by A. J. Baime
A day later Truman met with Rabbi Stephen Wise, president of the Zionist Organization of America, to discuss the critical issue of displaced Jews in Europe, who should be granted land in Palestine to form a Jewish state, the rabbi argued. The secretary of state had prepared the president with a confidential memo for the Wise meeting: “We have interests in [Palestine] which are vital to the United States, [and] we feel that this whole subject is one that should be handled with the greatest care.” Truman made Dr. Wise no commitments.
The president met with J. Edgar Hoover, chief of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Hoover’s powers in an era of wartime paranoia had expanded alarmingly, Truman believed. “We want no Gestapo or Secret Police,” he wrote in a diary. “FBI is tending in that direction. They are dabbling in sex-life scandals and plain blackmail . . . This must stop.”
Truman was also grilled by black leaders seeking to know how the new president would stand on racial issues. The war had forced integration as nothing ever had. However, about half of the employers in the United States still refused to hire black workers, and blacks were forbidden from serving alongside white soldiers in the military. Black leaders could see progress made on the labor front; the war economy had put more African Americans to work than ever before. As one female black American famously said: “Hitler was the one that got us out of the white folks’ kitchen.” As of 1944, 7.5 percent of war production jobs were held by African Americans, while their overall percentage of the nation’s population at the time was 9.8 percent. A black reporter from the Chicago Defender put it to Truman: “Would you comment on these matters and any others that may give reassurance to 13 million of your fellow Americans who today look hopefully to you?” The reporter walked away satisfied that the new president would support black issues as much as Roosevelt had.
As busy as a president could be, Truman was still a man who each night went home to his family, who had to keep track of bills, and who had doctor and dentist appointments. (The White House dentist made house calls; Truman’s teeth were in fine shape, but Margaret had nine cavities, having not seen a dentist in five years.) On April 19, between appointments with army chief of staff George Marshall and the Chinese foreign minister, T. V. Soong, Truman took a few minutes to entertain some special guests. His brother, Vivian, and Fred Canfil showed up at the White House. They took turns sitting in the president’s chair and swam in the White House pool before Truman had enjoyed a chance to test the waters.
Truman had made Canfil a U.S. marshal in Kansas City, and it was Canfil who drove to the nation’s capital, from Missouri. “We all wanted to see Harry and that’s why we drove to Washington,” Canfil told Duke Shoop of the Kansas City Star, which promptly published a photo of the strange-looking Canfil smiling crookedly in front of the White House. (The trip got Canfil in trouble, as the long drive violated rationing rules on the use of gasoline.)
The Trumans also had the added stress of moving again. On April 20, a procession of twenty army trucks could be seen parked at the White House, as movers hauled Eleanor Roosevelt’s possessions out of the executive mansion. (“I was saying goodbye to an unforgettable era,” she told her newspaper column readers.) Mrs. Roosevelt stopped by the Blair House on her way out of town, as a courtesy to Bess and Margaret. She apologized for the state of the White House, and admitted that she had recently seen a rat scamper across a porch railing while she was having lunch with friends on the South Portico. Due to the war emergency, the Roosevelts had no time to keep up the home. When Bess and Margaret went to look at the place, they were not happy.
“The expression on Mother’s face when she saw the dingy, worn furniture and the shabby white walls, unpainted in twelve years, was more expressive than any paragraph of exclamation points,” Margaret recorded. Bess insisted that the walls be painted and new furniture be purchased before the new First Family could move in.
18
ON APRIL 19, the day Truman’s brother and Fred Canfil visited the White House, and also the day Charlie Ross arrived, Admiral Leahy led the president to a safe in the executive mansion. Inside were some extraordinary documents—secret agreements that Roosevelt had made with Stalin, at Yalta. Around this same time Jimmy Byrnes produced his notes from Yalta. Together the documentation disclosed startling information that would have immeasurable impact on the future of the world.
