The Accidental President

by A. J. Baime

  He arrived at his quarters in Babelsberg—a small suburb between Berlin and Potsdam—at approximately 5 p.m., the motorcade lurching to a stop at 2 Kaiserstrasse, a three-story stucco villa on Lake Griebnitz. The lake had served as a popular summer getaway for Berliners before the war, while the villa itself had belonged to a well-known German filmmaker. This filmmaker had been taken by the Soviets—to where, no one knew. “The house as all others was stripped of everything by the Russians,” Truman wrote in a diary on this day. “Not even a tin spoon left.” The Soviet hosts had hastily refurnished the place with odds and ends, giving it a bizarre feel. “It is comfortable enough,” Truman noted, “but what a nightmare it would give an interior decorator.” Though the villa was yellow, it quickly became known as “the Little White House.”

  Truman had a bedroom, an office, and a bathroom, a flight of steps above the ground floor. Windows offered a view of the lake. In a room between his bedroom and his office, the head of the secret service detail, George Drescher, had already unpacked his bags. Byrnes, Leahy, Ross, Vaughan, and Chip Bohlen also took up residence in this house. There were no screens on the windows; mosquitoes would be feasting at night. Additionally, the bathrooms were “wholly inadequate,” according to Commander William Rigdon, an assistant naval aide who would be in charge of the president’s kitchen.

  But at least the Americans knew they were safe. Army engineers had fumigated the place, checked all the electrical wiring, and inspected the foundation for booby traps or bombs. Secret service had assigned code names to each member of the party, in case their communications were intercepted. Truman was Kilting; Leahy was Coffeetree; Byrnes was Iceblink.

  In several nearby villas, Washington officials were settling in. A whole American neighborhood had been created here in Babelsberg, the villas marked “State Department” and “Chiefs of Staff” and “Foreign Office.” American flags flew from each, and U.S. military police patrolled the main road 24/7. Truman had issued strict orders that no American should “liberate” any items from any of these villas. No souvenirs. Each official was assigned a mess area and times when he could eat, and given information on the locations of bars where Americans could gather, where films would be shown, plus the locations of barbershops and laundry. Each man received a “Safeguard Your Health” memorandum, with instructions to drink water only from “authorized sources,” not to enter unauthorized buildings, and to consume only U.S. ration liquor, as “the cleanliness and purity” of foreign liquors were questionable.

  To accommodate all these figures, the army had requisitioned an extraordinary amount of materials: 5,000 linen sheets, 50 vacuum cleaners, 20 lawn mowers, 100 bedside lamps, 250 bottle openers, 250 corkscrews, 500 ashtrays, 25 reams of paper, 100 garbage baskets, 20 electric typewriters, and 3,000 rolls of toilet paper. All of Truman’s food would be served at his villa, where also his valet would handle his laundry. The army had flown in a physician for the president—Dr. Wallace Graham, who had attended wounded men at the D-day invasion and the Battle of the Bulge and had been wounded himself in the fighting. A Missourian, Dr. Graham would become Truman’s physician from this point onward, for the rest of Truman’s life.

  The president was exhausted from the journey. He had no way of knowing how long his sojourn in Europe would last. That night he cabled Matthew Connelly in the White House, instructing him to deliver the following message to Mrs. Truman: “Safely landed in Berlin. Things in good shape. Margie owes me two letters. Please call Mamma. Lots of love. Signed Harry.” Then he went to bed.

  He had a lot on his mind. The prime minister would be calling at the Little White House in the morning.

  ///

  At 11 a.m. on July 16, Winston Churchill appeared at Truman’s villa with members of his party, including his daughter Mary. Churchill, now seventy years old (nearly a decade older than Truman), was bleary-eyed. He was a night owl. As his daughter mentioned, to make this 11 a.m. appointment, Churchill had awoken earlier than he had in ten years. Truman had already been awake for four and a half hours.

