The Accidental President

by A. J. Baime

  Fred Vinson would in fact be the new Treasury secretary, and had already begun to assume the role.

  ///

  Not long before Truman’s departure for Europe, the secretary of war came to see him. Stimson came to discuss Japan. He produced a document, and Truman read the memorandum—called “Proposed Program for Japan”—carefully, as Stimson sat by. The planning for the invasion of Japan was “now actually going on,” Stimson wrote. “There is reason to believe that the operation for the occupation of Japan following the landing may be a very long, costly and arduous struggle on our part.” Stimson was second-guessing the invasion plan. He believed that the Japanese would refuse to surrender, under any cost, if their homeland was invaded by foreigners. They would fight to the last man and the last square foot of territory. The United States would have no choice but to destroy Japan completely, at the cost of countless American casualties.

  “A question then comes,” Stimson’s memo read. “Is there any alternative to such a forceful occupation of Japan which will secure for us the equivalent of an unconditional surrender of her forces and a permanent destruction of her power again to strike an aggressive blow at the ‘peace of the Pacific’?” The memorandum read further: “Japan has no allies . . . She is terribly vulnerable to our concentrated air attack upon her crowded cities, industrial and food resources . . . We have inexhaustible and untouched industrial resources to bring to bear against her diminishing potential. We have great moral superiority through being the victim of her first sneak attack. The problem is to translate these advantages into prompt and economical achievement of our objectives.”

  The secretary of war did not mention the atomic bomb in this memorandum. (As Stimson noted, “On grounds of secrecy the bomb was never mentioned except when absolutely necessary.”) Behind closed doors in the president’s office, however, they spoke freely on the matter.

  Stimson recommended a kind of warning to Japan, and he had written a draft of what such a warning would look like, with the help of his colleagues. It spoke of the “overwhelming character of the force we are about to bring to bear on the islands.” It spoke of “the inevitability and completeness of the destruction on which the full application of this force will entail.” Whether or not such a warning would use the words atomic bomb was a subject to be discussed. But either way, Stimson argued, by issuing a public and official warning, the United States could convince Japan to capitulate. And if Japan did not (more likely the case), history would record the moral position of an attacking nation that had done its best to warn its victim of what was to come—annihilation of a city, perhaps more than one.

  Truman liked what he was hearing. Stimson’s memorandum was the impetus for what would become the Potsdam Declaration—an ultimatum to Japan that the whole world would see, warning utter destruction.

  The secretary also believed that no harm would come from allowing the emperor to remain in power in Japan. He believed such an offer would “substantially add to the chances” that Japan would surrender. Truman remained uncommitted on this matter.

  Finally, Stimson thought it would be a good idea to inform Stalin at the upcoming meeting about the atomic bomb, before it was used. (The secretary was assuming at this point that Oppenheimer’s test shot would be a success, which was not assured.) Stimson thought Truman should tell Stalin “that we were busy with this thing working like the dickens and . . . that we were pretty nearly ready and we intended to use it against the enemy, Japan.” The time was now to inform Stalin of the bomb, Stimson urged, “with the purpose of having it make the world peaceful and safe rather than to destroy civilization.” Here again, Truman was in agreement. The question remained: How to inform Stalin?

  Before leaving the president’s office, Stimson asked why he had not been invited to Potsdam. He was nearing his seventy-eighth birthday; he was an elder statesman who was clearly pained by the idea of missing out on what would be the climactic moment of a much heralded career. He wondered aloud to the president: Was it because of his age?

  “Yes,” Truman answered, trying to lighten the moment with a bit of laughter. “That was just it.” He feared Stimson’s overexertion.

  Stimson was fit and ready. He could produce nothing less than the endorsement of the surgeon general of the United States, he said. He thought he could do some good if he came along in an unofficial capacity. Truman agreed, and Stimson left to go make last-minute arrangements for the most important trip of his life.

  ///

  On the eve of Potsdam the global picture looked grim. The course of international relations depended on various plot lines of which Truman had no control, and the once great Grand Alliance had lost its grandeur, like a bad three-way marriage turned bitter by suspicions, betrayals, and money problems.

