The Accidental President

by A. J. Baime

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  Nearing the end of his first week in office, Truman had inadvertently become the world’s most fascinating man. Reporters had overturned every stone to explore the man’s curious character.

  How big was he? (Five feet nine inches, 165 pounds.) His gustatory pleasures? (Meat and potatoes, pie a la mode.) What did the middle initial S. stand for? (Nothing specifically.) Though Truman was associated with Kansas City, a hotbed of swinging jazz, he was no fan of what he called “modern noise,” preferring Beethoven and Bach. His favorite pastime was poker. Madame Tussauds of London asked for the president’s exact measurements and physical attributes, so the museum could build a lifelike wax statue of him. The White House delivered them: gray eyes, size 9B shoes, 35½-inch waistline.

  No one was more surprised by the hoopla than Truman himself. “Six days President of the United States,” he wrote in a letter to his mother and sister on Wednesday, April 18. “It is hardly believable.”

  Comparisons were made to Andrew Jackson, the first common man to become president—much to Truman’s pleasure, because Jackson was of course his hero. The famed quote “If Andrew Jackson can be President, anyone can!” was refashioned as “If Harry Truman can be President, so could my next door neighbor!” Others compared Truman to Abraham Lincoln; both Truman and Lincoln had come from humble beginnings in the Midwest, both had served as small-town postmasters at one time (Truman for a very short time), and both were failed store owners (Berry & Lincoln; Truman & Jacobson).

  In reality Truman was like no other man who had ever served as president, and the family’s obscurity only brightened the spotlight. It seemed as if they had come out of nowhere. “Mr. and Mrs. Truman lived so inconspicuously in their senatorial days that few people knew them,” wrote Washington Times-Herald columnist Helen Essary. “He brings to the White House a background and personality which has had no counterpart among any recent or remote Chief Executive,” wrote Luther Huston in the New York Times. The powerful men who reported to Truman crystallized their first impressions. Undersecretary of State Joseph Grew wrote in a letter to a friend that he had “seen a good deal of [Truman] lately” and could report “nothing but the most favorable reaction . . . I think he is going to measure up splendidly to the tremendous job which faces him.” “When I saw him today,” Grew wrote of Truman in another missive, shortly after FDR’s death, “I had fourteen problems to take up with him and got through them in less than fifteen minutes with a clear directive on every one of them. You can imagine what a joy it is to deal with a man like that.” Even the notoriously cranky Admiral Leahy was disarmed by the president’s affability. “Personally,” Leahy wrote, “he proved to be easy to work with and, to use a trite phrase accurately, one of the nicest people I have ever known.”

  As the man who worked most closely with Truman on an hourly basis, handsome Matthew Connelly became a subject of intrigue. Connelly met with the press the same day that Truman did.

  “How do you spell your name?”

  “C-O-N-N-E-L-L-Y. That is Matthew J.”

  “Are you going to function as the appointment secretary?”

  “That’s right.”

  Connelly was from Clinton, Massachusetts. He was thirty-seven, married with one daughter. A graduate of Fordham University, he had worked on Wall Street, then as an investigator with congressional committees. The press wanted to know if he had any political experience.

  “Not in actual politics, no.”

  “Do you drink, or chase women, or anything like that?”

  “You should know.” (Laughter.)

  The president’s family members came under the spotlight. When Margaret returned to class at George Washington University after the shock of FDR’s death, the press followed her around campus. “Back to school and photographers all over the place!” she wrote in her diary. Bess Truman had become the subject of public fascination, a fact that pleased her none at all. Eleanor Roosevelt had radically altered the role of the First Lady by holding weekly press conferences for women reporters and writing her own newspaper column. Now the pressure was on Bess to do the same; Mrs. Roosevelt had sent her a note saying that this would be good for women across America.

  Unlike Mrs. Roosevelt, who enjoyed the public eye, Bess remained a mystery. “Few citizens of the capital have even had a glimpse of her,” a Washington bureau AP reporter wrote. Those who did know Bess found it hard to imagine this small-town sixty-year-old housewife as the First Lady of the United States, or a speech giver, or a newspaper columnist. Bess announced she would hold a press conference on April 17, but then she called it off, agonizing over the decision.

