The Accidental President
Page 28
And so the date was set for the meeting, in bombed-out Berlin. Truman was considering a one-on-one with Stalin first, before Churchill joined in, as the future of the world clearly depended on the negotiations between the United States and the Soviet Union. Britain’s role was no longer primary. The prime minister certainly would not like the idea of a Truman-Stalin meeting without the United Kingdom represented, but Churchill might not have a choice, Truman figured.
Churchill continued to plead for a sooner date. “I will gladly come to Berlin with a British delegation,” he cabled Truman. He added some biting British sarcasm: “But I consider that July 15, repeat July the month after June, is much too late for the urgent questions that demand attention between us, and that we shall do an injury to world hopes and unity if we allow personal or national requirements to stand in the way of an earlier meeting.”
The prime minister could not understand what felt to him like procrastination. Truman could only hope the bomb was going to work.
“Nothing really important has been settled yet,” Churchill cabled Truman, “and you and I will have to bear the great responsibility for the future.”
Harry Truman (left) in the Truman & Jacobson haberdashery in Kansas City, circa 1920. The store failed (as did most of Truman’s early business ventures). “I’m still paying on those debts,” he wrote, some twelve years after this picture was taken.
HISTORICAL CORBIS/GETTY IMAGES
Pandemonium at the 1944 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, where Truman shocked the political world. Although only 2 percent of Democratic voters favored him for vice president, the Missourian was named to the ’44 ticket with Franklin Roosevelt.
BETTMANN/GETTY IMAGES
A stunned Truman accepts the VP nomination in Chicago. Up to this moment, he was adamant that he did not want the job. “He did not want it,” his mother, Martha Ellen Truman, said. “They pushed him into it.”
GORDON COSTER / GETTY IMAGES
Truman and Roosevelt meet at the White House to discuss the 1944 election. “His hands are shaking and he talks with considerable difficulty,” Truman said of the president after this meeting. “It doesn’t seem to be any mental lapse of any kind, but physically, he’s just going to pieces.”
UNIVERSAL HISTORY ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES
Truman recites the presidential oath of office, at 7:09 p.m. on April 12, 1945. To his left: his wife, Bess, and only child, Margaret. He described this moment in these four words: “The lightning has struck!” Said one reporter at the time: “No man ever came to the presidency of the United States under more difficult circumstances than does Harry S. Truman.”
ABBIE ROWE, NATIONAL PARK SERVICE / HARRY S. TRUMAN LIBRARY & MUSEUM
FDR’s funeral procession winds through Washington, DC. In the White House, chaos reigned. “I doubt that there have been few more dramatic, confused moments in American history than the ingress of the people who saw power in their hands under Harry Truman,” recalled press secretary Jonathan Daniels.
KEYSTONE FEATURES/GETTY IMAGES
During Truman’s first week in office, Allied armies liberated Nazi death camps in Europe. This photo inside Buchenwald was taken April 16, 1945, the day the new president addressed Congress for the first time.
UNITED STATES ARMY SIGNAL CORPS / HARRY S. TRUMAN LIBRARY & MUSEUM
The battle for Okinawa raged during Truman’s early days in office. In this death struggle, the Japanese employed suicide bombers, suicide boats, even suicide swimmers. Pictured: a Japanese kamikaze attack on the USS Bunker Hill on May 11, 1945.
UNIVERSAL HISTORY ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES
Major General Curtis LeMay at Twenty-First Bomber Command headquarters on the island of Guam. LeMay architected firebombings of Japan that killed thousands during Truman’s first four months in office.
HISTORICAL CORBIS/GETTY IMAGES
The Boeing B-29 Superfortress—the most technologically advanced weapons system of its time—was the main aircraft used in the firebombings of Japan. The development of this aircraft cost the American government more than the Manhattan Project did.
BERNARD HOFFMAN/ GETTY IMAGES
Two of the most powerful figures in the early Truman administration: General George C. Marshall (left), the army chief of staff, and Henry Stimson, secretary of war. Stimson headed up the atomic bomb project from a governmental level.