According to these secret protocols, Stalin had agreed at Yalta to join the war against Japan two to three months after Germany’s surrender, whenever that would be. He would need that much time to amass his troops and equipment on the other side of the globe from Europe. The Red Army’s addition to the attacking forces would surely shorten the war against Japan and save countless American lives. And so this policy was unanimously embraced by top State and War Department officials and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Truman now learned.
Stalin had demands in return, however: (1) the restoration of certain former rights of Russia, lost in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905, including the Kurile Islands and lower Sakhalin, and control of Port Arthur and Dairen in Manchuria; (2) recognition of the independence from China of pro-Soviet Outer Mongolia; and (3) Soviet control of China’s South Manchurian and Chinese-Eastern railroads. Roosevelt had agreed to all of this.
Truman could see why these demands benefited Stalin, giving him strategic territories for military bases and open access to seaports and trade routes. The secret Yalta agreements caused one major problem, however. Roosevelt’s commitments would require large concessions on the part of the Chinese. Nobody had informed the Chinese. If the Chinese refused to abide by these secret agreements, of which they were never consulted, the entire picture of the war in the Far East would alter, as the Russians could then refuse to join the fight against Japan. Thousands of American lives would hang in the balance of these negotiations, and it would now be Truman’s job to solve this vexing problem.
The president needed to know all the secrets before he sat down with Vyacheslav Molotov; Stalin’s number two was set to arrive in the United States just three days after Truman learned of the secret Yalta agreements. The more the president studied the situation, the more he realized that he had but a glimpse of this complex picture.
At noon on April 20, Averell Harriman, the fifty-three-year-old ambassador to Moscow, arrived in Truman’s office for their first meeting. Weary from the long journey (Harriman had traveled from Moscow to Washington by aircraft in record time—forty-nine hours and twenty minutes), he appeared haggard and nervous. To say his reputation preceded him would be a laughable understatement. The son of a railroad tycoon, educated at Groton (where he first met members of the Roosevelt family) and then Yale, Harriman was chairman of the board of the great Union Pacific Railroad. He had inherited a fabulous fortune at a young age and had traveled to the Soviet Union before the war as a principal of Brown Brothers Harriman, a Wall Street investment firm. He was a renowned polo player, an accomplished billiards and badminton competitor, and he had founded the American West’s first ski resort, at Sun Valley, Idaho, in the 1930s. Roosevelt had recruited Harriman months before Pearl Harbor—at the height of the Battle of Britain—to serve as a special envoy of the United States, telling Harriman, “I want you to go over to London, and recommend everything that we can do, short of war, to keep the British Isles afloat.” Harriman agreed to do the job, at his own expense.
So began his diplomatic career. He had taken over the Moscow embassy in 1943, running it with his daughter Kathleen as his hostess—a striking beauty who spoke Russian and rode Stalin’s horses with abandon. Harriman’s second in command at the Moscow embassy, George Kennan, described him during the war: “[Harriman] recognized no interests outside his work. Personal life did not exist for him . . . Accustomed to doing things in a big way and endowed with a keen appreciation for great personal power . . . he dealt only with people at the top . . . I once asked a Russian friend what the Russians thought of him. ‘They look at him,’ she replied, ‘and they say to themselves: Ther
e goes a man!’”
As of April 1945, Harriman had spent more hours in Stalin’s company than any other American. However, the stress of running the embassy—in the Spaso House, one mile from the Kremlin—had begun to wear him down. Life in the Spaso House had become overbearing—boarded up windows shattered during the Nazi invasion, lack of coal for heating. As the point man for American-Soviet relations, he carried the stress in bags under his eyes, and had become increasingly pessimistic about the future.
In the Oval Office, Secretary of State Stettinius presented Harriman to the president. Also in the room: Chip Bohlen, the Russian expert and interpreter, and Joseph Grew, the State Department’s second in command. Truman asked for a report on the Soviet situation, and what Harriman had to say was chilling.
