The Accidental President

by A. J. Baime

“Now stop it,” she said, “stop it this instant. Sit down, every darn one of you.”

  Her mother, Mrs. Wallace, now eighty-eight, was as unfriendly to Harry as she had always been—even now that he had become president. As historian Michael Beschloss wrote of Mrs. Wallace, “The imperious dowager, proud of her place atop the social hierarchy of Independence, Missouri, still believed that this dirt farmer and failed haberdasher was unworthy of her daughter Bess.”

  Despite the stress of their sudden thrust into celebrity and world affairs, the Truman family was making the White House their home. Truman had replaced Roosevelt’s ship paintings in the Oval Office with pictures of early airplanes. A portrait of Roosevelt was mounted nearby on Truman’s right, while a statue of Andrew Jackson stood atop a stand to the president’s left, both crowded close as if they were whispering into Truman’s ears. In the kitchen, old Mrs. Nesbitt—famed for turning out “meals so gray, so drooping, and so spectacularly inept that they became a Washington legend,” as put by one New Yorker writer—had suddenly decided to retire, after an uncomfortable run-in with Bess, probably over the ubiquity of brussels sprouts on the dinner table. The Trumans asked Vietta Garr, an African American housekeeper and cook from Independence, to join them in the White House as cook and companion, and she agreed. (Garr had worked for Madge Wallace for years at the North Delaware Street home and had a close relationship with Margaret.)

  The Trumans could now enjoy more exciting aromas from the White House stoves, Vietta Garr’s Missouri home cooking—fried chicken, baked ham, sweet potatoes, and Harry’s favorite angel food cake. Meanwhile, Alonzo Fields, the head butler and an accomplished mixologist, had perfected old-fashioneds according to the Trumans’ tastes—bourbon over rocks with water and nothing else. “Now that’s the way we like our old-fashioneds,” Bess said approvingly.

  On the job, Truman was proving tougher than people thought he would be. He had announced that he was cutting $7.5 billion from shipbuilding programs and from eight government agencies. That was a lot of jobs sliced—a wise decision for the economy, most believed, but not for a man who ever intended to get elected again. Truman had vetoed the Agricultural Deferment Bill, which would allow farmers to avoid military service. Roosevelt had supported the bill, but Truman won over Congress. He “challenged the [farm] bloc on a matter of broad national policy and won,” noted the New York Times.

  Truman knew America’s warm glow was destined to fade. He had feared the inevitable moment when he would make a grave error—a mistake that would embarrass him on the public stage—and that day came in early May. As Clark Clifford, a young lawyer working in the Truman administration at the time, wrote of government: “At the savage intersection of policy, ambition, and history, it is impossible to be right all the time.”

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  OF ALL WASHINGTON’S WARTIME LEGISLATION, none was arguably more controversial than Lend-Lease. The brainchild of FDR, the Lend-Lease bill was conceived in the winter of 1940–1941, before the United States entered the war, and Roosevelt signed it into law on March 11, 1941. It enabled Roosevelt, and now Truman, to send munitions and supplies to “the government of any country whose defense the president deems vital to the defense of the U.S.” All over the world, because of Lend-Lease, Soviet, Chinese, British, French, and other soldiers had fought with and, in some cases, were still fighting with tools of war built in American factories, and gaining sustenance from food grown on American farms, at the expense of the American taxpayer. (Over the course of the war, more than thirty countries would benefit from Lend-Lease, totaling some $50 billion in American assistance.) As Churchill famously said, “Give us the tools and we will finish the job.” He called Lend-Lease “the most unsordid act in history.”

  Without Lend-Lease, Hitler could never have been defeated. That did not mean that the American taxpayer had to like this law. Foreign countries were supposed to pay for this food and these tools of war years down the line (albeit, at a huge discount), but the war was bankrupting the Allied governments, the United States aside. The American taxpayer was not likely to see all this debt paid back.* As Senator Arthur Vandenberg had said of Lend-Lease: It must not extend “one minute or $1 into the post-war period.”

