Where the Buck Stops

by Harry Truman

  But the simple truth of the matter is that, though Russia needed us when Hitler double-crossed Stalin, we also needed Russia. Roosevelt felt, and I agree, that without the participation of Russia, there was a good chance that we couldn’t have won the war. If the Russians had stayed with Hitler, and if Hitler had been smart and kept the Russians on his side, there’s certainly little chance that we could have won the war in Western Europe. Russia had 7 million men in the field, and we only had 1.6 million. Do your own figuring. I believe that despite all our mobilization, and despite all the tremendous industrial might that the United States was about to turn on, we still couldn’t have done it without Russia. If Russia wasn’t on our side, I truly feel that the war might not have been won. And that’s not just because Germany had Japan on its side. We did manage to whip Japan eventually, even though it took terrible measures to do it. But if Hitler had used his head, I’m not so certain that we could have whipped the Germans. Don’t forget that Hitler conquered France and all of Western Europe. If he had stayed out of Russia, he would have had the world by the tail because he had that deal with Stalin. But then, luckily for us and the rest of the world, he went crazy, or crazier than ever, and he made the same mistake that Napoleon made. And that’s when we were able to put him out of business.

  Roosevelt has also been criticized about the meeting with Stalin at Yalta, in the Crimea, in February 1945, during which postwar plans were discussed and Roosevelt and Churchill agreed to give Russia a strong position in Germany after the war by dividing that country into four zones - American, British, French, and Russian, of course - and also agreed to restore Port Arthur, in China, to its former status as a Soviet naval base, which it had been before the Russo-Japanese War in 1904, plus some other concessions. In return for this, Russia agreed to join us in the war against Japan, and also join a new organization that would be called the United Nations. And the argument here was that we really didn’t need Russia to win the war against Japan, and didn’t need them in the new organization, so why make concessions to them?

  Roosevelt has even been criticized about Yalta on other grounds: that he shouldn’t have gone to Yalta personally because it was “demeaning” for an American president to make that big trip, and because he was a very sick man at that point and lacked the strength to negotiate forcefully. Well, I saw Roosevelt immediately after he got back from Yalta, and I made the arrangements for his appearance on the Hill, and he was as spirited and clearheaded as ever. He certainly showed his physical deterioration and weakness, and I think he surprised some people when he addressed Congress for the first time from a wheelchair, but he’d been growing weaker physically for some time and it affected in no way his ability to function and to negotiate. People who interpreted his physical appearance to mean that he hadn’t fared well in his negotiations with Stalin were absolutely misreading the situation.

  I think Roosevelt made a good deal at Yalta, and all I can say is that everybody ought to read the protocol and agreement that was made there, and then read the protocol and agreement that was made at Potsdam, and they’ll find that they would have been just fine if the Russians had kept the agreements. We wanted the Russians to feel they were part of our team in Germany because we didn’t want any belated thinking on their part that a new Russian-German partnership, using German technology and Russian military strength and physical resources, might be very nice - and don’t think there was no danger of that even at that late date. And we also felt, as I still feel, that the United Nations will eventually bring about world peace and that the organization would be incomplete and almost pointless without a major country like Russia in it.

  And the same answer applies to people who felt that it was unnecessary or demeaning for the president of the United States, in his frail condition, to go all the way to Yalta to meet Stalin. That had been the policy all along. Roosevelt had been to Casablanca and to Teheran and to Cairo, and the trip to Yalta was just a continuation of the effort to achieve world peace. Would I have gone if I’d been president at the time? Under the circumstances, of course, I would have. Not to accommodate Stalin. To accommodate myself and try to get peace in the world. Roosevelt didn’t go to accommodate Stalin. He went with the idea that he was going to win world peace and keep it with the United Nations; that’s what he went for. We had to have Stalin’s support. I had to send a man to Stalin myself to get Molotov to agree to the United Nations charter after it was made up.

  The trouble, of course, was that Russia didn’t live up to the agreements, but nobody could really have predicted that in advance. Roosevelt certainly didn’t show any signs of discouragement when I saw him after he came back from Yalta. I don’t think he was in any way of the opinion that Stalin wouldn’t keep his agreements, and after talking to Roosevelt, I felt the same way when I went down to Potsdam.

  Potsdam was a meeting for the purpose of implementing agreements with Russia that had been begun all the way back in Quebec, early in the game. I went there with the expectation that everything would be in shipshape condition. I didn’t go to make any new agreements; I went there for assurance that there’d be no modification of previous agreements. I went for confirmation of what had been done at the four meetings previous to Potsdam, and when the Potsdam Conference was over, everything had been agreed to and all of us had confidence that Stalin would keep his engagements. There was no indication at all at the time that Stalin would eventually behave the way he did. You had to believe someone, and Stalin was speaking for Russia.

  It was easy to make agreements with Stalin, and it wasn’t until later that we all found out that the reason it was so easy to make agreements with him was that he didn’t intend to keep the agreements. Later on, Churchill was very critical of Russia, but that was just hindsight; he was right there with Roosevelt at Yalta and with me at Potsdam, and he was certainly willing to make agreements, wasn’t he? Churchill felt the same way that Roosevelt and I did. He was there and made the agreements in both instances. He thought the Russians were all right, and so did I, and so did everybody else who was there.