“The Soviet Union had two policies,” Harriman said, according to this meeting’s minutes, “which they thought they could successfully pursue at the same time—one, the policy of cooperation with the United States and Great Britain, and the other, the extension of Soviet control over neighboring states . . . Soviet control over any foreign country did not mean merely influence on their foreign relations but the extension of the Soviet system with secret police, extinction of freedom of speech, etc.”
The Russians were fixed on domination, and it started with Poland. What the world was facing, said Harriman, was “a barbarian invasion of Europe.”
Truman said he was not afraid of the Soviets. “And anyway,” he said, “the Russians need us more than we need them.” The president was speaking specifically of money and resources; the Americans were shipping the USSR hundreds of tons of food and military equipment weekly, and the Soviets (like the British, for that matter) were hoping to reap billions in loans from the United States for postwar reconstruction.
The president was adamant: the Soviets’ puppet government in Poland had to go. According to the meeting’s minutes, “[Truman] added that he intended to tell Molotov just this in words of one syllable.” Truman admitted he was “not up on all details of foreign affairs,” that he would rely on his secretary of state and Ambassador Harriman. But he planned “to be firm in his dealings with the Soviet government.”
Through the discussion, Harriman realized how closely Truman had studied the Yalta negotiations. “I gained great respect for Truman at once,” he recorded, after their first meeting. “Although I also was disturbed, during this first conversation and others that followed, because he kept saying—too often, I thought—that he was not equipped for the job, that he lacked experience and did not fully understand the issues.”
Nevertheless, the stage was set for the Truman-Molotov meeting. No one had yet to discover a way to solve the impasse with the Russians over Poland. The State Department’s Archibald MacLeish, who happened to be a Pulitzer Prize–winning poet, put the situation in these words: “It would be a blessing to the world if we could walk straight up to this question.” Truman intended to do exactly that.
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On Saturday night, April 21, a motorcade pulled up in front of the Blair House. As one secret service man recalled, seven “GPU guys” (Russian secret police) jumped out of a handful of cars, under the cloak of night. Without a word to anyone, they charged into the Blair House. “I followed them around and they tried the windows, tried this, pulled the drawers out, dashed up and down stairs, cased the joint [for] ten minutes,” recalled the secret service man. Then Vyacheslav Molotov entered the residence. He would be staying in a different section of the Blair House from the Trumans, putting the president and Molotov in awkwardly close proximity.
By this time Truman and his advisors had held numerous meetings on how to handle Molotov. The president received memo after memo regarding every detail of the visit, which would require no military honors, at the Russians’ request. Truman received a State Department bio of Molotov. “Real name is Skriabin, a Slav,” it read. “Born in 1890 of a worker’s family; entered the [Communist] Party in 1906; engaged in revolutionary work prior to the [Communist Revolution] and imprisoned and exiled many times.” Once Stalin took the reins of the Soviet government in 1929, Molotov rode on his coattails to the very center of power in the Kremlin. “He has always carried out Stalin’s policies and instructions in a painstaking and effective manner,” the State Department’s bio read. Molotov had a reputation for bluntness. He could be exceedingly rude.
At 8:30 p.m. on Sunday, April 22, Truman’s tenth day in office, he received Molotov at the Blair House. The Russian stood taller than Truman, with a bulging forehead, wispy salt-and-pepper hair, and a shaggy mustache. The two men exchanged formalities, with Chip Bohlen standing by as interpreter. Molotov’s trip by air had been long but bearable, he said. Truman said he had “the greatest admiration for Marshal Stalin and the Soviet Republic” and that he “hoped that the relations which President Roosevelt had established between our two countries would be maintained.” Truman hoped they could navigate “difficulties” that “lay in the path.” Molotov assured Truman this could be done, and they agreed that Truman and Stalin must meet in person as soon as possible.
Not until the following day did the two men get down to business. Molotov spent the morning of April 23 in a meeting with State Department and British foreign service officials, in hopes that the Polish situation could be cleared up without any confrontation with Truman. At 2 p.m. Truman met again with his top officials: Ambassador Harriman, Secretary of State Stettinius, Secretary of War Stimson, Admirals Leahy and Ernest King, General Marshall, and Secretary of the Navy Forrestal. Stettinius reported that meetings with Molotov over Poland that morning had gotten nowhere.