  The president was slightly dubious about Churchill, for the prime minister had been at times demanding and irritating in his correspondence. “The difficulties with Churchill are very nearly as exasperating as they are with the Russians,” Truman had recently written in a letter to Eleanor Roosevelt. Churchill also enjoyed the patrician upbringing that instantly ingratiated him to Roosevelt—a background of wealth and social stature that Harry Truman lacked completely. Upon their first shake of hands, however, Truman fell for the prime minister.

  “I had an instant liking for this man who had done so much for his own country and for the Allied cause,” Truman later wrote. “There was something very open and genuine about the way he greeted me.”

  The pink-cheeked prime minister stood only five feet six, but he possessed a transcendent magnanimity. His life seemed to chart the very course of British history, starting in the military (he had served in Cuba, India, Egypt, and Sudan), then in government (he had been, at different times, secretary of state for war, secretary of state for the colonies, minister of defense, and, since 1940, prime minister). He was an accomplished landscape painter and the author of more than twenty books—histories, memoirs, and biographies.* Though his mother, Lady Randolph Churchill, was American-born, Churchill had come to symbolize Britain’s resolve. His speeches during the early war years, when the United Kingdom’s fate looked bleak at the hands of the Nazis, had inspired the will of the nation to fight, and like FDR, Churchill had a deep understanding of his place in time, the knowledge that his life would be chronicled by authors and warriors forever.

  Churchill had arrived in Germany the day before, like Truman, and was staying in a similar villa at 23 Ringstrasse, two blocks away—a six-minute walk. In addition to his daughter, the prime minister had with him his foreign minister, the First Earl of Avon, Anthony Eden, who would be at the prime minister’s side during the conference, and Alexander Cadogan, a British foreign affairs expert. With Byrnes present, the group enjoyed a two-hour social visit. Truman told the prime minister that he had prepared an agenda for the conference and asked Churchill if he had as well.

  “No,” the Briton said. “I don’t need one.” Truman must have wondered if the prime minister was overconfident. Either way, it was clear that Churchill had long grown accustomed to face-to-face diplomacy at its highest stakes.

  By the end of their first meeting, the prime minister came to understand what all believed to be Truman’s most noteworthy personal trait: his “obvious power of decision.” Truman invited personal friendship, and Churchill was moved. “I felt that here was a man of exceptional character and ability,” he wrote of his first impressions of Truman, “with an excellent outlook exactly along the lines of Anglo-American relations as they had developed, simple and direct methods of speech, and a great deal of self-confidence and resolution.”

  Before leaving, Churchill and Truman “struck a blow for liberty” with tumblers of whiskey. The meeting, all agreed, was wonderful. One of Churchill’s entourage, Cadogan, wrote in his diary: “P.M. delighted with Pres.”

  ///

  Truman was expecting to meet Stalin in the afternoon but was informed that the Soviet generalissimo was ill, so his arrival would await another day. Stalin, it turned out, was recovering from a mild heart attack. So Truman decided on an unscheduled tour of Berlin. He left the Little White House at 3:40 in an open car with Leahy and Byrnes beside him. The car turned onto the famed Autobahn, and along one side of the highway, the U.S. Second Armored Division was deployed—some eleven hundred jeeps, trucks, and tanks, probably the largest armored division in the world. When the president’s car stopped to greet the division’s commanding general, Leahy said, “This is the most powerful land force I have ever seen. I do not see how anybody could stop them if they really wanted to go somewhere.”

  The general responded, “Nobody has stopped them yet!”

  Turning toward the city center, Truman saw f
or the first time what the Allies had done to Berlin. American and British bombers had reduced the city to rubble—piles of it two and three stories high—while the Red Army had sprayed what little bits of buildings were still standing with machine-gun fire. “You could smell the effluvia of the unburied dead,” remembered journalist Robert Nixon, who was in a car following Truman’s. “It was a ghostly sight.” The stink of death, and of feces emanating from shattered buildings that were being used as outdoor toilets, was made more acute by stifling July heat. Through this destruction, Russian bulldozers had cleared a way for cars to travel.