  Truman had by this time met with the Chinese foreign minister, T. V. Soong, and had finally informed him of the secret Yalta agreements. “There was a long discussion of every point,” Undersecretary of State Joseph Grew wrote in his notes of this meeting, “the president making it clear that he was definitely committed to the agreements reached by President Roosevelt.” Soong understood that the Chinese would have to make major concessions in order to get the Soviets into the war against Japan, and he told Truman there was no way the Chinese could honor these agreements, about which they were never consulted.

  For Truman, an agreement between China and the USSR was imperative, not just because he wanted Soviet commitment to the Pacific war but also because he wanted Stalin to be aligned with the current Chinese government under Chiang Kai-shek, not the rebel Chinese Communists, currently gaining power under Mao Tse-tung in the north. Regarding the concessions to the Soviets, Soong declared that China would prefer to “settle the controversy by military action.” The Chinese would fight rather than make these concessions to the Soviets. But both Soong and Truman knew that China had no resources to wage war above and beyond the war it was already fighting. Soong had since left Washington en route to Moscow, in an attempt to negotiate directly with Stalin.

  In the New Mexico desert, a construction crew reporting to a Harvard experimental physicist named Kenneth T. Bainbridge was putting the finishing touches on a proving ground, where the test shot was set to go off. After more delay, the atomic bomb test was now scheduled for July 15, just as Truman would be arriving at Potsdam. Truman and his closest aides were awaiting news from New Mexico with great anticipation.

  Truman rushed through his final personal arrangements in anticipation of his journey. He saw his dentist, who made a house call to the White House. (“A lot has happened since I saw you last,” he told his dentist, who in turn told the president he needed a root canal, and performed the procedure on the spot.) Truman packed his finest suits, formal wear for the evenings, cold weather clothes for the ship cruise across the Atlantic, and hot weather clothes for summer in Berlin. He needed his “high hat, top hat, and hard hat,” he joked.

  “It’ll be a circus sure enough,” he wrote Bess. “But we will get it done I hope.”

  There was no letup in the schedule on July 6, the day Truman and his party were set to leave Washington. At the morning staff meeting, all talk was of the voyage to Europe. Neither Truman nor Jimmy Byrnes had any experience negotiating with the likes of Stalin and Churchill. Eben Ayers admitted in his diary after the morning meeting what many in Washington were feeling: fear that Truman and Byrnes were going to make mistakes at Potsdam, mistakes that the American public, perhaps even future generations, was going to have to pay for. Ayers feared Potsdam would be a “‘babes in the wood’ affair.”

  The president’s calendar on this day listed no fewer than twenty appointments. He had a budget meeting and a cabinet meeting. He issued three executive orders, most notably an order to create an emergency board to investigate labor strikes at midwestern railroad companies critical to the war effort. Exhausted, he left the White House by motorcade at 9:40 p.m. with members of his party. He made sure to surround himself during his travel with
old friends, men who set him at ease: Charlie Ross, Harry Vaughan. He even brought along his old pal Fred Canfil. At 9:50 the party boarded a special train at track 2 in Union Station, bound for the shipyard in Newport News.

  Truman had a strong wind at his sails. At the time of his departure, a new Gallup poll set his approval rating at a miraculous 87 percent. Never during any of Franklin Roosevelt’s days as president had FDR enjoyed an approval rating that high. America found Truman to be “fair-minded . . . a hard worker . . . a realist who looks at things squarely and seeks good advice,” according to the poll. He was “better at handling people than Roosevelt,” and he “had no crackpot ideas.” Still, no approval ratings could ease Truman’s fears. As Robert Nixon wrote of Truman in the Washington Post, “The present conference projects him into the world spotlight.”

  He knew his country was counting on him, and that he would be held accountable. As Judge Sam Rosenman wrote in a memo to the president, “The American people expect you to bring something home to them.”

