The Accidental President

by A. J. Baime

  Oppenheimer reviewed expectations for the test shot, now scheduled for July 4—a day of obvious symbolism. One bomb might produce anywhere from 2,000 to 20,000 tons of TNT equivalent; it was impossible to know for sure at this stage, he explained. But he assured the group that the visual effect would be “tremendous.” He described what sounded like the creation of a new sun, a “brilliant luminescence, which would rise to a height of 10,000 to 20,000 feet.” Future bombs, he believed, could detonate with the force of 50,000 to 100,000 tons of TNT, and later, as much as 100 million tons. Oppenheimer added that, while the “immediate concern had been to shorten the war,” he envisioned a future where this new revolutionary means of exploiting power could be used for peacetime purposes. “The basic endeavors in the field should be the enlargement of human welfare,” he said.

  He also had strong opinions about how to handle the USSR. He argued that the United States should approach the Soviets now, in hopes of a postwar cooperation in this field. If the Americans sprang the bomb on the world as a surprise, the Soviets were certain to react with exponentially greater distrust and aggression.

  The others in the room were surprised to hear the theoretical physicist speak so bluntly of politics, and on this matter Byrnes objected. If the Russians were given knowledge of the project, even in general terms, Byrnes believed, “Stalin would ask to be brought into partnership.”

  The Interim Committee came to some conclusions. There should be no warning given to the Japanese. What if a warning were offered, and the bomb failed to explode? Or, if the weapon did explode and failed to bring about a surrender—would the critical element of surprise have been wasted? Also, the strategists believed that the Japanese could move American POWs into the target area, if they were told ahead of time where it would be. The committee agreed that the bombing should not occur in a civilian area. However, they also agreed that they “should seek to make a profound psychological impression on as many of the inhabitants as possible.”

  The secretary of war asked Oppenheimer to create his own committee at Los Alamos, so that the scientists themselves could make recommendations on what should be done with their work. Did the scientists believe that this weapon should in fact be used? Oppenheimer was to form this advisory committee quickly, as time was of the essence. However, it appeared to the scientists that the decision to use the bomb had already been made. As Compton noted, it seemed from these committee discussions like “a foregone conclusion that the bomb would be used.”

  ///

  After the Interim Committee’s final session, Byrnes crossed the Potomac River in his car, motoring from the Pentagon to the White House for an unscheduled meeting with Truman. Byrnes gave a blow-by-blow of the decisions made—the recommendations to the president from the highest military, political, and scientific thinkers. Byrnes himself had been among the strongest voices in these proceedings. He had made the following recommendations at the end of the final session, all of which the Interim Committee had approved. These were the decisions that Byrnes voiced to Truman on this day, June 1: “While recognizing that the final selection of the target was essentially a military decision, the present view of the Committee was that the bomb should be used against Japan as soon as possible; that it be used on a war plant surrounded by workers’ homes; and that it be used without prior warning.”

  The implications of this were frighteningly clear to Truman. In the end, no matter what recommendations were made, the final decisions regarding the bomb would be his, and his alone.

  Never before in American history had the president been personally responsible for a major military tactical decision during the course of a war. But then, everything about the bomb was unprecedented. As a child, Truman had begun his political education through his reading. He had learned that history moves in cycles, that political circumstances in the present so often have occurred before, in different places and different times, from Philadelphia in 1776 to ancient Greece. But nothing in history could prepare humanity for the bomb, and for the potentially apocalyptic global picture now in Harry Truman’s focus.

  Around this time, Leonard Reinsch—the radio executive who was serving in the White House as a publicity advisor—met with Truman, finding him deeply disturbed. Truman explained that he had just been briefed on something explosive; exactly what, he told Reinsch, he could not say.

  “Leonard,” Truman uttered, according to Reinsch’s recollections, “I have just gotten some important information. I am going to have to make a decision which no man in history has ever had to make. I’ll make the decision but it is terrifying to think about what I will have to decide.” Truman said again and again, “I wish I could talk to you about it.” But he could not.

