The Accidental President: Harry S. Truman and the Four Months That Changed the World

by A.J. Baime

as Churchill put it, “If Hitler invaded Hell, I would make at least a favorable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons.”

“In reading the lives of great men,” he later wrote in a diary, “I found that the first victory they won was over themselves . . . Self-discipline with all of them came first.”

I began to see that the history of the world has moved in cycles and that very often we find ourselves in the midst of political circumstances which appear to be new but which might have existed in almost identical form at various times during the past six thousand years.

anti-German fervor swept across the United States. At countless lunch counters, sauerkraut became liberty cabbage, and frankfurters—named for the German city Frankfurt—became hot dogs.

the project forced a hard lesson on him. In politics, issues do not always pit right against wrong. Sometimes a politician is forced to choose the lesser of two evils. Truman discovered that one of the two judges working under him was collecting kickback money in the road-building program. He was forced to look the other way in order to prevent more injurious crimes from occurring and to keep on the good side of Boss Pendergast, who had given him his career.

The senator’s motto was “There is no substitute for a fact. When the facts are known, reasonable men do not disagree with respect to them.”

The war had accelerated the speed of modernization.

“There is complete economic, social and political collapse going on in Central Europe,” McCloy wrote, “the extent of which is unparalleled in history unless one goes back to the collapse of the Roman Empire, and even that may not have been as great an economic upheaval . . . One of the chief elements of disorder is the immense number of previously enslaved people who will be running around loose, as well as Germans who have been made homeless by the devastation of [the Allies’] victory.”

Roosevelt had promised when he entered the White House in 1933 that he would balance the budget, something the previous president, Hoover, had failed to do. However, FDR had subsequently been influenced by the British economist John Maynard Keynes, who argued that in times of emergency (such as the Great Depression and the war), “public authority must be called in aid to create additional current incomes through the expenditure of borrowed or printed money.” In other words, Keynes urged deficit spending. This radical theory, along with the spectacular rise in economic activity spurred by the war, was greatly responsible for pulling the United States out of the Depression.

Someday—and that someday would come soon, Truman could only hope—thousands of government-owned factories, building war materiel, would have to stop producing. As soon as the war ended, the federal government was set to cancel billions of dollars’ worth of war contracts almost instantly, and in fact, this process had already begun. Unemployment was predicted to skyrocket. Millions of soldiers would return from overseas with money earned fighting, money they would want to spend, which would only fuel further inflation.

Truman met with Rabbi Stephen Wise, president of the Zionist Organization of America, to discuss the critical issue of displaced Jews in Europe, who should be granted land in Palestine to form a Jewish state, the rabbi argued.

The war had forced integration as nothing ever had. However, about half of the employers in the United States still refused to hire black workers, and blacks were forbidden from serving alongside white soldiers in the military.

Three months earlier, at the end of the Yalta Conference, American-Soviet relations had reached a peak of goodwill. Now the State Department’s number two, Joseph Grew, had come to this conclusion: “A future war with Soviet Russia is as certain as anything in this world.”

Major General Curtis LeMay had dispatched 550 Superfortresses from bases in the Marianas. The attack wave swept low, under 10,000 feet, the planes slicing through Tokyo’s sky before sunrise and releasing canisters that ignited the city.

Firefighters abandoned whole neighborhoods to the flames to save the palace, leaving vast sections of Tokyo to burn. Search crews would collect the bodies from the ashes many hours later.

Of this new attack wave, LeMay later wrote in his memoirs: “We plastered the as-yet-unburned areas of Tokyo with nearly nine thousand tons of incendiaries on the 23rd and 25th.”

American newspapers reported the May 24 firebombing on their front pages. No outrage came from the American public. All the critics who had hurled calumny at the British for their willingness to bomb civilian population centers in Nazi Germany now remained silent. In fact, popular American opinion now seemed to embrace this form of warfare.

Only Secretary of War Stimson urged an end to the indiscriminate killing.

Stimson wrote in his diary. “First, because I did not want to have the United States get the reputation of outdoing Hitler in atrocities;

Why had the rules changed—from precision bombing to the firebombing of civilian neighborhoods? What about the Japanese was different, in the eyes of America, from the Third Reich?