  The sight of surviving Berliners left Truman in despair. He described “the long, never-ending procession of old men, women, and children wandering aimlessly along the Autobahn and the country roads carrying, pushing, or pulling what was left of their belongings.” There was little access to food, water, or shelter. Here was a woman trying to start a fire so that she could heat soup for her children. Here was a sign amidst the rubble reading NICHT FÜR JUDEN (Not for Jews). At the center of Berlin, the car turned down the Wilhelmstrasse to the remains of Hitler’s Reich Chancellery. Truman could now see the shattered balcony where the Nazi leader had so often addressed his brainwashed followers.

  “That’s what happens,” Truman said to Leahy and Byrnes, “when a man overreaches himself. I never saw such destruction. I don’t know whether they learned anything from it or not.”

  Truman had fought in a European war as a younger man and had seen war’s devastation. But he had never seen anything like Berlin in July 1945. In contrast to the Great War, World War II was a fully industrialized conflict. The French 75 cannon had given way to swarms of 60,000-pound, four-engine bomber aircraft capable of shredding whole cities. He wrote in a diary entry that night of his impression of Berlin. It had left him philosophical and fearful for the future of mankind.

  “I hope for some sort of peace—but I fear that machines are ahead of morals by some centuries and when morals catch up perhaps there’ll [be] no reason for any of it. I hope not. But we are only termites on a planet and maybe when we bore too deeply into the planet there’ll [be] a reckoning—who knows?”

  32

  AT THE BOMB TEST SITE IN NEW MEXICO, a desert gunnery range miles from any other sign of civilization, clocks read eight hours earlier than they did in Berlin. As Churchill and Truman were conferring in the Little White House for the first time on July 16, Robert Oppenheimer and General Leslie Groves were in a control bunker ten thousand yards from ground zero.

  In the darkness the desert skies had produced a furious squall. Thirty-mile-per-hour winds strafed the bunker, and thunder cracks shook the earth. The first atomic explosion was scheduled for 4 a.m., but the weather threatened everything. There was talk of postponement.

  “If we postpone,” said Oppenheimer, “I’ll never get my people up to pitch again.”

  Groves was adamant: This was the time. They had to get the Trinity test shot done before Truman sat down at the negotiating table in Potsdam. Besides, each day the war in the Far East continued, more American soldiers died.

  Every thirty minutes, Oppenheimer and Groves left their bunker and walked out into the stormy night to discuss the weather. The chief meteorologist, Jack Hubbard, promised that the storm would move on before sunrise. Was he right? Groves had no faith in the weatherman; he found Hubbard to be “obviously confused and badly rattled.” The group decided to push forward, postponing ninety minutes until 5:30 a.m.—which was not ideal, as the scientists needed Trinity to go off in darkness for the sake of the high-speed cameras. It had to be done not a minute past 5:30.

  Nerves had stretched to the breaking point. “There was an air of excitement at the camp that I did not like,” Groves later wrote, “for this was a time when calm deliberation was most essential.” He feared that one of these scientists might crack, that nervous collapse or even hysteria was imminent. “The strain had been great on all our people, and it was impossible to predict just when someone might give way under it. There was always the chance, too, that a trained saboteur might be present, either within or without the organization, awaiting an opportunity.”

  Enrico Fermi, the Italian physicist, worried that the storm could drench the scientists with radioactive rain, post-detonation. “There could be a catastrophe,” he warned Oppenheimer. In addition, a last-minute test of the firing mechanism had malfunctioned, and now the team believed there was a good chance Trinity would be a dud. This news had caused Oppenheimer to become highly emotional. Fermi also worried that, if the bomb did work, it could potentially ignite the atmosphere. To lighten the strain, the scientists took bets as to how big the explosion would be—if there would be one at all. Oppenheimer had bet conservatively: 3,000 tons TNT equivalent. Edward Teller—the brilliant Hungarian physicist, who later would become “the father of the hydrogen bomb”—bet the highest: 45,000 tons.