  There was no thought about our ideological differences on the part of the Russians while we were saving their skins, not after the Germans approached within reach of Moscow and Leningrad. The objective of the Russians then was to get with the people who could save them. And we did save them: we sent equipment - $6.5 billion worth of equipment - through the Caspian Sea and the Persian Gulf. If it hadn’t been for that approach, the Russians would have been pulverized by Hitler. I don’t in the slightest way share the opinion some people developed in retrospect that we made a mistake in helping Russia because we had to save Russia to save ourselves; if Hitler had succeeded in pulverizing Russia at the time he had a chance to do it, where would we be?

  It’s a pity, of course, that the Russians showed their ingratitude so quickly. But it’s that way with so many people you help when they’re down; they get up and find they’re working again and working well, and they think they did it all themselves. The Russians obviously decided they did it all themselves, and after Potsdam, Stalin began to break every agreement he’d made. He broke twenty agreements he’d made with Roosevelt, and he broke thirty-two with me. I don’t know how you’re going to be able to tell in advance that a man is going to make agreements and then break them; I guess you just can’t. Perhaps, thinking about it, he really even intended to stick by his agreements up to and including the time of the Potsdam Conference. He’d certainly appeared to be a friend of the West at Casablanca and Cairo and Teheran, and at Yalta and Potsdam as well. But he changed dramatically after Potsdam, Perhaps he came to the conclusion that he was independent and out of danger and could do as he damn pleased - that he was now comfortably in a position where he could gain his objectives without the help or the friendship of the West, and that’s what brought it about.

  The Russians began to ignore promises they’d made in connection with Berlin, Greece, Turkey, and the Near East, and if we hadn’t met the problems effect
ively and decisively, I think we might have been in a bad fix. For example, they’d agreed to withdraw their troops from Azerbaijan, and they didn’t do it. So we ordered a fleet into the Persian Gulf and told the Russians we were sending in divisions, and they moved out. The same thing happened with Tito at Trieste, when he made up his mind that he was going to take over Trieste. And I sent him word that all right, come on, we have divisions and fleets there to meet him, and he didn’t come. That seems to be the only kind of language some people understand. It’s a shame that it’s so, but it’s the truth. And when the Japanese surrender took place, I made it a point to be careful to keep the Russians out of Japan in view of the way they’d behaved in Western Europe. I definitely didn’t want them in on the occupation of Japan.

  Well, I’ve delineated Franklin Roosevelt’s faults, and as you can see, they didn’t amount to a hill of beans. But if you’re still wondering why I consider him perhaps our greatest president, my heavens, all you have to do is look at the incredible number of things accomplished in his fruitful years in office.

  The Emergency Relief program, which kept people from starving in the streets, was established during his administration. The FDIC, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, which insures deposits in savings banks and keeps them safe, was established during his administration. The FSLIC, the Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation program, which insures deposits and keeps them safe in savings and loan institutions, was established during his administration. The WPA, the Works Progress Administration, to give employment to people who didn’t want to subsist on handouts, and which resulted in the building of 75,000 bridges, 650,000 miles of highways and roads, and 125,000 national and local government buildings, and helped develop some of our country’s best artists, musicians, actors and actresses, and authors, was established during his administration. The Social Security Act, which made sure that elderly people had at least a minimum amount of money on which to live after they stopped working, was established during his administration.

  And so was the TVA, the Tennessee Valley Authority, which used the Tennessee River and other waters to bring electricity and other advantages to seven especially depressed states; and the SEC, the Securities and Exchange Commission; and the Wagner Act, which prohibited employers from discrimination against unions and union members and allowed workers to bargain collectively; and the CCC, the Civilian Conservation Corps, which gave healthy outdoor jobs, things like tree-planting and road-building and flood control, to over 3 million young men who would otherwise have been idle and bitter on city streets; and the FHA, the Federal Housing Authority, which guaranteed mortgage loans and kept the building of homes going instead of grinding to a halt; and the REA, the Rural Electrification Administration, which brought electricity to hundreds of areas previously ignored by the big utility companies because they were sparsely populated and considered potentially unprofitable by those companies; and dozens of other programs along similar lines. It’s hard to believe that these essential programs weren’t around before Roosevelt came along, but they weren’t. And many of these things are still with us, of course, so is it any wonder that I feel about him as I do - or that you should, too?

  And then all at once, on that terrible spring day in 1945, Franklin Roosevelt wasn’t with us any longer. He was in Warm Springs, Georgia, planning to remain there for a three-week vacation, and the day was particularly relaxed. Franklin was working on a speech, an artist named Elizabeth Shoumatoff was looking over at him and working on his portrait, and his cousin Margaret Suckley was sitting and crocheting. Then suddenly the President said, “I have a terrific headache,” and lapsed into unconsciousness, and at 4:35 p.m. he was dead of a cerebral hemorrhage. The words he’d written before that were both memorable and typical of his thinking: “The only limit to our realization of tomorrow will be our doubts of today. Let us move forward with strong and active faith.” It was a simple restatement of his famous philosophy: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”

  And then, just as suddenly, I was president of the United States.