  On May 11, Truman received a memo signed by Undersecretary of State Joseph Grew and Foreign Economic administrator Leo Crowley stating: “Deliveries of supplies under the current lend-lease programs for the U.S.S.R. should be adjusted immediately to take account of the end of organized resistance in Europe.” Some Lend-Lease military equipment should continue to flow to the Soviets considering their secret plan to join the war against Japan, the document pointed out. “Other lend-lease supplies now programmed for the U.S.S.R. should be cut off immediately as far as physically practicable.”

  According to the latest figures on Truman’s desk, the United States had sent 593,259 long tons of Lend-Lease goods to the Soviets in the month of April 1945. That number was up from 484,829 long tons the month before. Shipments included aircraft and trucks built on the assembly lines of Detroit, and ship hulls full of bullets, but also (during the month of April) 16,866 short tons of wheat, flour, and cereals; 23,459 short tons of butter; and 26,213 short tons of animal fats and cured meats.

  Truman knew from his days in the Senate how touchy Congress was on the issue of Lend-Lease. As Representative Karl Mundt of South Dakota—a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee—said on the floor of the House, “There can be no post-war economic activities by Lend-Lease except through the most flagrant violation of the intent of Congress.” Now the war in Europe was over.

  The president approved the plan to cut off many supplies to the Soviets, and also to the British, immediately. Had he thought this matter through completely? The fact was, he was exhausted and he signed the document without reading it, trusting his advisors on the matter. A number of high-level officials had singled out a curious trait about Truman. “He . . . seemed eager to make decisions of every kind with the greatest promptness,” Commerce secretary Henry Wallace wrote of Truman in his diary, following a cabinet meeting. “Everything he said was decisive. It almost seemed as though he was eager to decide in advance of thinking.” According to ambassador to the Soviet Union Averell Harriman, “You could go into [Truman’s] office with a question and come out with a decision more swiftly than any man I have ever known.”

  Over the next few days, the chain of command reached ships at sea, brimming with supplies headed for the Soviet Union and Britain. Those ships were ordered to turn around. They contained cargo loads of food desperately needed by the British and Soviets, whose territories had seen infrastructure devastation that the United States had not. Stalin and Churchill were sure to be furious over Truman’s Lend-Lease decision, as soon as they learned of it.

  ///

  One night in May, Truman was aboard the presidential yacht playing a game of poker with friends. He was holding cards when a naval aide handed him an alarming memorandum regarding the Yugoslavian dictator Tito. According to intelligence sources, Tito was attempting to lay claim to territory in northern Italy—a piece of Venezia Giulia, notable for the port city of Trieste. Truman said, “Tell the son of a bitch he’ll have to shoot his way in.”

  “Aye aye, sir,” the naval aide said. And Truman went back to his game.

  Over the next few days, however, the standoff in Italy grew hot, and the threat of mass violence became imminent. According to State Department reports, Yugoslavian forces had hung their own flags all over Trieste and had even changed the street signs from Italian to their own language. The Yugoslavian military had complete control. Tito seemed willing to gamble the lives of his soldiers, and it was hard to gauge a bluff from across the Atlantic Ocean.

  Venezia Giulia bordered the Balkan States and had been subject to territorial dispute before. The current situation alarmed Truman for two reasons: (1) Tito had a large army of 300,000 to 400,000 soldiers, and his regime was “no less dictatorial than Stalin’s,” bearing “little resemblanc
e to democracy and [affording] few opportunities for freedom,” according to a report to the president from William “Wild Bill” Donovan, head of the Office of Strategic Services (the OSS spy agency, precursor to the CIA); and (2) Tito was another puppet of the Soviet government. “In foreign affairs, as in internal affairs, Russia is the lodestone governing Tito’s policies,” the spy agency stated. “In every international issue, whether it is the direct concern of Yugoslavia or not, Tito and his press assiduously follow Moscow’s lead . . .

