by A. J. Baime
Truman’s motorcade swept through Kansas City, Kansas, and over the bridge into Kansas City, Missouri, led by a squadron of motorcycle police. He sat in the back seat of an open car, with Margaret and his brother, Vivian, sitting next to him. A parade of cars followed, many of them open automobiles overflowing with locals. A sign at Grand Avenue read, WELCOME HOME, HARRY! Mobs pushed from the sidewalks into the streets. From the windows of a Woolworth’s store, women waved mini-American flags mounted on little sticks. In front of Kansas City’s Jackson County Court House, which Truman had led the charge to build eleven years earlier, a familiar face yelled, “Hello Harry!” Others screamed for “Mr. President” awkwardly—as if, one Washington Post reporter noted, “the things that had happened to put this man in the White House were still a bit incredible.”
When Truman arrived in his Independence neighborhood, soldiers with white helmets and MP brassards on their arms lined the roads to keep the crowds back. He could see that the old family house at 219 North Delaware had received a fresh coat. It wouldn’t do to have the “Summer White House”—as the press was now calling it—badly in need of paint. The house sat on roughly three quarters of an acre, and gardeners had spruced up the property. Along the driveway, red, pink, and white peonies—Bess’s favorite flowers—were in bloom. On the northwest corner of the lawn, Truman saw a brand-new thirty-four-foot flagpole set in cement. It was a gift from the city of Independence, and the Stars and Stripes had been raised on this pole for the first time the day before his arrival. Behind the house, there was a new doghouse for Margie’s Irish setter, topped by a sign with the dog’s name, MIKE.
The family gathered in the house. There was one particular piece of news to celebrate. During Truman’s 1940 Senate campaign, a bank had foreclosed on the family farm in Grandview, where Truman had toiled for years as a farmer and where his mother had lived for most of her life. Now, with the financial help of some friends, the family had repurchased the home, and the deed was fully paid off.
“That gives you a rent free home for the rest of your life,” Truman informed his mother and his sister. “So now take good care of yourselves and live as long as you can.”
In the afternoon Truman enjoyed a quiet moment with his daughter in his backyard, then he rushed off to hold his regular press conference, this time at Independence’s Memorial Hall. Every seat in the place was full, but no one was sitting when the president walked onto the stage, where a simple desk and chair had been placed for him. Reporters sat in chairs in the front row, with seemingly the entire town of Independence behind them. Press secretary Charlie Ross called the meeting to order.
“Gentlemen, and ladies—ladies and gentlemen.” (Cries of shshshshhhh.) Ross read the rules: No direct quotes, unless it’s a formal announcement. “Now, no one is to leave the conference until it is adjourned.” Ross turned to Truman. “I believe that’s all, Mr. President.”
“All right,” Truman said. “I guess we’ll start.”
He began by announcing that Edward Stettinius would be moving to a new job: representative of the United States to the United Nations. He refused at that moment to name the new secretary of state.
One reporter yelled, “Is it Mr. Byrnes, Mr. President?”
Laughter filled the room, for Byrnes’s appointment had by this point become common knowledge.
“That question,” Truman said, “I cannot answer.”
Following the press conference, Truman was whisked off to a dinner with old army buddies at Independence mayor Roger Sermon’s house, then to the auditorium at the town’s Reorganized Latter Day Saints Auditorium, where again locals jammed the room to see the president, who stood on a stage and spoke extemporaneously. The flag-festooned church auditorium had thousands of seats, and Truman packed the house. Behind him on the stage sat Bess and Margaret, and one Miss Caroline Stoll, age eighty-four, who had been a grade school teacher of Harry’s. “This is the most wonderful day of my life,” she said. “To think that God should let me live to see this come to pass.”
“Time and again, I have tried to fill this great auditorium,” Truman said, referring to his adventures as a novice politician in Jackson County, “and this is the first time I have succeeded.” He told the story of the night he had become president. “I arrived at the White House and went to Mrs. Roosevelt’s study and she informed me that the president had passed away. You can understand how I felt at that moment. It was necessary for me to assume a greater burden, I think, than any man has assumed in the history of the world.”