  ///

  “This is a lonesome place,” Truman wrote his wife of the White House, on the morning of Sunday, June 3. Bess, Margaret, and Mrs. Wallace were in Independence, and the president had a rare day with no official appointments. He had his breakfast alone, then got dressed. “I’m always so lonesome when the family leaves,” he wrote in a diary on this morning. “I have no one to raise a fuss over my neckties and my haircuts, my shoes and my clothes.”

  Without informing any security detail, Truman snuck out of the White House. He walked alone through Lafayette Square to Saint John’s Church at Sixteenth and H Streets. A few soldiers and sailors stopped in their tracks when they saw the president walking alone through Washington, saluting him formally. But mostly, he went unnoticed. “Don’t think over six people recognized me,” he recorded. Parishioners were not surprised to see the president among the crowd that Sunday morning, as Saint John’s was the closest chapel to the White House, and every president since James Madison had made an appearance here. Truman found the services “rather dull,” he wrote in his diary, “but I had a chance to do some thinking and the time wasn’t wasted.”

  That night he dined alone on the South Portico, looking out over the White House lawn. Staff was at his beck and call. Truman had everything he needed, with the exception of emotional support he had never in his life required more. He was accustomed to sharing his thoughts with Bess about a day’s work. She was the only person to whom he could reveal himself completely. He longed for Margie, too. In his letters to her from this time, he revealed himself to be what so many fathers of daughters become: intensely vulnerable. He felt her pain. When Margaret left for Independence, Washington’s most popular political gossip columnist—Drew Pearson, in his “Washington Merry-Go-Round” column—put an uncomfortable spin on her departure.

  “It came as something of a shock to Washington dowagers and socially-minded young naval officers when attractive, dynamic Margaret Truman suddenly was whisked out of Washington at the very height of the gay June season,” Pearson wrote. “A very wise presidential papa wasn’t happy about the featured newspaper articles of his daughter shagging at this party, cocktailing at that, and bitting merrily through Washington society with the war still bitterly contested in the Pacific.”

  Truman felt personally wounded. Pearson’s column was the most widely read syndicated newspaper column in the country, and it suggested whimsy and heartlessness on the part of Margaret Truman. He wrote Margie from the White House to apologize, on the day the story was published.

  “You evidently are just finding out what a terrible situation the president’s daughter is facing,” he wrote. “That was the main reason for my not wanting to be Vice-President. I knew what it would mean to you and your mother—to your Aunts and Uncles and Grandmothers and cousins.” He called Pearson’s column “a tissue of lies” and pleaded with his daughter to “keep your balance and go along just as your dad is trying to do.”

  Alone at night, the president buried himself in budget figures and State Department papers. But he had to escape what he began to call “the Great White Jail.” On his first bachelor weekend he attended the annual Jamboree of the Burning Tree Golf Club in Bethesda, Maryland, a popular watering hole for Washington’s elite. Guests at the jam
boree that night heard someone playing piano. When they looked up, they were stunned: there was the president of the United States, his fingers on the keys. Imposing secret service men stood cold-faced as a crowd gathered around the piano. “I’m just a prisoner,” Truman joked, nodding toward his bodyguards. “Look at my keepers. But you don’t know what fun I’m having tonight.”

  The following Saturday night, June 9, Truman invited guests aboard the presidential yacht for a game of poker. At the card table, Truman could forget his worries and lose himself in the game. Players would sometimes forget to call him Mr. President (such as the time the jurist and politician Fred Vinson addressed Truman as “you son of a bitch”). It was hot aboard the Potomac that night, the seasonal humidity thickening the air. The game went on, and surely some bourbon bottles were opened. One frequent Truman poker pal, the White House correspondent Robert Nixon (who was almost certainly aboard the Potomac that night, as six newsmen had been invited as guests), said of Truman: “He loved these wild games. Boy, there were some so wild they’d make your hair stand up.”