  The test site was sixty miles northwest of the tiny village of Alamogordo; the Spanish had referred to this stretch of rattlesnake-infested desert as Jornada del Muerto—historically translated as Journey of the Dead Man, or Journey of Death. The gadget itself hung 100 feet above the ground, inside a tower. The bomb looked like a ball with wires poking out in all directions, like some primordial organism, only it was encased in metal and was the size of a Volkswagen. It was a “Fat Man” implosion-type bomb, using plutonium enriched at the Hanford reactor.

  Oppenheimer’s team would remember the way he smoked cigarettes and drank black coffee during the early morning hours, unable to mask his anguish. At one point he cracked a book of Baudelaire poems, reading the verse quietly as lightning flashes lit up the night sky. (An aficionado of the written word, Oppenheimer had taken the name of the test shot—Trinity—from a John Donne poem.) “It was raining cats and dogs, lightning and thunder,” recalled Los Alamos scientist Isidor Rabi. “[We were] really scared [that] this object there in the tower might be set off accidentally. So you can imagine the strain on Oppenheimer.”

  Hundreds of scientists were spread out around the test site, which had three bunkers all situated at ten thousand yards. Others had gathered on Compania Hill, a viewing site twenty miles northwest of ground zero. The men were organized into groups according to function: Services, Shock and Blast, Measurements, Meteorology, Spectrographic and Photographic, Airborne Measurements, and Medical. Each man had dark glasses to protect the eyes. The observers were told to lie down and bury their faces in their arms at the moment of detonation. Few were intending to follow those orders, noted Edward Teller: “We were determined to look the beast in the eye.” One of the scientists recalled, “With the darkness and the waiting in the chill of the desert the tension became almost unbearable.”

  At 5:10 a.m. a Chicago physicist named Sam Allison announced over a loudspeaker from the control center: “It is now zero minus twenty minutes.” At zero minus five minutes, the soldiers guarding the tower that held the gadget climbed into jeeps and abandoned their posts, motoring to the safety of the control bunkers. As clocks ticked away the final minutes, everyone present took position. In Oppenheimer’s bunker, S-10000, observers watched him. He barely breathed, holding on to a post to steady himself. The shot was set to go off by automatic timer, and it was the job of a scientist named Donald Hornig to monitor it; in the final minute, Hornig would be the only one who could flip a switch to stop Trinity. “My hand was on the switch,” he recalled. “I could hear the timer counting . . . three . . . two . . . one . . .

  “Now!”

  ///

  “My first impression was one of tremendous light,” Groves recorded, “and then as I turned, I saw the now familiar fireball . . . The light had been so much greater than any human had previously experienced.”

  “All of a sudden, the night turned into day,” recalled scientist Joe Hirschfelder, “and it was tremendously bright; the chill turned into warmth; the fireball gradually turned from white to yellow to red as it grew in size and climbed into the sky.”

&nbs
p; General Thomas Farrell, the army’s chief of field operations at Los Alamos: “The lighting effects beggared description. The whole country was lighted by a searing light with the intensity many times that of the midday sun. It was golden, purple, violet, gray, and blue. It lighted every peak, crevasse and ridge of the nearby mountain range with a clarity and beauty that cannot be described but must be seen to be imagined.”

  The group watched as a mushroom cloud climbed to a height of over ten thousand feet. Farrell approached Groves and said to his boss, “The war is over.”

  Oppenheimer himself later recalled the moment. “We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita . . . ‘Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.’”

  Roughly thirty minutes later, General Groves called his contact in Washington, an official from the Interim Committee named George L. Harrison, by phone. One hour after that Groves called in more details. It was Harrison’s job to construct a cable to be sent to the secretary of war, now in Germany. Harrison wrote out the words in thinly veiled code with a note of comic relief, and at 9:30 a.m. eastern time he showed this cable to his superiors, who approved it. The cable fired off at 11:15 a.m. Washington time.

  In one of history’s more macabre ironies, the Trinity shot went off at roughly the moment when Harry Truman and Winston Churchill were striking a blow for liberty, unaware, thousands of miles away at the Little White House in Babelsberg.