The Accidental President

by A. J. Baime

  The home had an unmistakable aura. “Visiting the White House in person is a little like meeting a celebrity face to face,” Margaret later wrote. “You get impressions and feelings that a newspaper . . . can’t communicate.” Every president except George Washington had resided here. One could walk through the winding warrens from room to room and dream of what the place looked like when Thomas Jefferson lived here, with his abundant collections of fossils, musical instruments, books, and wine. Or during Andrew Jackson’s administration, when the wildest party ever thrown in the White House went off, a post-inaugural bacchanal in 1829 where the promise of free liquor lured an unexpected mob.

  “Everything seems larger than life,” Margaret wrote, “a kind of waking dream, outside time, yet paradoxically immersed in time . . . The White House continues to envelop you the way history surrounds nations, a huge silent presence that is inescapable.”

  The mansion’s main entrance came through the North Portico into a large lobby. Andrew Jackson had once kept a fourteen-hundred-pound wheel of cheddar cheese in this room—a gift from one of his supporters. Some claimed that on a hot day, you could still sense its odor. The Green Room contained the George P. A. Healy presidential portraits of John Quincy Adams, Martin Van Buren, and James K. Polk. The China Room held nearly three hundred pieces of chinaware, silverware, and glassware, displayed in fragile glass cases. Margaret Truman had asked that the “dark, clunky furniture” in her sitting room be moved. This furniture, it turned out, had been purchased during Abraham Lincoln's administration, and the Trumans had it moved to a room on the opposite end of the house, into a space renamed the Lincoln Bedroom—an ironic name, since Lincoln never slept in it. (He had used this space as his office, and it was in this room where, on January 1, 1863, he signed the documents that emancipated slaves in the eleven seceded Southern states.)

  The current version of the West Wing was built in 1902, under Theodore Roosevelt. It housed the president’s office, the Cabinet Room, an appointments lobby, and offices for assistants. Truman had grown to like walking to work from the Blair House, but his morning commute would be a lot shorter now.

  The Trumans moved into the White House just in time for Harry to celebrate his sixty-first birthday the following day. As history would record, there would be quite a festive party.

  ///

  “At 0241 hours this morning,” General Eisenhower cabled the War Department on May 7, the day the Trumans moved into the White House, “the German representative, General Jodl, signed the instrument of military surrender.” Hostilities were scheduled to end one minute after midnight on the night of May 8/9, Eisenhower reported.

  The three Allied governments had made arrangements to announce the unconditional surrender of Nazi Germany simultaneously. However, Stalin refused to make the announcement. He was getting reports that the Nazis were still fighting the Russians, and as it would turn out, these reports were true. So deep was the hatred between these armies, the Germans and Russians would not let go of the shooting war. And yet, German radio stations were already announcing the unconditional surrender. Already, on May 7, a half million Americans had crowded Manhattan’s Times Square to celebrate. Churchill demanded to make a statement immediately, but Truman would not allow it—not without Stalin’s agreement. Admiral Leahy spoke at length with Churchill by secure phone from the Pentagon. Churchill was furious.

  “What is the use of me and the president looking to be the only two people in the world who don’t know what is going on?” Churchill barked at Leahy over the phone. “I feel it absolutely necessary to go off at 6 p.m., and I will telegraph to Stalin the very message that I am sending to you, in view of the fact that the Germans have blasted it all over the world.”

  In the White House the press corps had grown nearly hysterical, and Truman was forced to issue a statement: “I have agreed with the London and Moscow governments that I will make NO announcement with reference to surrender of the enemy forces in Europe or elsewhere until a simultaneous statement can be made by the three governments. Until then, there is nothing I can or will say to you.”

  Churchill was forced to wait as well.

  That night Truman slept in the White House for the first time, in the bed where Roosevelt had slept for the previous twelve-plus years. Mamma Truman and the president’s sister, Mary Jane, would be arriving in four days to visit, so they could see the new home. Truman awoke early on May 8, as usual, and soon after sunrise he stole a moment to write a letter.