There were two things Truman needed to achieve as president, he explained. “The first one is to win the war with Japan, and we are winning it.” The crowd erupted in thunderous applause. “The next one,” Truman said, “is to win the peace.” He spoke of the Big Three meeting in Berlin, fast approaching, where negotiations would lead, he hoped, to “peace of the world, for generations to come.”
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Truman’s homecoming cast a spotlight on the state of Missouri the likes of which its residents had never known. The whole country wanted to know about the place that had given rise to this figure who had inadvertently become a subject of intense fascination. Missouri had never had its own president of the United States before. It had, however, cast its vote for every president since the turn of the twentieth century, and thus it was said that, as Missouri goes, so too goes America. The state had both northern and southern roots (southerners were more likely to pronounce Missouri with an a at the end), and while it was home to two vastly different cities—St. Louis and Kansas City—the majority of the land was carved into farming communities. Missouri did not practice segregation on buses, elevators, or streetcars, but it did in schools, toilet facilities, restaurants, and hotels.
Kansas City, the metropolis most associated with the president, still had the air of the Wild West. It was cut in half by the chocolate-colored Missouri River, with Kansas City, Kansas, on one side and Kansas City, Missouri (the larger, more well-known metropolis), on the other. More than three hundred passenger trains and five hundred freight trains passed through Union Station in Kansas City, Missouri, every day. Until recently, the city had boasted some of the most celebrated jazz clubs in the country, stages that had given rise to Bennie Moten, Count Basie, and hometown saxophone wunderkind Charlie “Yardbird” Parker. But many of those clubs had shuttered during the war, and many of those musicians were now serving in the military. While the sizzling Kansas City steak was the local gustatory claim to fame, this cut’s smoky fragrance had all but disappeared, due to rationing.
The war had fueled the city’s booming economy. Action in the slaughterhouses had pushed Kansas City past Chicago during the war as the world’s largest cattle market. Aviation and ordnance plants employed tens of thousands, notably a freshly constructed B-25 bomber plant on the Kansas side of the Missouri River. One example of the wartime boom: the Vendo Company of Kansas City, Missouri—previously a soda vending machine company with 150 workers—had become a military electronics factory employing 1,500.
Independence, meanwhile, was a town that could be dropped into any other state and not look out of place. It had shops, auto garages, banks, corner drugstores, all surrounding Independence Square. There was one thing Independence had, however, that other towns did not: Harry Truman.
“It looks to us,” one longtime resident told the New York Times, “like you writers and newspaper people are trying to paint a lot of glamour on a fellow who just won’t glamorize. Harry Truman isn’t any genius. He’s just like the rest of us around here, only he’s a little smarter. We’ve known that ever since he was a kid.”
The day after Truman’s appearance at the church auditorium, he went for a walk through Kansas City, with secret service in tow. At Thirty-Ninth and Main Streets he visited an old friend—Eddie Jacobson—in Jacobson’s new shop, Westport Men’s Wear.
“Hello there, Eddie,” Truman said, shaking his old friend’s hand.
“Hello, Harry.”
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sp; Surely the memories flashed before Truman’s eyes—running the canteen with Jacobson at Camp Doniphan in Oklahoma, two young soldiers on their way to war. Or the ill-fated Truman & Jacobson. That shop had now been closed for twenty-three years. Jacobson had opened his new store just months earlier.
“I want some shirts,” Truman told Eddie. “Size 15½, 33 lengths.”
Jacobson searched the store, but he did not have Truman’s size. By this time, mobs had crowded the front door, and photographers snapped away at the old partners. It was a moment neither man would ever forget.
Once again, Bess managed to escape the attention, secluding herself behind the doors of 219 North Delaware during her husband’s visit. Thus far, she had decided the role of First Lady did not suit her. (A year later, in 1946, Bess was asked, “If it had been left to your own free choice, would you have gone into the White House in the first place?” She answered, “Most definitely would not have.” Would she want Margaret to become a First Lady? “No.” Did she think there would ever be a female president? “No.” Had living in the White House changed her view of politics and people? “No comment.”)