  “The issue, therefore, is hardly an Italian-Yugoslavian dispute, but a basic and clear-cut U.S.-Soviet conflict,” concluded the OSS. “In this conflict the United States holds very good cards . . . there is an overwhelming superiority of [American and British] troops in the area.”

  On May 11, Truman spelled out the situation in a cable to Churchill. “You are no doubt receiving the same reports,” he wrote. Tito’s threatening and expansionist tactics felt “all too reminiscent of those of Hitler and Japan.”

  Through State Department channels, the United States sent a firm message to Tito, who refused to move his troops. He had won this frontier from the Nazis in late April, and thus Yugoslavia “has all the rights to hold this territory,” Tito argued in a cable to the U.S. State Department. “It would be unjust to deny [the] Yugoslav Army the rights of military occupation of ‘Venezia Giulia.’”

  General Eisenhower and Britain’s Field Marshal Harold Alexander, the Allied commander in Italy, were given orders to reinforce troops in the disputed area and to prepare for the worst. These forces were not to fire, unless fired upon first. Appeals were sent to Stalin to defuse the situation, but Stalin had everything to gain by allowing the dispute to continue. Daily the situation worsened. Refugees by the tens of thousands were lingering in the area, and there was little food to feed either them or the local populations. On May 15 Undersecretary of State Joseph Grew reported that “many Italians of all classes are being arrested and local industrialists have been told that their property is now Yugoslav.” Grew also reported that Tito was making incendiary moves in Austria. “The Yugoslavs are making excessive and ridiculous demands and charges.” The American and British military leaders began moving refugees and POWs out of the area around Trieste, “so as to leave our troops mobile for whatever happens,” Grew informed Truman.

  On May 16, Truman wrote Churchill again. “I am unable and unwilling to involve this country in a war with the Yugoslavs unless they should attack us, in which case we would be justified in using our Allied troops to throw them back.” Four days later he cabled again, “I must not have any avoidable interference with the redeployment of American forces to the Pacific.”

  “We had another explosive situation on our hands,” Truman recorded.

  At every turn, it seemed, Truman saw signs of more war coming. And each new arising conflict seemed to place the Americans and the Soviets on a crash course. On May 12, as the Tito drama was unfolding, Truman received a startling telephone call from Secretary of State Stettinius in San Francisco, where negotiations between the American and Russian delegations were continuing to unravel. Vyacheslav Molotov was insisting that members of the UN Security Council—a group formed of delegations from the world’s most powerful nations—should have a veto privilege. What that meant, according to the Russian definition, was the ability of a Security Council nation to veto any action of which the rest of the Security Council nations approved. According to the Russian definition, the veto would allow one nation to block a matter from even being discussed by the Security Council. The Americans found this position indefensible.

  At one point, during a discussion over regional treaties at the San Francisco conference, a Latin American official made the following statement, and his reasoning exemplifies the perceived assurance of impending war between the United States and the USSR: “Any country seeking to attack the United States in the future would attack through the weakest point, which is in South America. The next war will be between Russia and the United States, not between any two countries in Europe. [An] attempt will be made to [out]flank the United States through South America.”

  In Germany, meanwhile, Allied forces were scheduled to meet in Berlin on June 5 to move the occupation into the next phase. The United States, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, and France would take over their respective occupation zones, each with its own military government ruling over a desperate population totaling some 70 million. The Americans would govern the southeastern section of Germany and would have to withdraw some two hundred miles from their current military position at the Elbe River. The Soviets would take the northeastern zone (which, in four years’ time, would become the communist nation of East Germany). The British would take over the northwestern part of Germany, which was closest to Britain itself, while France would take a smaller section to the southwest.

  Already State Department officials had grave reservations that these occupation mechanisms—dreamed up during a time when American-Soviet relations were far rosier—would work. George Kennan, Ambassador Harriman’s top aide in the Moscow embassy, wrote around this time, “The idea of a Germany run jointly with the Russians is a chimera. The idea of both the Russians and ourselves withdrawing politely at a given date and a healthy, peaceful, stable, and friendly Germany arising out of the resulting vacuum is also a chimera. We have no choice but to lead our section of Germany . . . to a form of independence so prosperous, so secure, so superior, that the East cannot threaten it.” (Thus the future foundation of West Germany, which formed its official government four years later, in 1949.)