  The White House

  Washington

  Dear Mamma & Mary:—

  I am sixty-one this morning, and I slept in the president’s room in the White House last night. They have finished the painting and have some of the furniture in place. I’m hoping it will all be ready for you by Friday . . . This will be a historic day. At 9:00 o’clock this morning I must make a broadcast to the country: announcing the German surrender. The papers were signed yesterday morning and hostilities will cease on all fronts at midnight tonight. Isn’t that some birthday present?

  Lots & lots of love to you both,

  Harry

  By 8:35 a.m. Truman was at his desk, and already his office was crowded with members of his cabinet, Senate and congressional leaders, military representatives including General Marshall and Admiral Leahy in crisp uniforms, and Bess and Margaret, all of whom sat in chairs behind and to the side of the president. Senator Kenneth McKellar of Tennessee offered Truman a special greeting that morning.

  “You’re forty years old!”

  “Yes, forty years old—plus!” Truman responded, and giddy laughter filled the room.

  Truman gave the signal, and a White House usher opened the office door. Newspaper reporters charged through. “Good morning,” Truman said, rising from his seat. “I sure made you all get up this morning, didn’t I? [More laughter.] Yes, indeed . . . Still at it, I see . . . Still coming, I see . . .”

  The room was jammed tight. A voice shouted, “All in,” and Truman began his remarks.

  “I want to start off by reading you a little statement,” he said. “This is a solemn but glorious hour. General Eisenhower informs me that the forces of Germany have surrendered to the United Nations. The flags of freedom fly all over Europe. It’s celebrating my birthday, too—today, too.”

  Voices shouted, “Happy birthday, Mr. President!”

  Truman hushed the crowd. “Our rejoicing is sobered and subdued,” he continued, “by a supreme consciousness of the terrible price we have paid to rid the world of Hitler and his evil band. Let us not forget, my fellow Americans, the sorrow and the heartache which today abide in the homes of so many of our neighbors.”

  The president gave a clear message to the enemy: “We are going to be in a position where we can turn the greatest war machine in the history of the world loose on the Japanese.” He demanded unconditional surrender of the enemy in the Far East.

  When he finished, the news reporters made a mad scramble for the door. “Did you ever see such a rush!?” Senator McKellar said to the president. Merriman Smith of the United Press—one of the nation’s most revered Washington correspondents—tripped and fell to the floor, fracturing his arm. But still the stampede continued. Truman headed to the Diplomatic Reception Room, where he was going to read his statement again over the radio.

  “Our victory is but half-won,” he said. “The West is free, but the East is still in bondage to the treacherous tyranny of the Japanese.” Millions heard these words, huddled around their radios. Among them, in her home in Hyde Park, New York, Eleanor Roosevelt listened in. “I can almost hear my husband’s voice make that announcement, for I heard him repeat it so often,” she wrote of this moment in her newspaper column. She could not celebrate, for Americans were still fighting and dying for the cause. “Some of my own sons,” she wrote, “with millions of others, are still in danger.”

  For the rest of the day, Truman received visitors, including the ambassador from Argentina and Governor Jimmie Davis
of Louisiana, in short meetings, mostly fifteen minutes long. In the afternoon he was able to squeeze in a birthday party—a toast of bourbon with friends.

  Across the country, celebrations were subdued. Bars and churches filled wall to wall. In Washington the War Department ordered all posts to maintain normal schedules. Traders on the New York Stock Exchange and Chicago’s Board of Trade paused for two minutes of silence, then dove back into the heat of battle. Detroit’s war factories remained open, as did the steel mills in Pittsburgh. All business in Cleveland closed down, while in Chicago, industry proceeded “at half-pace,” the Wall Street Journal reported.