Truman promised his family that he would have no official duties on his last full day at home—Saturday, June 30—for he could not even guess when he would be able to come home again. But pleas from the press lured him out onto his front porch with Margaret for some pictures, in the late afternoon. The photographers asked for Bess to be in the photographs, and Truman went inside to fetch the First Lady. He came back alone. As Margaret remembered, “Mother had flatly refused to join us.” Truman offered a halfhearted smile, telling the photographers, “Take a few more of us, why don’t you, boys.”
Early the next morning, July 1, the president’s limousine left Independence for the airport. Truman arrived back in Washington at 2 p.m., alone without his family in the White House again. Later in the afternoon he was at his desk looking over documents in his second-floor study when a knock came at the door. White House staffers Bill Hassett, Eben Ayers, and Matt Connelly entered, along with Charlie Ross and Sam Rosenman. A few minutes later a naval aide ushered in Alger Hiss of the State Department, who held in his hands the UN Charter.
Truman suggested a drink to celebrate—with ice, as the summer heat was bearing down on the White House. He made a call, and minutes later servants brought in a tray of glasses, a bucket of ice, and bottles of bourbon and scotch. Truman raised a toast to the United Nations.
The following day, just after lunch, he stood at the podium in the Senate Chamber and formally presented the charter. As an international treaty, the document would have to be approved by the Senate by a two-thirds vote, or it would land in history’s dustbin, right next to Woodrow Wilson’s League of Nations charter. Truman delivered a short, heartfelt speech.
“No international document has been drawn in a greater glare of publicity than has this one,” he said. “The choice before the Senate is now clear,” he continued. “The choice is not between this Charter and something else. It is between this Charter and no Charter at all.”
The Senate began its talks the moment Truman left the gallery. The deliberations would grow heated at times, the UN hanging in the balance.
At 11 a.m. the following day, James F. Byrnes was sworn in as secretary of state. Truman watched Justice Richard Whaley conduct the ceremony on the White House’s East Portico, which was surrounded by rosebushes in bloom. The affair was quick, simple, and sultry hot, with Mrs. Byrnes and Henry Stimson standing by as witnesses with the president.
Byrnes now joined Truman as chief architect of American foreign policy. Ever since Thomas Jefferson served as the first secretary of state, the role had been defined by decisions as to how much the United States should get involved in other nations’ conflicts, and how to exploit international relations for the purpose of national security and economic growth. The end of World War II would pose complexities that no secretary of state had faced before.
The new secretary of state was a polarizing figure—certainly more so than Truman realized at the time. Byrnes had a rare résumé; he had served in all three branches of government—executive (as secretary of state), judicial (as a Supreme Court justice), and legislative (as a former senator from South Carolina). He had angered some of his colleagues in the past, who considered him Machiavellian and, at times, remarkably self-interested. Before his swearing in, Sam Rosenman, White House special counsel, had warned Truman: “I don’t think you know Jimmy Byrnes, Mr. President. You think you do. In the bonhomie of the Senate, he’s one kind of a fellow; but I think you will regret this [appointment], and if I were you, I wouldn’t do it.” Others were furious over the sacking of “Brother Ed” Stettinius, who was responsible more than any other man for bringing the UN Charter to fruition. “It just shows how cruel and ruthless ‘politics’ can be,” Senator Vandenberg wrote in his diary.
Truman felt sure that in Byrnes he had the right man. “My, but he has a keen mind,” he wrote of Byrnes. The timing of the appointment was key. The president was set to leave for Berlin in two days’ time, and blue-eyed Jimmy Byrnes would be by his side as his most trusted advisor.
30
“I SURE DREAD THIS TRIP worse than anything I’ve had to face,” Truman wrote Bess of the upcoming Berlin conference. He was set to leave the White House on the night of July 6, and the race to prepare had set the city of Washington on edge. In the midnight hours, office lights could be seen flickering in the executive mansion, the old State and War Building, the Pentagon, and elsewhere, as officials tapped out thick position papers for Truman on every subject from Zionism to the evolving government in Poland to the future economy of Germany. At port in Newport News, Virginia, the crew of the USS Augusta was readying the ship for the president. Truman’s party was now set at thirty-seven individuals, while the secretary of state’s traveling staff would total twenty-six. The Joint Chiefs of Staff’s party would total seventy-five, not including the chiefs themselves.
