best you can. No man can do it as it should be done.”

  On the morning of April 17 Truman began a new routine. After breakfast, he left the Blair House, making the two-hundred-yard commute to the White House on foot. He had to cross an intersection with a traffic light at Pennsylvania Avenue and Jackson Place, and when he reached this corner, secret service magically turned all the lights at the intersection red so the president could cross. Newspapermen and secret service clung to Truman’s heels, perspiring as they attempted to match his pace, forming a farcical retinue. The White House correspondent Merriman Smith: “This limousine-infested Capital saw something today it hadn’t ever seen—the president of the United States walking to work.” Truman shook the hands of wide-eyed women who happened to be walking by. Cabdrivers motoring past honked their horns and yelled, “Good luck, Harry!”

  Mornings in the White House began with a military briefing from Admiral Leahy, who delivered the critical news from all corners of the globe. These meetings took place either in Truman’s office or in the White House Map Room, an extraordinary space filled with the most technologically advanced cryptographic and communications equipment ever invented. All top-secret cables to and from foreign leaders and embassies came through this room. National Geographic maps hung on the walls, pinned with codified colored markings noting the location of Allied and Axis troops and ships, so that the president could grasp at a glance the broad strokes of the military situation and, with Leahy’s help, how it had changed from the day before. Roosevelt had set up this secret space in a former women’s cloakroom in the White House basement soon after Pearl Harbor. It was so secret, not even the First Lady was allowed inside. Few people who worked in the White House knew of its existence.

  After the president’s military briefing came a 9 a.m. staff meeting, which Truman would hold six days a week (including Saturdays). He called this “the morning meeting.” About a half dozen staffers sat around his desk, including correspondence secretary Bill Hassett (who responded to the majority of Truman’s mail), appointments secretary Connelly, the press secretary and assistant press secretary, and Truman’s portly poker pal Harry Vaughan, whom he had made an official military aide and was fast becoming the unofficial White House jester. These informal meetings lasted from twenty to forty minutes, often veering into storytelling, such as the time when a full-blown discussion dove into Winston Churchill’s startling “capacity for drink,” or the time when the group addressed French leader Charles de Gaulle’s astonishing pomposity. “I don’t like the son-of-a-bitch,” Truman said.

  Then came the day’s appointments, which stacked up in small blocks of time. On Tuesday, April 17—Truman’s fourth full day in office, and the day after he addressed Congress—he was handed an official meetings schedule for the first time, prepared by Matthew Connelly. His morning on the seventeenth was devoted mostly to the press. A New York Times artist was given thirty minutes to sketch him for the Sunday magazine. (During this meeting, Truman pulled from his wallet a folded piece of paper with a section of the poem “Locksley Hall” printed on it. He read the poem “slowly and with feeling,” the New York Times man recalled. Then the president said, “Tennyson wrote that in 1842.” Truman had carried this poem with him everywhere he went since he was a little boy.)

  At 10:30 a.m., dozens filed into the Oval Office for Truman’s first press conference. Standing behind his desk, he greeted reporters as they pushed into the room, which quickly grew uncomfortably crowded. Regular presidential press conferences were a tradition going back to Woodrow Wilson, who on March 15, 1913, set a precedent of welcoming newspaper reporters into his office to answer questions. Roosevelt had held two a week and had elevated these meetings to high art. Wielding his cigarette holder as if conducting an orchestra, he would deliver soliloquies that would entrance his guests, while almost always failing on purpose to answer any question posed.

  On April 17 the largest crowd ever assembled for a presidential press conference pushed into the Oval Office—348 men and women reporters—all aiming to size up the new chief executive. Some were forced to stand on the terrace outside the president’s office—lucky ones, because the room got exceedingly hot.

  “Good morning,” Truman said, “good morning.”

  “Good morning, Mr. President,” someone in the crowd said. “Will you take it sort of slow for us today, please, sir?”

  “Surely, surely,” Truman said. “Anything I can do to accommodate you.”

  No one in the room could help making comparisons to Roosevelt. For one thing, this president was standing up. “We all knew that Roosevelt had gone to Groton and then Harvard,” recalled White House correspondent Robert Nixon, who was getting his first crack at Truman that morning. “That [Roosevelt] came from a quite old, well-to-do fa
mily; that he moved in what is known as the best circles all of his life . . . Truman was a small town, Midwestern Missourian of farm origin . . . The contrast was in appearance, voice mannerisms, and even their attire. President Roosevelt, while a casual dresser, was very well tailored . . . Truman dressed like he had just come off of Main Street in Independence.”

  The new president called for attention. “The first thing I want to do to you is to read the rules,” he said. After telling the reporters what they already knew—everything he said was background material, no direct quotes were allowed unless there was specific permission—he began by announcing that most of the Roosevelt staff would stay on, and that Matthew Connelly had been appointed his confidential secretary. Truman read a letter aloud from Mrs. Roosevelt, thanking everyone for their wishes, “which have brought great comfort and consolation to all of us.” Due to the wartime paper shortage, Mrs. Roosevelt would not be responding to all correspondence. Instead, she had asked Truman to read her thank-you letter to the press.

  Truman then opened the floor. He answered questions about reciprocal trade, race relations, the wartime ban on horseracing, and the historic United Nations Conference set to open in eight days.

  “Mr. President,” said one reporter in the crowd. “Will Mrs. Truman have a press conference?”

  “I would rather not answer that question at this time.”

  At numerous moments Truman delivered witticisms that sparked laughter in the room. The Missourian had a simple way of speaking that amused his counterparts in the press. He whittled his ideas down to the fewest words and handed them over. Unlike Roosevelt, Truman actually answered questions, and if he chose not to, he said just that.

  “His first press conferences were wonderful,” noted press secretary Daniels. At the end of this first one, something happened that had never occurred in any of Roosevelt’s meetings with the press: the room erupted in spontaneous applause.