  In Britain, where buildings still lay in rubble from Nazi bombers, the scene was far wilder. “There are no words,” the American radioman Edward R. Murrow reported from London. “Just a sort of rumbling roar. London is celebrating today in a city which became a symbol. The scars of war are all about. There is no lack of serious, solemn faces. Their thoughts are their own.” As Murrow concluded, on this day much of Britain was focused on America, for the United States would carry the weight of creating the peace for the future world and, to a large extent, aiding the victims suffering from years of explosive violence—the hungry, sick, and displaced. “Our nation,” Murrow said, “which was created by men who wanted to leave Europe, is the center of the hopes and some of the fears of millions who are in Europe today.”

  There was no celebration in Moscow, for even now after the surrender documents had been signed, Nazi soldiers were still firing upon the Red Army.

  Truman finished his work on VE-day beset with worry. The news from San Francisco was bad. The Russian and American delegations clashed at every turn. On his desk in the Oval Office at that very moment, statistics spelled out a horrific bloodletting on the isles of the Pacific. To capture Iwo Jima, eight square miles of volcanic rock, the marines had suffered 25,489 casualties, roughly a third of the landing force. At Okinawa—still now ablaze with military action—the statistics were even worse.

  “Things have moved at a terrific rate since April 12,” he wrote his mother and his sister on this day. “So far luck has been with me. I hope it keeps up. It can’t stay with me forever however and I hope when the mistake comes it won’t be too great to remedy.”

  ///

  The day after VE-day, at 9:30 a.m., a group of men led by Dr. Vannevar Bush and Dr. Karl T. Compton of the National Defense Research Committee arrived at the secretary of war’s office in the Pentagon, along with General Groves, for the first meeting of the Interim Committee. Secretary of War Stimson had created the committee, with Truman’s approval, as a think tank to gauge the pace of the Manhattan Project and to advise the president on all issues regarding the atomic bomb, military and political. The bomb had become a Promethean undertaking; scientists were unlocking the secrets of the universe. What would be the challenges of completing the weapon and delivering it over a target? What were the consequences of using this science in ways that generations hence could judge as singularly evil, rather than good?

  Once this project was no longer secret—after the bomb had been born and employed—Congress would likely build a new committee to “supervise, regulate, and control the entire field,” according to Stimson. Until that time, this committee would serve as the government’s primary policy advisor on the subject. Thus its name—Interim. Truman had asked that he have a personal representative present, and Stimson had suggested Jimmy Byrnes, who was in the secretary of war’s office this morning, May 9.

  Stimson began the meeting with the following words: “Gentlemen, it is our responsibility to recommend action that may turn the course of civilization.”

  The discussion that followed got everyone up to speed on the progress of this project. Already, Groves had a Target Committee working on the selection of cities in Japan. This committee had come to some conclusions. The B-29 Superfortress would have a fifteen-hundred-mile range while carrying the estimated weight of the bomb. That would be enough distance to place the weapon on a primary target inside mainland Japan, from an air base in the Mariana Islands. Visual bombing was essential, so that firsthand accounts of the detonation could be made. The middle of the afternoon would be the best time to deliver the bomb, and weather would be a major factor. Groves was not prepared to allow hazardous weather to jeopardize this $2 billion enterprise, or to eclipse the explosion from the camera equipment. Groves thought there would be a bomb ready in July, August, or September, but those were the worst weather months in Japan.

  He had a list of thirty-three primary targets. First on the list as of early May: Hiroshima. “Hiroshima is the largest untouched target not on the 21st Bomber command priority list,” the Target Committee had reported. Thus, it was a virgin target, so the damage of the bomb could be gauged with accuracy.

  As for delivery, the army’s 509th Composite Group had been training at the newly constructed Wendover Army Air Base in Utah, for a top-secret mission, with specially outfitted Superfortresses stripped of all their gun turrets, except one in the tail, so the aircraft could accommodate the weight of the bomb. These B-29s had especially rugged fuel-injected engines, electrically controlled reversible propellers, and a host of other modifications to make them the finest, most technologically advanced four-engine bombers in the army air forces. Pilots had been practicing sharp diving turns and bombing runs with hyper-fast getaways. Recently the 509th had moved to the South Pacific, continuing training at an air base on the island of Tinian. Not one man in the 509th had any knowledge yet of what he was training for, with the exception of one—a crack pilot who had been specifically chosen to fly the B-29 that would drop the first bomb, Colonel Paul Tibbets of Quincy, Illinois.