The Russians were set to host the meeting inside Soviet-occupied territory. The conference would be held in the Berlin suburb of Potsdam, since the city of Berlin had been destroyed, in a prince’s palace that had not suffered bombing damage. Harriman carried the heavy load of making the arrangements for the conference with the hosting Soviets, while Eisenhower’s office was in charge of arranging on-site accommodations. The latter in particular had become a headache, signifying how difficult it was going to be to negotiate with the Soviets on anything. American reconnaissance personnel headed by General Floyd Parks had been refused access to secure a safe location for the president and his staff in Potsdam.
“All attempts to secure permission for General Parks and party to proceed to Berlin immediately for reconnaissance and making necessary arrangements for conference have been unsuccessful,” Eisenhower’s office in Frankfurt cabled Washington. General Parks himself cabled: “No explanation can be given for such a delay except the lack of permission from the Soviet authorities to undertake necessary arrangements.” Only after strong lobbying from Harriman was General Parks allowed to enter Potsdam, to insure safety, inspect quarters, and to set up high-frequency communications systems. Mess, laundry, medical, and pharmaceutical aid—all of it had to be arranged under the careful watch of Soviet intelligence.
Britain was holding an election for prime minister, and the results would not be known at the start of the conference, so Churchill informed Truman that he would bring his opposing candidate, Clement Attlee of the Labour Party, with him, “in order that full continuity of British policy may be assured,” whether Churchill remained prime minister or not. Experts in the State Department had informed Truman that they expected Churchill to win the election, but who knew? Electioneering was full of surprises, as Truman knew as much as anybody.
The names of Truman’s party represented great intrigue in Washington. “There isn’t any doubt that James F. Byrnes, Secretary of State, has emerged as the man closest to President Truman,” the Boston Globe�
��s chief Washington reporter noted. Secretary of War Stimson was not on the list to attend Potsdam. Neither was Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, who was infuriated. The rumor mill buzzed that Morgenthau was going to get replaced by Fred Vinson, director of the Office of Economic Stabilization. Vinson had been invited to the Potsdam Conference. Morgenthau had not. Morgenthau insisted on talking over the matter with Truman, face-to-face.
The two met in the Oval Office at 10:15 a.m. on the day before Truman was scheduled to set sail. By this time, the Oval Office appeared entirely Truman’s. All remnants of Franklin Roosevelt had vanished—a fact not lost on Morgenthau, who had considered himself one of FDR’s closest confidants and had spent countless hours with Roosevelt in this room. Even the desk was different. Truman had given FDR’s desk to Eleanor Roosevelt and had replaced it with a walnut desk that had belonged to Theodore Roosevelt. Upon this desk now sat a framed photograph of Bess—the same picture that Truman had kept in his pocket while fighting as a soldier in World War I.
“You are leaving,” Morgenthau said, “and there’s all this gossip which has been increasing more and more about my being through.” Morgenthau wanted to know: Was he in or out?
“Let me think this thing over,” Truman said, trying to find a polite way out of the conversation.
“Mr. President, from several remarks you have dropped you must have something in your mind. Either you want me or you don’t, and you know it now.”
Morgenthau offered his resignation. He said that if he was not invited to Potsdam, he should step down. The president had heard enough.
“All right,” Truman answered, “if that is the way you feel, I’ll accept your resignation right now.”
Soon afterward Truman was hosting his regular press conference, prepared to announce Morgenthau’s resignation. When reporters entered his office, they found him sipping a glass of water (“just taking a little something for my nerves!” he said) and wielding a sword that had come off a swordfish (“a good letter opener,” he said). The press had come to rely on Truman’s jocularity as an icebreaker, but Truman’s voice turned sober as he announced the Treasury secretary’s resignation. Morgenthau had run the Treasury for eleven years. When reporters asked Truman if he had decided on a successor, he said, “I have a successor in mind, but he will not be announced until I get back from Europe.”