  But the poker table could only serve as a temporary escape. “Have been going through some very hectic days,” he wrote in his diary in early June. “Eyes troubling somewhat. Too much reading ‘fine print.’ Nearly every memorandum has a catch in it and it has been necessary to read at least a thousand of ’em and as many reports. Most of it at night.”

  He confessed in his diary that he was nearly helpless when Bess was gone: “I’m a damn fool I guess because I could never get excited or worked up about gals or women. I only had one sweet-heart from the time I was six . . . I’m old fashioned I guess, but it’s a happy state to labor under in this terrible job I fell heir to on Apr. 12, ’45.”

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  MUCH TO TRUMAN’S SURPRISE, international tension eased during the first week of June. The news regarding a new Polish government was a boost. Stalin also agreed in early June to help defuse the Tito standoff at the border of Italy and Yugoslavia. Negotiations were taking place for a peaceful solution; the United States, British, and Yugoslavian governments would in fact sign an agreement for the future disposition of Venezia Giulia on June 9. It would remain part of Italy.

  From San Francisco, Secretary of State Stettinius had kept Truman up to date on the UN negotiations by phone. The gravest disagreement between the Americans and Soviets remained the veto in the Security Council. Could a member nation veto action by the others? The Soviets insisted on a veto, which could render the UN impotent to act, in the case of one nation’s attack on another. The Americans were against the veto, as the Soviets defined it. Molotov refused to negotiate, so Stettinius decided on a bold move—to go over Molotov’s head, reaching out directly to Stalin in Moscow through Harry Hopkins. On June 6, Hopkins had his last meetings with Stalin, after which he cabled Truman directly regarding the UN veto: “Stalin overruled Molotov and agreed that the American position was acceptable to him.”

  Once again, Harry Hopkins had come through. He had saved the UN peace organization. In San Francisco, Stettinius was ecstatic; this victory humiliated Molotov, in front of all the UN delegations. Stettinius informed the president that it now appeared the conference would come to a close successfully, around June 15, at which point Truman would travel west to address the delegations at the closing ceremony.

  The Americans celebrated one other major triumph in the first week of June. This victory came over the French, and gave Truman particular satisfaction. French forces under Charles de Gaulle were occupying a piece of northern Italy and were refusing to leave. They had ignored orders from General Eisenhower to move out of Italy and were threatening to protect their claim to this section of Italy along the French border with military action. On June 6, Stimson met with the president to discuss the matter. Stimson spoke of “this clash with the French.”

  “I was fully in sympathy with the necessity of curbing DeGaulle,” Stimson wrote in his diary, “whom I was coming to regard as a psychopathic. [Truman] interrupted me to say that was his opinion too.”

  This situation bordered on the absurd. The British and American forces had saved France from the Nazis. The United States government had delivered—and was still delivering—immense amounts of supplies to France through Lend-Lease. (France had a separate Lend-Lease agreement signed before Truman took over, which allowed for continued deliveries of supplies after VE-day.) Now de Gaulle was attempting to claim territory that did not belong to France—threatening to fight against American troops with tools of war supplied by America. “Those French ought to be taken out and castrated,” Truman said in one of his morning meetings.

  Truman wrote de Gaulle a letter, dated June 6, noting “the almost unbelievable threat that French soldiers bearing American arms will combat American and Allied soldiers whose efforts and sacrifices have so recently and successfully contributed to the liberation of France itself. Indeed, this action comes at the time of the very anniversary of our landings in Normandy which set in motion the forces that resulted in that liberation.”

  The president informed de Gaulle that Lend-Lease supplies headed for France would be stopped at once if France refused to relinquish this section of Italy. Very soon after Truman’s letter was delivered, the president was informed by Allied headquarters in Caserta, Italy, that “General DeGaulle agrees to withdrawal of French troops west of 1939 Italo-France frontier.”