  Soon the bomb would be ready, members of the Interim Committee believed, and so would the delivery system. Sitting in the first Interim Committee meeting as Truman’s personal representative, Jimmy Byrnes found himself “thoroughly frightened” as he listened to Groves and Stimson deliver details on the progress. “I had sufficient imagination to visualize the danger to our country when some other country possessed such a weapon,” Byrnes recorded. “Thinking of the country most likely to become unfriendly to us.” Byrnes was thinking of the Soviet Union.

  The committee’s first meeting ended after ninety minutes, with more meetings scheduled throughout the month of May. Never during this first meeting was the subject of whether or not to use the weapon raised. For all present, it seemed self-evident that it would be used—if in fact the scientists at Los Alamos could complete it.

  Immediately after the committee left the secretary of war’s office, another group of men was entering. Twelve congressmen walked into Stimson’s office, along with General George Marshall and six personnel from the War Department. The congressmen had just returned from Europe, where they had toured liberated Nazi death camps, at General Eisenhower’s request, and they now planned to report their findings to the secretary of war. For Stimson, who was presiding, the juxtaposition of this meeting with the Interim Committee meeting just before it made his day unlike any the seventy-seven-year-old could recall, in his decades of public service. The senators and congressmen began their testimony.

  “We saw, of course, what everybody has seen there,” Senator Alben Barkley reported, “the instruments of torture, the starvations, barbarisms, unsanitary conditions, dead, cremations, strangulations, everything that has been represented as being there . . . We found in that camp [Buchenwald] where they had a crematory that had six ovens, six compartments, and the capacity of that crematory was to burn 200 a day.” Barkley told of a room with forty-eight hooks, where prisoners were strangled with rope, and if they did not die fast enough, they were beaten with mallets to quicken the process. “They told us that one day they had executed 126 of these people on these hooks.”

  “By strangulation?” asked Stimson.

  “Yes, and by the use of this mallet.”

  The senators and congressmen continued with details “so gruesome that it is difficult to real
ize that such a thing could happen,” as Barkley put it. Congressman James Richards of South Carolina ended the meeting on a sickening note. “Many of the inmates of the camps we inspected,” he said, “testified to us that other camps were much worse to be in than the camps we saw.”

  Thus far, a majority of the Nazi archcriminals were still on the loose.

  ///

  The same week as the first Interim Committee meeting was held, Truman received a cable from Churchill regarding “U.J.”—Uncle Joe, the nickname that Churchill and Roosevelt had given to Stalin, an attempt at comic relief. “It seems to me that matters can hardly be carried farther by correspondence,” Churchill wrote Truman, “and that, as soon as possible, there should be a meeting of the three heads of governments.” The war had seen two famed Big Three conferences, where Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill conferred in person under strict secrecy—Tehran (1943) and Yalta (earlier in 1945). Churchill’s cable was the impetus for what would become Potsdam, the third and final Big Three World War II meeting.

  The Russian situation was continuing to decline. The Red Army had liberated Austria from the Nazis, and Stalin had now installed a new government in Vienna, without consulting the other Allies. The Red Army had closed off Austria’s borders and grounded American airplanes. Would Austria become another Poland? Truman cabled Stalin directly: “I am unable to understand why the Soviet authorities are now refusing to permit American and Allied representatives to proceed to Vienna.”

  In Bulgaria, according to a State Department memorandum to the president, the Soviets, “using one excuse or another, have imposed severe restrictions on the actions and movements of the members of the U.S. Representation . . . They will allow no planes or personnel to enter or leave Bulgaria without previous clearance from them . . . It appears that a concerted effort is being made by the Russians to keep the influence and prestige of the United States at an absolute minimum with the goal of increasing the prestige of the completely Communist-dominated Bulgarian Government and the USSR.”