  A new image of Europe was coming into focus. The continent would be increasingly influenced by democratic regimes from the West and Soviet-backed regimes from the East. The Soviets had Poland, Austria, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary—all of it in their sights. A report to the president from the OSS on May 18 revealed that Czechoslovakia too was falling to communist influence: “Sources declare that the Communist Party appears to be the only organized political group and the only one with a program . . . Source also reports that the Czech Communist Party has demanded that workers be armed.”

  Even in the Far East, the Soviets were spreading communist influence, in surprising ways. On Monday, May 14, at 2 p.m., Truman met with the Chinese foreign minister, Dr. T. V. Soong. Joseph Grew attended, to take the meeting’s minutes. Dr. Soong spoke beautiful English, as he had studied economics at Harvard and Columbia Universities, and had worked in banking in New York for a short time. At age fifty, he had already spent twenty years at the highest levels of Chinese government. He outlined for Truman an extraordinarily complex situation in China, as the two sat together in the White House over a map of the Far East. The prime objective of Soong’s government was to drive out Japanese forces occupying Chinese territory, he explained, and he would need continued Lend-Lease military supplies from the United States. Truman assured that these supplies would continue until the Japanese surrendered. But the Chinese situation, Dr. Soong said, had also gotten tangled with the Soviet problem.

  China had been divided by two forces from within—the old republic under Chiang Kai-shek, friendly with the United States, and Communist forces in the north, under Mao Tse-tung. “[Dr. Soong] discussed at some length the attitude of Soviet Russia,” according to Grew’s account of this May 14 meeting with Truman. The Soviets had allied with Chiang Kai-shek’s government during the war, but lately “there had been a change and the Soviet Government seemed to be supporting the Chinese Communists rather than the National Government,” Soong said.

  What was to keep the Soviets from supplying arms and soldiers to Mao and the Communists in China, to foment a communist revolution in one of the most powerful nations in the East?

  Three months earlier, at the end of the Yalta Conference, American-Soviet relations had reached a peak of goodwill. Now the State Department’s number two, Joseph Grew, had come to this conclusion: “A future war with Soviet Russia is as certain as anything in th
is world.”

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  The week after VE-day Truman went in search of advice, canvassing the brightest political minds in Washington on how to stem the decline in American-Soviet relations. There had to be a way to avoid more war, for any war with the USSR would slaughter inconceivable numbers of people. After all, as different as these nations were, they had common ground. Both the United States and the Soviet Union had been born of violent revolution, and both were now in this war due to surprise attacks—the United States at Pearl Harbor and the Soviets at the hands of the Nazis. As the two countries that would emerge from the war as superpowers, they would play the two biggest roles in creating whatever new world lay in the future.

  Truman started with a former ambassador to Moscow. On Sunday, May 13, the State Department’s Joseph Davies arrived at the White House for an informal tête-à-tête with Truman in his second-floor study. Truman was “much disturbed” over the Russian situation, as Davies recalled. The newspapers—“these damn sheets,” Truman called them—were fueling the fire. Davies was a trusted sounding board, and he was hearing the same alarm bells. He told Truman that he had just written him a letter, and had yet to mail it. He had brought it with him, and Truman asked him to read it aloud.

  “The rapid and serious deterioration within the last few weeks in the relations between the Soviets, Britain, and ourselves, and particularly with ourselves, has alarmed me,” Davies said. “The potentialities are beyond words . . . In my opinion, you are in the best position to avert [conflict] for our country and for the world.” Davies urged Truman to avoid contention—to avoid “the ‘tough’ approach”—and to handle Soviet relations “with generosity and friendliness.” In such cases, “the Soviets respond with even greater generosity . . . It is . . . wrong to assume that ‘tough’ language is the only language that they can understand. That is commonly urged. My experience has been to the contrary . . .