BETTMANN/GETTY IMAGES
Truman at the United Nations Conference in San Francisco, where the peace organization was formed, on June 26, 1945. On the right: Secretary of State Edward Stettinius. On the left: Alger Hiss of the U.S. delegation. (Hiss was later outed as a Soviet spy.) Behind Truman: close friend and unofficial White House jester Harry Vaughan.
BETTMANN/GETTY IMAGES
June 27, 1945: The biggest crowds in Jackson County history turned out for Truman’s homecoming as president for the first time. Here he exits his airplane, the Sacred Cow, with his daughter, Margaret.
HARRY S. TRUMAN LIBRARY & MUSEUM
From left: General Dwight Eisenhower, General George Patton, and the president, watching an American flag rise over former-Nazi Berlin. The flag was the same one that flew over the White House at the time of Pearl Harbor and was also raised over Paris when the city was liberated from the Nazis. Truman wrote in his diary on this day, July 28, 1945, “Flag was [flying] on the White House when Pearl Harbor happened. Will be raised over Tokyo.”
BETTMANN / GETTY IMAGES
Less than four months into his accidental presidency, Truman meets British prime minister Winston Churchill for the first time, in front of the Little White House in Soviet-occupied Germany. Churchill had earlier cabled Truman: “You and I will have to bear the great responsibility for the future.”
IMPERIAL WAR MUSEUM/GETTY IMAGES
As Truman and Churchill confer for the first time, the world’s first atomic explosion—the Trinity shot—goes off in the New Mexico desert. When Churchill learned of Trinity, he exclaimed, “The atomic bomb is the second coming of wrath.”
JACK AEBY/HARRY S. TRUMAN LIBRARY & MUSEUM
Truman’s first meeting with Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin (July 17, 1945), one day after the Trinity atomic bomb test. From left: Vyacheslav Molotov (Stalin’s number two), Truman’s secretary of state James F. Byrnes, Truman’s Russian translator Chip Bohlen, the president, Truman’s chief of staff Admiral Leahy, and Stalin, the Man of Steel. The historic Potsdam Conference would begin later that night.
UNITED STATES ARMY SIGNAL CORPS/HARRY S. TRUMAN LIBRARY & MUSEUM
On August 2, four days before the Hiroshima bombing, Truman and Jimmy Byrnes meet with Britain’s King George VI. At lunch, Truman’s chief of staff Admiral Leahy said of the bomb, “I do not think it will be as effective as expected.” The king said, “Admiral, would you like to lay a little bet on that?”
HARRY S. TRUMAN LIBRARY & MUSEUM
The Nagasaki bomb (August 9,1945)—the second atomic strike. Was Truman justified in using atomic weapons against Japan?
JOE KOSSTATSCHER, UNITED STATES NAVY/HARRY S. TRUMAN LIBRARY & MUSEUM
The dramatic scene inside the Oval Office as Truman announces the unconditional surrender of Japan on August 14, 1945—four months and two days after the death of FDR.
ABBIE ROWE, NATIONAL PARK SERVICE/HARRY S. TRUMAN LIBRARY & MUSEUM
Following the announcement of Japan’s surrender, Harry and Bess Truman wave at tens of thousands who have gathered at the White House gates, chanting, “We want Harry!” It was, in the words of one reporter present, “the wildest celebration this capital ever saw.”
ABBIE ROWE, NATIONAL PARK SERVICE / HARRY S. TRUMAN LIBRARY & MUSEUM
Part IV
* * *
June–July 1945
We see no acceptable alternative to direct military use.
—J. Robert Oppenheimer on the atomic bomb, June 16, 1945
26
HISTORY DOES NOT DEFINITIVELY RECORD THE DAY when Truman realized that he would so
on face the most controversial decision that any president had ever faced, and perhaps would ever face, in all of time. But evidence suggests that the first of June was that day.