  The first in-depth interviews with Truman’s extended family members surfaced. “My first thought was that Harry was president and we didn’t want him to be,” said Bess’s brother George Wallace. “I really can’t be glad he’s President because I am sorry that President Roosevelt is dead,” said Mamma Truman. “If he’d have been voted in, I’d be out waving a flag, but it doesn’t seem right to be very happy or wave any flags now.” She had listened to her son’s speech to Congress over the radio. “Every one who heard him talk . . . will know he’s sincere and will do what’s best,” she said.

  (Truman’s press advisors told him that Mamma Truman’s comments could not have been more perfect; it was as if they had been written by a seasoned press agent. Truman wrote his mother on the matter on April 18: “I told them that my family all told the truth all the time and that they did not need a press agent.”)

  Mamma Truman was correct: Her son’s speech had given the nation a boost of morale, at a time when it was desperately needed. The stock market soared the afternoon after Truman’s first speech. “Everywhere one hears the remark, ‘He’s doing all right,’” noted one political columnist. Senate reporter Allen Drury wrote in his diary the day after Truman’s speech, “Few Presidents in history have started off on such a wave of universal good will and good hope as has come to Harry Truman.”

  Meanwhile, the most fevered gossip in the nation’s capital centered on power in the new administration. Rumors were, Secretary of State Ed Stettinius was out and Jimmy Byrnes would take his place. Treasury secretary Morgenthau was likely to go. Who would fill his role? Republicans were sure that FDR’s New Deal was dead, that the midwestern values of the new president would move the political metronome further right from Roosevelt’s far left, if not smack in the center. But the true nature of the president’s politics had yet to be seen.

  By all accounts, Truman was off to a brilliant start. Privately, however, his presidential odyssey was unfolding differently. He was a poker player, and he knew that the deck was unlikely to spit out aces. The future was sure to thrust upon him contention and perhaps even public embarrassment. All he had to do was open a Time magazine, and there it was, talk of his incompetence: “Harry Truman is a man of distinct limitations, especially in experience in high level politics.” Even in his private conversations with his wife, the doubt was crushing.

  “He shared so many moments of doubt and discouragement with her,” recalled Margaret of the early days of the Truman presidency. “This frankness combined with her natural pessimism to produce a lack of confidence.” Bess feared what everyone else in America feared. According to Margaret: “She was not sure he could do the job.”

  17

  THE RELENTLESS PACE OF HISTORY seemed to quicken during the first week of the Truman administration. From around the globe came stark reports of anarchy and murder.

  In the battle for Okinawa, Japanese forces were employing a campaign of mass suicide missions to repel American forces: kamikaze planes, kamikaze boats, even suicide swimmers immolating themselves with explosives anywhere they could to affect damage and death. Military leaders in Tokyo were determined to make a statement, and the timing happened to coincide with Truman’s inauguration day and his first days in office. Suicide planes rained from the sky—256 of them, according to navy sources, starting the day before Roosevelt’s death.
Admiral Chester Nimitz, commanding the U.S. Navy in the Pacific, reported that “large numbers of enemy aircraft made desperate attacks on our forces in the Okinawa area.” Antiaircraft gunners downed dozens of Japanese planes, but the enemy sank one destroyer in the process, and caused wreckage to numerous other American ships. The blows were not only physical; they were psychologically brutalizing. The Japanese had employed suicide tactics before, “but never so extensively and so earnestly” as they now were in Okinawa, according to a New Yorker reporter embedded with the marines. The suicide missioners had become “a branch of hysteria . . . developed highly in this war.”

  Meanwhile the American forces hammered Japanese strongholds on the island with combat troops supported by ships and planes hurling thousands of tons of shells. Some 140,000 island citizens were caught in the crossfire. On the island, Japanese soldiers hid in a maze of caves and seemed intent on fighting to the last man. The casualty reports reaching the Pentagon stunned War Department officials—nearly 2,700 American soldiers and sailors in the first nine days of the Okinawa campaign.