“It was now clear that the Soviet Government intended to try to enforce upon the United States and British Governments this puppet government,” Stettinius recorded.
If anything, the situation had worsened. Truman received a State Department communiqué on this day detailing the scene inside Poland. A French official who had been allowed into Warsaw described the political situation as “appalling.” “He states that the ‘so-called’ Warsaw government has practically no support and that its authority would be nonexistent if it were not maintained by the Red Army [and that] unless something is done, Poland as a nation will cease to exist within a year,” the report read.
Surrounded by foreign-relations and military advisors, Truman went around the room asking for each’s opinion on how to handle Molotov. But he had his own ideas, too. The conversation, as recounted in Averell Harriman’s memoirs: “It was now or never, [Truman] said. The Yalta agreements so far had been a one-way street and that could not continue.” If the Russians would not stand by their agreements, Truman said, they could “go to hell.”
At 5:30 p.m. Molotov was shown in. Others in the room included Harriman and Stettinius. Molotov brought with him a translator, Vladimir Pavlov, and Moscow’s minister of foreign affairs, Andrei Gromyko. After a warm greeting, Truman spoke with the kind of frankness he had learned in hard-nosed Kansas City politics. “The United States government could not agree to be a party to the formation of a Polish government which was not representative of all Polish democratic elements,” Truman said. The U.S. government was “deeply disappointed” by the failure of the Russians to stand by their agreements, Truman said, and this disappointment “cast serious doubt upon our unity of purpose in regard to postwar collaboration.”
The one-sided conversation continued for thirty minutes. “How I enjoyed translating Truman’s sentences!” recalled Bohlen. “They were probably the first sharp words uttered during the war by an American President to a high Soviet official.” At the end, Truman said, “That will be all, Mr. Molotov. I would appreciate it if you would transmit my views to Marshal Stalin.”
According to Truman’s account of this conversation, Molotov then said: “I have never been talked to like that in my life.”
“Carry out your agreements,” Truman fired back, “and you won’t get talked to like that.”
As Molotov stood up to leave, Truman h
anded him a memorandum that he wished the Russian to pass on to Stalin. The document reiterated the points the president had just voiced, in equally strong language. Molotov took his leave.
All over Washington the next day, news of the Truman-Molotov meeting spread, leaving government officials astonished. Chief of staff Admiral Leahy was thrilled. Secretary of War Stimson was deeply concerned, fearing that the Polish issue would result in “a head-on collision” between the United States and the Soviets. Ambassador Harriman was equally troubled: “I did regret that Truman went at it so hard because his behavior gave Molotov an excuse to tell Stalin that the Roosevelt policy was being abandoned.”
Not long after the Molotov meeting, Truman met with Joseph Davies, a State Department official who had served as a Moscow ambassador before Harriman. Davies had written a best-selling memoir about his years in the Moscow embassy called Mission to Moscow; it had been turned into a popular movie in 1943, with Walter Huston playing the part of Davies and Ann Harding playing Mrs. Davies, who was none other than Marjorie Merriweather Post, heir to the Post cereal fortune and one of the richest women in the world.
“I gave it to him straight,” Truman told Davies of his meeting with Molotov. “I let him have it. It was the straight one-two to the jaw. I wanted him to know that our cooperation had to be two sided.” Then Truman asked Davies, “I want to know what you think. Did I do right?”
Davies was alarmed. He explained that he too had talked with Molotov, as they knew each other well. The Russians were very nervous about having to deal with an American leader other than Roosevelt, whom they knew and respected. With Roosevelt, the Russians believed they would arrive at peace, a fruitful friendship, after the war. With Truman, Davies explained, that assurance was gone. To understand the Russians, Davies believed, one had to see things as they did. The Soviets saw themselves as “an island surrounded by a sea of enemies,” Davies believed. In all decisions, they would move to protect their security.