  While still on the train, Truman wrote Bess. They had spoken by phone recently, and she had seemed to him rather upset. The stress of living a public life was maddening her, and they had years left to go before it would be over. Their marriage was suffering. “I’m sorry if I’ve done something to make you unhappy,” Harry wrote Bess, sitting in the swaying belly of the president’s Pullman car en route to Newport News. “All I’ve ever tried to do is make you pleased with me and the world. I’m very much afraid I’ve failed miserably . . . Now I’m on the way to the high executioner.”

  Churchill had given this Big Three conference an ominous code name: Terminal. The president and his party boarded the USS Augusta on the morning of July 7. Truman had not stepped foot in Europe since he was a soldier in 1918. Less than three months had passed since the moon and all the stars had fallen upon him. As he wrote in his diary on July 7, the day the Augusta pulled out of port: “How I hate this trip!”

  31

  THE AUGUSTA’S CAPTAIN JAMES FOSKETT personally escorted Truman to his quarters. The president would stay in the admiral’s cabin (which had its own private head), directly across from the captain’s cabin, where Jimmy Byrnes was assigned, both cabins one flight up from the ship’s main deck. The Augusta measured 600¼ feet long, its beam rising 66 feet high. Cruising speed: 32.7 knots. The ship was named for a city in Georgia, but the crew called it “Augie” for short, and it had a distinguished career. It was aboard this ship that Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill met face-to-face for the first time as leaders of their respective countries, in Canada’s Placentia Bay on August 9, 1941. Now, with Truman aboard, the Augusta followed 1,000 yards behind the light cruiser USS Philadelphia, the two ships operating as Task Force 68.

  An “Advance Map Room” was set up onboard with a direct communications line to the White House Map Room, so the president could be in constant contact with intelligence sources from all over the world. Truman was given a telephone directory for onboard calls (he was #51), along with instructions for laundry, barber, and tailor. He had a list of the books in the ship’s library, and another of the crew members from his home state of Missouri. At lunch the first day at sea, he stood on line in the chief petty officer’s mess with his aluminum tray, and when he sat down at a table, the sailors next to him were too nervous to speak. He lightened them up quickly. “Old Harry sat around batting the breeze like he’d known us all his life,” recalled one sailor who sat next to Truman.

  The ocean voyage would last eight days, and at night the Augusta traveled with lights on rather than in blackout, now that German U-boats—the rattlesnakes of the sea, as FDR had called them—were no longer torpedoing ships in the Atlantic. Truman’s group fell into a routine. The State Department had put together red-covered tomes full of position papers for Truman to memorize. Similar books were prepared for Roosevelt on the way to Yalta, but FDR never read them. Truman did—thousands of pages. At least once a day he met with Byrnes and Leahy, along with assistants, to firm up proposals that were then prepared for presentation at the upcoming conference. Recalled Chip Bohlen, who was present at many of these meetings: “Truman, a newcomer as a world leader, was understandably somewhat nervous about confronting such awesome figures as Churchill and Stalin . . . During our conferences, Truman spent little time on small talk and jokes. He stuck to business.”

  Each day Truman received news updates from the Advance Map Room. The first day at sea, a memo arrived detailing Curtis LeMay’s latest bombing of Japan: “600 B-29 Superfortresses have dropped nearly 4,000 tons of incendiary and demolition bombs on the main Japanese island of Honshu.” Japanese cities such as Shimizu and Kofu were receiving their “first baptism of incendiaries,” the firebombs killing indiscriminately. Rumors of peace feelers from the Japanese had led Undersecretary of State Joseph Grew to make a statement from Washington: “Conversations relating to peace have been reported to the Department from various parts of the world, but in no case has an approach been made to this Government, directly or indirectly, by a person who could establish his authority to speak for the Japanese Government, and in no case has an offer of surrender been made.”