  But Okinawa was only a part of the story in the Pacific war. In Tokyo, miles of neighborhoods were still smoldering from firebombings unleashed by Major General Curtis LeMay and his Twenty-First Bomber Command. LeMay had ordered an incendiary mission the night of April 13–14, which was April 12–13 in Washington, which meant that Tokyo had begun to boil with explosions and flames just a handful of hours after Truman had recited the presidential oath. Crews returning from those missions told of devastating results. “We saw great clouds of black smoke, higher than our plane,” reported Corporal David Menor of Kansas City, Missouri. “We could still hear explosions when we were better than 100 miles away on our trip home.” This one firebombing mission would destroy over 170,000 buildings, leaving roughly 2,500 dead (mostly civilians), about the same number of Americans who died at Pearl Harbor.

  Soon after this mission—on Truman’s third full day in office—Curtis LeMay declared from his headquarters on the island of Guam that the defeat of Japan could be achieved, he believed, by striking the mainland with incendiaries, by burning Japanese neighborhoods until the nation could no longer summon the will to fight.

  As Truman was beginning his presidency, LeMay’s reputation was soaring in the Pentagon. A month earlier the Ohioan had single-handedly changed the strategy of the attacking forces in the Pacific theater, with no permission from anyone. LeMay had been sent from the European theater to the Mariana Islands in the Pacific to take command of a new fleet of the army air forces’ B-29s. These new aircraft were the biggest, most destructive weapons systems ever devised. Four 2,200-horsepower Wright engines could power the airplane to 357 miles per hour. The Superfortress had a wingspan nearly as long as half a football field, and could carry ten tons of bombs. Boeing had designed the aircraft to attack at high altitudes to avoid flak, and thus it was the first American military aircraft with a pressurized cabin. It was also the first with remote-control machine guns.

  General H. H. “Hap” Arnold, head of the army air forces, had gambled $3 billion—and his entire career—on the development of the B-29 Superfortress. (The B-29 program cost taxpayers considerably more than the Manhattan Project did.) The stress of the B-29’s development had caused Arnold to suffer numerous heart attacks. By autumn 1944, the airplanes were finally arriving in the Pacific. At only thirty-nine years of age, LeMay had been given the command. His direct superior, General Larry Norstad, had told him (according to LeMay’s account): “You go ahead and get results with the B-29. If you don’t get results, you’ll be fired . . . If you don’t get results it will mean eventually a mass amphibious invasion of Japan, to cost probably half a million more American lives.”

  In the winter of 1944–1945, LeMay’s B-29 crews flew 2,037 sorties, attempting to knock out precise targets in darkness from high altitudes, a strategy considerably safer for the men aboard these ships. LeMay was not satisfied with the results.

  “Our attempts to bomb precision targets at night have failed,” he wrote the army air forces’ chief, General Arnold. Weather and the ability of the bombers to hit targets from such high altitudes proved the major problems. So LeMay came up with a new plan of attack. “It was against this background,” according to a Twenty-First Bomber Command report, “that the decision was reached early in March 1945 to launch a series of low level incendiary night attacks against Japanese urban areas.” LeMay’s idea was to strip out all possible excess weight from the B-29s—including the armament, the guns, and the gunners—and load them with firebombs. The aircraft would then fly at low altitude to be sure to hit their targets, which were urban neighborhoods tightly woven with wooden-framed buildings that would explode in towering columns of flames.

  The plan was entirely in conflict with American policy, which was to use airplanes for “precision bombing”—to strike precise targets of military importance with conventional TNT, to weaken the enemy’s ability to wage war while causing as little damage to civilian populations as possible. The United States had condemned urban bombing. Earlier in the war, Roosevelt had appealed to the world to keep armies from perpetrating “the ruthless bombing from the air of civilians in unfortified centers of population,” calling this form of warfare “inhuman barbarism.” While American air power did take part in the ruthless bombing of Dresden, no American officials publicly embraced this form of warfare, the way the British did.

  LeMay knew that if he asked permission to utilize firebombs in low-altitude attacks against urban areas, he would be turned down. So he asked no permission. His aim had never been to kill women and children but to put an end to Japan’s ability to wage war, and much of Japan’s war making counted on “home industries carried on in cities or settlements close to major factory areas,” according to a secret Twenty-First Bomber Command report. In other words, urban areas where civilians lived.