It began on a high note. Staffers arrived in the Oval Office at nine fifteen for the morning meeting to find the president in a great mood. He was wearing new spectacles, his eyesight fading from all the reading. He told his staff that Harry Hopkins had achieved something marvelous in Moscow. Hopkins had brokered an agreement between Stalin and the Poles, allowing exiled Polish leaders in London to return to Warsaw to help create a more democratic regime. Truman had received a cable to this effect first thing in the morning from Hopkins: “It looks as though Stalin is prepared to return to and implement the [Yalta] decision and permit a representative group of Poles to come to Moscow,” the cable read. This communiqué was immediately followed by one from Churchill: “Harry Hopkins has just sent me a most encouraging message about the Polish situation.”
The staffers were surprised—a nice way to begin a Friday morning. “If this is true,” Eben Ayers wrote in his diary, “it will be a major accomplishment in removing one of the most serious issues threatening Russian-Allied relations.”
The president faced another relentless day of meetings, and his morning calendar on this day exemplifies how grueling his daily life could be. A fifteen-minute ceremony with the regent of Iraq, a half hour with the secretary of the Treasury, twenty minutes with Senator Styles Bridges of New Hampshire, and the weekly press conference; then Truman hosted the Civil Service Commission’s Arthur S. Flemming (thirty minutes); civilians Paul D. Hoffmann, Howard Myers, and William Benton (fifteen minutes); Dr. L. S. Rowe (fifteen minutes); George Messersmith (fifteen minutes); Dr. Gilbert Grosvenor, Dr. John Oliver La Gorce, and Robert V. Fleming (fifteen minutes); Senator Frank P. Briggs, Dr. C. Robert Starks, Dr. Chester D. Swope, Dr. George J. Conley, and Dr. Phil R. Russell (fifteen minutes); Miss Gertrude Ely (fifteen minutes); and a group of labor representatives—thirty-two of them (five minutes). This schedule only got him to lunch, at 1 p.m.
The White House released a Message to Congress from the president on this morning, informing the American people of the Allies’ “plans for bringing about unconditional surrender of Japan.”
We are now engaged in a process of deploying millions of our armed forces against Japan in a mass movement of troops and supplies and weapons over 14,000 miles—a military and naval feat unequalled in history. The Japanese have more than four million troops under arms—a force larger than the Germans were ever able to put against us on the Western Front . . . We have not yet come up against the main strength of the Japanese military force . . . Substantial portions of Japan’s key industrial centers have been leveled to the ground in a series of record incendiary raids. What has happened to Tokyo will happen to every Japanese city whose industries feed the Japanese war machine. I urge Japanese civilians to leave these cities if they wish to save their lives.
In Truman’s first meeting after a short lunch, he welcomed Justice Robert Jackson, who had just returned from the rubble of Europe, where he was laboring to set up military tribunals to try Nazi war criminals. Jackson’s progress fascinated the president. Already, a number of the most loathed German officials had been stripped of their freedom. (“I always get those dirty Nazis mixed up,” Truman wrote of these figures. “But it makes no difference.”) Heinrich Himmler—the Nazi minister of the interior, and a chief architect of the Final Solution—had been captured by the Soviets and had already committed suicide. Hitler’s most senior ranking military official, Wilhelm Keitel, and the evil Ernst Kaltenbrunner, boss of the feared Gestapo, were both in custody. Joachim von Ribbentrop, Hitler’s foreign minister, was still at large. (He would be captured thirteen days later.)
Thus far, Hermann Göring was the most intriguing Nazi in custody. With Hitler dead, there was no more high-profile Nazi alive than Göring. A former World War I pilot who had spent time in a sanitarium in a straitjacket before rising to be Hitler’s number two for much of the Third Reich’s life-span, Göring had surrendered on his own volition to American forces, fearing what the Russians would do with him if he were captured by the Red Army. Truman had received Göring’s jewel-covered baton as a gift from some generals. “Can you imagine a fat pig like that strutting around with a forty thousand dollar bauble—at the poor taxpayer’s expense and making ’em like it?” Truman said of Göring and his baton. “It goes in a military museum.”