  When Truman was not in conferences, he walked the ship from bow to stern restlessly, followed often by Fred Canfil, as loyal as a dog, and Harry Vaughan, who had a habit of talking too much. (“I don’t suppose anyone gives more advice than I do,” Vaughan said, “and has less of it used.”) Each night at six o’clock a thirty-piece band played a symphonette program, followed by dinner. At eight o’clock a movie was shown in Byrnes’s room (the first night featured The Princess and the Pirate, starring Bob Hope). Truman slipped out of these movies to play poker in his quarters. One night over a card game, conversation turned to the election in Britain. Churchill believed that his present government would win, but one could not say for sure. At the poker table, newsman Robert Nixon insisted that Churchill was on his way out of office.

  “The Conservative government, with Churchill as its head, is going to go out,” Nixon insisted. Was he right? The voting had taken place, and it would be days before the count was completed, which meant that, if there was a change in British leadership, it would occur right in the middle of the Potsdam Conference.

  The mood aboard the ship was positive, though the pressure was palpable. The two previous Big Three meetings, Tehran and Yalta, had occurred under a veil of secrecy. The entire world knew of this upcoming conference. Meanwhile, the president was eager to hear news of the test shot in New Mexico. Admiral Leahy was still positive the experiment would never work. “This is the biggest fool thing we have ever done,” the White House chief of staff insisted. “The bomb will never go off, and I speak as an expert in explosives.”

  ///

  On July 14 the Augusta steamed past the white cliffs of Dover and into the English Channel. Truman stood atop the bridge focusing his eyes on this breathtaking sight. Seven ships of His Majesty’s fleet greeted the president, six destroyers and the HMS Birmingham light cruiser, which served as an escort. Aboard each stood rows of hundreds of British sailors saluting Truman, shouting three cheers as he passed.

  “Three cheers for Mr. Truman,” thousands of sailors roared, “President of the United States!”

  The Augusta cruised past an army encampment along the shore where thousands of American GIs were awaiting their journeys home, the men climbing over one another trying to get a look at the president. As the ship moved closer to its berth, Truman saw a sea of ecstatic Belgians and Hollanders on the banks of the water—men, women, old and young, shouting with delight and pumping fists in the air. They were a reminder that Truman was the face of the nation that had saved these people from Hitler. He was the face of the nation that was now the hope of rebirth for millions of Europeans.

  At Antwerp the Augusta was boarded by a welcoming party, notably General Eisenhower himself. Truman walked off the boat at 11:10 a.m. on July 15. The scene was a mesmerizing display of security and logistics. Soldiers
began unloading from the Augusta 83 suitcases, 1 trunk, 40 small pieces, plus office gear, Map Room equipment, 36 cans of motion picture film, and the president’s kitchen equipment, which would follow him to Potsdam. Swarms of military police had been surveilling this terrain for days, and twelve P-47 Thunderbolt fighter planes patrolled the skies. Truman climbed into an armored car, and a motorcade left the port for a forty-five-minute ride to an airfield in Brussels, where transport planes awaited. Secret service and MPs flanked the motorcade, while directly behind the president’s car a truck motored with eight machine gunners and eight sharpshooting riflemen.

  In Brussels the party took off in three C-47 transport planes and landed some three hours later at Gatow outside Berlin. A dozen officials greeted Truman, including Ambassador Harriman and Secretary of War Stimson, who had arranged travel for himself and his team aboard the USS Brazil and had arrived the day before. Though not officially invited, Stimson was to play a key role at Potsdam. The Second Armored “Hell on Wheels” Division performed military honors at the airfield. Truman inspected the guard, as was custom. “Everyone was relieved when this was over,” recalled Joseph Davies, who was present. “The Secret Service had been quite nervous about it. When [Truman] walked in front of the line they could not possibly have protected him from a long distance shot.”

  Then Truman was back in a car for the ten-mile drive to his villa. From inside his car, he could hear explosions in the distance. Russians were still detonating German mines, left over from the war. The explosions were at a safe distance but close enough to rattle the president’s nerves. Along this short drive he saw another ominous sight. The airfield at Brussels had been guarded by American and British troops, but here in eastern Germany the roadway was guarded by Russians. Armed frontier guardsmen stood along the entire route at 50- to 100-yard gaps, each a reminder that the president was inside Soviet-occupied territory.