  Sam Rayburn, the speaker of the House, had asked me to come over to his Capitol office that afternoon and discuss some bills on which the Senate and the House weren’t seeing eye to eye, and when I got there, Sam was sitting and talking with two other men, Jim Barnes, a White House legislative assistant, and Lew Deschler, the House parliamentarian. Sam started to mix us some drinks, and then mentioned, almost as an afterthought, that Steve Early, the President’s press secretary, had called and asked that I call him as soon as I got there. Sam obviously didn’t think it was anything important, and neither did I, but I returned the call, of course. And Steve told me, “Please come over here” - to the White House, that is - “as quickly and quietly as you can.”

  I went over immediately, stopping only to get my hat and tell one of my secretaries where I was going, and I walked out to my car and driver so quickly that the Secret Service didn’t know where I was and spent some frenzied minutes catching up with me. But I still didn’t have the faintest guess of what had happened. And I wrote to my mother and to my sister, Mary, a few days later, “I thought that the President had come to Washington to attend the funeral of the Episcopal Bishop Atwood, for whom he was an honorary pallbearer, and who was his good friend. I thought that possibly he wanted me to do some special liaison work with the Congress . . .” Then I was taken up to Eleanor Roosevelt’s study on the second floor of the White House, where she was with Steve Early, her daughter Anna, and Anna’s husband, John Boettiger. And then I knew, from the look on their faces, what had happened even before Eleanor put her hand on my shoulder and said, “Harry, the President is dead.” And when I asked her, “Is there anything I can do for you?” her answer was, “Is there anything we can do for you? You’re the one in trouble now.”

  Just the day before, I’d joked about being the vice president when I addressed a group of newspapermen covering the Senate. One of them called me Mr. Vice President and I said, “Smile when you say that,” and I told them that the Senate was the greatest place in the world and that I wished I was still a senator. “I was getting along fine,” I said, “until I stuck my neck out too far and got too famous. And then they made me VP and now I can’t do anything.” But now I wasn’t the vice president any longer, and there was plenty to do.

  I won’t deny that, at first, I felt plenty of fear myself at the added and overwhelming responsibilities that had come to me so suddenly. I tried to deal with it lightly, telling Mrs. Truman that I thought I’d make a good president because Abraham Lincoln and I had so much in common. And when she looked hard at me, probably wondering if I was turning pompous in my old age, I told her that I wasn’t comparing myself to Lincoln in terms of intelligence or administrative ability or anything really significant like that. But at least, I said, Lincoln and I had three other things in common.

  First of all, I said, Lincoln and I were alike in that we both didn’t like to hunt and didn’t like to fish. He didn’t like to kill anything, and I didn’t like to kill anything, either. Second, I said, I think Lincoln and I both had a sense of humor; and, I told Mrs. Truman, a sense of humor is a tremendous help to any man in a position of authority. Because when a stuffed shirt tries to tell a man in a place of responsibility what he ought to do, the best way to settle the argument with him is to stick a pin in him and let the wind out - and if you have a sense of humor, you’ll have a good time doing it. And third, Lincoln and I both went broke in business. Lincoln’s partner went broke in business, and Lincoln ended up owing $1,100. Lincoln also didn’t mind the store because he was always lying behind the notions counter reading newspapers and books to keep himself informed. Well, my old partner, Eddie Jacobson, says that when our business was going broke, customers would come in all right but I was always in a corner reading about Andrew Jackson. I’ll admit that I’ve probably read more about Jackson than anyone else in the country. It took us a long time to pay off our creditors, too. It was
1935 before they were all settled and taken care of.

  I also thought a lot, in those early days, about my start in politics and the road that had taken me to where I was right then. I guess that my political career started around 1912, when Wilson became president of the United States, and I became postmaster of Grandview, Missouri, population around 300 people. It was also my first experience with bipartisan politics. That part of the country was unanimously Democratic; there were about 230 voters, and the Washington Township precinct for Grandview was the voting place for Grandview, and I don’t suppose there were over forty Republicans in the whole layout. But, of course, they had a Republican postmaster during the Republican administration, before Wilson came in, and that was a girl who was the secretary of the Eastern Star and all that kind of business, and a good friend of my sister’s, and also the daughter of a man named L. C. Hall, who ran a threshing machine in the neighborhood and threshed all the wheat and everything else and was one of the best friends that my father and I had. Well, when Wilson was elected, they wanted a Democratic postmaster, and they couldn’t think of anybody better, so they made me postmaster.

  But I was also the road overseer in Washington Township along with my father; he was the road overseer, and I was his deputy and did most of the work until he died in 1916, so I appointed the Hall girl deputy postmaster, and she just kept on running it as she had during the Republican administration. I guess I was postmaster three or four years. And then I went into the First World War as a lieutenant in the artillery and she continued to run things at the post office even though she was a Republican, so you see what I mean about bipartisanship.