  The first incendiary mission was flown March 9–10, using bombs loaded with white phosphorus and napalm; the latter substance was a new highly flammable fuel gel developed in a Harvard laboratory. The B-29 crews had been instructed on the best way to drop their payloads, to create the maximum amount of fire: “The bombs from a single ship must be spaced so as to assure a merging of the fires started by each bomb into a general conflagration before fire fighters have had time to put them out . . . With a full bomb load . . . of M-69 incendiaries, the area burned out by a single ship should be around 16 acres.”

  The night that first raid flew, LeMay paced in his headquarters until sunrise. “I’m sweating this one out myself,” he told a subordinate. “A lot could go wrong . . . If the raid works the way I think it will, we can shorten this war.”

  That first firebombing of Tokyo resulted in the largest death toll of any air raid, in any war ever, up to that point—an estimated 100,000 Japanese, likely more. Civilians hiding in dug-out holes that served as crude bomb shelters were baked alive by the towering flames, the heat reaching 1,800 degrees F. Others took refuge in canals only to be boiled to death in the searing heat. LeMay awaited response from Washington. The White House (still under Roosevelt) remained strangely silent. LeMay himself had this to say on the matter: “We don’t pause to shed any tears for uncounted hordes of Japanese who lie charred in that acrid-smelling rubble. The smell of Pearl Harbor fires is too persistent in our own nostrils.”

  The major general was becoming a curiosity not just for the deeds of the Twenty-First Bomber Command but for the unapologetic resolve with which he faced the killing of civilians, and the boldness for which he claimed personal responsibility. He had become known by his nickname, “Iron Ass.” “I was a machine,” the Ohioan said of himself. “When I went to the bathroom, it wasn’t in the ordinary human process. If I defecated, I defecated nuts and bolts. I was made of metal throughout. Iron Ass LeMay.”

  LeMay had ended these missions on March 19 for one reason: he ran out of firebombs. But his stock had once again filled, coincidentally, right at the time Truman became
president. Reports of the April 13–14 firebombings claimed that fifteen square miles of the city were still in flames forty-eight hours after the raid. Even at the time of FDR’s funeral, the city of Tokyo was still burning. When General Arnold received aerial photographs of the devastation, he wrote LeMay directly: “A quick glance at the map certainly gives the impression that something over half of Tokyo is now gone. [The] Tokyo incendiary operations have certainly been among the most effective in the entire history of bombing. Keep up the good work.”

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  In Europe the advancing Allied armies liberated more concentration camps during Truman’s first week in office. On April 15, three days after FDR’s death, the British Second Army reached Bergen-Belsen. What they found there defied description, according to the Second Army’s commander, General Miles Dempsey. “Anything you have seen doesn’t even begin the story,” he told reporters. Prisoners from camps closer to the front had been moved to Bergen-Belsen over the past year, swelling the population to about sixty thousand living people. Due to sanitary conditions, the camp was rife with typhoid, tuberculosis, and other diseases. Heaps of corpses lay scattered around, with one major pit filled with blackened bodies. The victims were Jews, political prisoners, “asocials,” Jehovah’s Witnesses, and homosexuals, among others.

  “There were children—500 of them—in the midst of this,” reported the Chicago Tribune. “Babies were born here daily.” Estimates put the death toll at thirty thousand, just in the previous few months, and more investigation would push that number considerably higher.

  During this same week, the Allies liberated Nazi death camps at Dora-Mittelbau, Buchenwald, and Westerbork. Within a few days, the U.S. Ninetieth Infantry Division would reach the camp at Flossenbürg, where more horror was discovered.

  Reports in newspapers and over the radio during the first days of the Truman administration revealed the details of Hitler’s most horrifying secret. “And now, let me tell you this in the first person,” Edward R. Murrow said over CBS Radio on Truman’s third day as president. Murrow had visited Buchenwald, where the Nazis had murdered at least 56,000 male prisoners, roughly 11,000 of them Jews. Murrow told of bodies “stacked up like cordwood,” innumerable victims of starvation and torture, and hundreds of dying children. “God alone knows how many men and boys have died there during the last twelve years . . . At Buchenwald they spoke of the president just before he died. If there be a better epitaph, history does not record it.”