Justice Jackson had, by this time, fixed Nuremberg as the place for the trials to take place. He had come across one unexpected obstacle. The British did not favor military tribunals, when it came to the handful of top war criminals who were easy to positively identify. As Jackson informed the president, “Their [the British] unanimous view was that these criminals be not given a trial, but that they should be . . . shot forthwith.” Jackson was insisting even the most heinous Nazis receive the rights of habeas corpus. These proceedings would be studied for generations. The moral obligations were imperative.
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As Truman met with Justice Jackson in the Oval Office, Secretary of War Henry Stimson was presiding over the last of a series of climactic meetings in the Pentagon regarding the atomic bomb. The purpose: to cement final recommendations for the president on the Manhattan Project. These meetings spread out over four days and called on all the major players: Jimmy Byrnes, Generals Marshall and Groves, even Robert Oppenheimer and four of his top scientists, who had traveled to Washington from Los Alamos.
Stimson was now focused exclusively on the atomic bomb. He had become transfixed by its potential historical impact. He had prepared handwritten notes for these meetings, which curiously read like modernist poetry. The verse was a window into the secretary of war’s state of mind.
Its size and character
We don’t think it mere new weapon
Revolutionary Discovery of Relation of man to universe
Great History Landmark like
Gravitation
Copernican Theory
But,
Bids fair infinitely greater, in respect to its Effect
—on the ordinary affairs of man’s life.
May destroy or perfect International Civilization
May [be] Frankenstein or means for World Peace
In terms of military judgment, no one in Stimson’s meetings overshadowed General Marshall, who came to the secretary of war armed with some convincing ideas. What if the United States government was to give the Japanese an evacuation warning, so that the bomb could be used against Japan without killing innumerable civilians? “He thought these weapons might first be used against straight military objectives such as a large naval installation,” according to meeting minutes, “and then if no complete result was derived from the effect of that, he thought we ought to designate a number of large manufacturing areas from which the people would be warned to leave—telling the Japanese that we intended to destroy such centers.”
“Every effort should be made,” Marshall argued, “to keep our record of warning clear. We must offset by such warning methods the opprobrium which might follow from an ill-considered employment of such force.”
Marshall also brought up chemical weapons, which might be used in the savage battle currently being fought on the island of Okinawa. “[Marshall] spoke of the type of gas that might be employed. It did not need to be our newest and most potent—just drench them and sicken them so that the fight would be taken out of them—saturate an area, possibly with mustard [gas], and just stand off.” It was no less humane than the flamethrowers currently in use to flush Japanese soldiers out of caves, General Marshall argued.
When the Los Alamos scientists were given the floor, they captivated their audience. Oppenheimer was appearing before the Interim Committee for the first time. While managing the stress and deadlines of Los Alamos, Oppenheimer’s five-foot-ten-inch body had withered to less than 130 pounds. He appeared as long and thin as the cigarette he was incessantly l
ighting, and he had striking facial features—bright blue eyes framed between pronounced cheekbones and heavy black eyebrows. As biographers Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin wrote of Oppenheimer, “Every feature of his body was of an extreme.” Here also was Italian-born Enrico Fermi, who had created the first controlled nuclear chain reaction, in 1942; Arthur Compton, who with Fermi and others had designed the first plutonium-producing reactor, at Hanford, Washington, during the war years; and Ernest Lawrence, inventor of Berkeley’s cyclotron, a machine later called “the granddaddy of today’s most powerful accelerators.” Each one of these scientists, with the exception of Oppenheimer, was a Nobel laureate. In introducing them, Stimson expressed that “this project should not be considered simply in terms of military weapons, but as a new relationship of man to the universe.”
“This discovery might be compared to the discoveries of the Copernican theory and the laws of gravity,” Stimson said, “but far more important than these in its effects on the lives of men.”
The scientists updated the committee on their progress. Dr. Compton noted that production of enriched uranium and plutonium at the Oak Ridge and Hanford facilities was now at a rate of pounds or hundreds of pounds but that soon scientists would be capable of producing many tons. Though no bomb had yet been detonated, Compton felt the explosive capability of the work at Los Alamos was “a scientific certainty.”