  The French affair sparked chuckles in many offices of the War Department and the Pentagon, and reinforced the stature of the president. Truman considered releasing the correspondence to the press; it would have embarrassed de Gaulle so severely, the French leader may have been forced to resign, but Truman decided against this move.

  On June 8, a few minutes before 2 p.m., Truman took his seat in the Cabinet Room for his regular cabinet meeting. Undersecretary of State Joseph Grew opened the proceedings that day. “Mr. President,” he said, “I don’t believe as a rule in crowing before the sun is really up but I may say that the international scene is a great deal better today than it was two days ago.”

  ///

  Joseph Davies returned to the United States from his meetings with Churchill, arriving at the White House for dinner with Truman at 6:45 on the night of June 4. He found Truman in his second-floor study reading documents with his sleeves rolled up.

  “Tell me,” Truman asked, “how were you received?”

  Davies began his account of his British sojourn, a story replete with intense conflict and moments of comic relief. One thing stood out for Davies: the prime minister was in a very nervous and agitated state. He was terrified of the Russians.

  Soon after his arrival in the United Kingdom, Davies was whisked off to Chequers, a sixteenth-century mansion in Buckinghamshire that served as the official country retreat of the prime minister. A formal dinner for political luminaries followed, after which Churchill and Davies retired to a private study, the prime minister with scotch and soda, and Davies—in bad health with heart problems—having “chemical soup” (broth synthetically made, since real broth was not obtainable in Britain due to the war, even by the prime minister). According to Davies, this first private talk “was not a ‘smooth’ session.”

  Davies told Churchill that—regarding the upcoming Big Three conference—Truman was considering meeting with Stalin alone first, then Churchill would be invited. The prime minister was instantly enraged. He insulted the honor of the United States to Davies’s face, and Davies—who had just arrived in England—threatened to leave immediately. Churchill then calmed down and agreed to cooperate with the United States (Truman interjected in the story here: “Great, you did a splendid job. You got exactly what I wanted on Churchill’s own suggestion.”). That first discussion with Churchill continued until 4:30 a.m., Davies explained. The two men then offered cloying good-night speeches, in the English tradition. As Davies recalled the conversation:

  “To the great American Envoy,” Churchill said.

  “Goodnight to you, Sir,” Davies c
ame back, “the greatest Englishman of all time, who lived what Shakespeare dreamed, and who translated into deeds what England’s greatest had taught.”

  The discussions began again the next morning in Churchill’s private quarters. Apparently, the prime minister had no compunction about conducting high-level diplomacy while still in bed in his pajamas. From here on out, over the next few days, Davies and Churchill got to the bottom of the prime minister’s fears, which Davies listed for the president.

  Churchill was bitter toward the French. “He was completely fed up with de Gaulle and out of patience,” Davies told Truman. The prime minister was “even more bitter towards Tito,” who was “a communist, and completely under the domination of Moscow.” Most important, Churchill was violent in his criticism of the USSR. Davies was shocked by his vitriol. Churchill believed the Soviets had sent “communist propagandists and leaders, ‘like locusts,’ to establish communist cells” all over Europe, Davies recounted. “What was more horrible to him than Communism,” Davies reported, “was the imposition of the Secret Police and Gestapo methods.”

  “As I listened to his denunciation of the Soviets,” Davies continued, “I was horrified in the realization of what it meant to Peace.”

  Churchill feared what was going to happen to Europe once the American military forces were gone from the continent. He understood the priorities in the Far East; the war against Japan had to be won. But with the withdrawal of American troops, Davies quoted Churchill, “Europe would be prostrate and at the mercy of the Red Army and of Communism.” The prime minister was clear about how high the stakes had grown, and who would shoulder the responsibilities ahead. “Perhaps it would fall to a very few men to decide in the next few weeks the kind of life that would confront several generations to come,” Churchill told Davies.