American feelings toward the Japanese went beyond racism. A hatred had sunk deep into the American consciousness following Pearl Harbor, a hatred that did not come into play in the European war, even toward the Nazis.

Americans read about frenzies of killing by the Japanese, notably the Rape of Nanking in 1937. (“Japanese atrocities marked fall of Nanking,” the New York Times reported. “Nanking invaders executed 20,000.”) A cult of death among Japanese soldiers terrified the Allies and set these soldiers apart from the German forces fighting in Europe.

Atrocities committed by the Japanese could not be characterized as anything more evil than the Nazi Final Solution. But the Nazis had not attacked Americans on American soil. And among high-level military ranks, there was more to the story. It was the Japanese treatment of prisoners of war that sparked hatred toward the Eastern foe among Pentagon operatives, who would have had access to information regarding treatment of American and British POWs. Allied intelligence had plenty of evidence of beheadings, torture, and executions.

American military officials felt it their duty to finish the Japanese off at the cost of as few of their own soldiers as possible.

“Apparently, the atrocities by the Japs have never been told in the US; babies thrown up in the air and caught on bayonets, autopsies on living people, burning prisoners to death by sprinkling them with gasoline and throwing in a hand grenade to start a fire . . . More and more of the stories, which can apparently be substantiated. Stories of men and boys being killed while all girls and women from ten years of age upward were raped by 1 Jap division retreating from this section of Manila. They are not pretty stories but they explain why the Japs can expect anything . . . There is no feeling of sparing any Japs here, men, women, or children; gas, fire, anything to exterminate the entire race exemplifies the feeling.”

Roosevelt and subsequently Truman had demanded unconditional surrender of the Japanese, as they had demanded and achieved with the Nazis. Allowing the emperor to remain in power would be considered a major condition.

Truman understood the challenging nature of this proposition. He could not know, however, that this question would become a pivotal one in world history and would weigh heavily on his legacy.

“The mood of the United States is one of extraordinary friendliness. Americans appear to be more at ease with each other. They are more inclined to talk about national affairs, less inclined to argue. In short there is a cordiality in the air that this country hasn’t known in years.”

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.

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.

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 saw for 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.

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?”

Fifteen men sat at the negotiating table, five from each nation, and the rest of the advisors sat ringed around them. This table felt familiar to Truman, for it had the aura of a great big poker table. He eyed his opponents. He knew that they hoped to take advantage of him, the inexperienced one, who had been an obscure county judge just ten years earlier, and whose rise seemed still inexplicable.

Truman’s personality emerged early. He wanted efficient talks. He wanted the agenda for the next day’s discussions set before today’s were over. “I don’t want just to discuss,” he said, “I want to decide.”

Stalin, on the other hand, was laconic, friendly, and fiercely protective of his interests. Of all the poker faces Truman had ever stared down, none beat the Man of Steel.

The United States wanted democratic nations and political stability for the world, for reasons of moral righteousness, peace, and economic gain. There was a quest for balance of power. The Soviets wanted instability, an imbalance of power, for reasons of survival. For the Soviets, strong nations were threats, while weak nations were not.

There can be no exact date when the Cold War started. However, as historian Charles L. Mee Jr. has pointed out, the nuclear arms race is a different story: “The Twentieth Century’s nuclear arms race began at the Cecilienhof Palace at 7:30 p.m., on July 24, 1945.”

he had no idea that a new attack wave of B-29s was gunning for Japan on this day, with a second atomic bomb.

Truman was aware that a second bomb would be employed, but he gave no direct order for this mission. There was no button pushed, no paper trail that connects the president directly to Fat Man.

With Japan’s military rule disintegrating, a power vacuum was forming in the Far East. Even before the Japanese surrender, the race was on for control of China and Korea.

On August 12, the four-month anniversary of Roosevelt’s death, Edward R. Murrow offered a point of view over CBS Radio regarding the war’s end: “Secular history offers few, if any, parallels to the events of the past week. And seldom, if ever, has a war ended leaving the victors with such a sense of uncertainty and fear, with such a realization that the future is obscure and that survival is not assured.”

As Jonathan Daniels wrote of Truman, “Americans felt leaderless when Roosevelt died. Truman taught them, as one of them, that their greatness lies in themselves.”

While he was president, he kept a quotation of Abraham Lincoln in a leather portfolio on his desk. It read, “I do the very best I know how—the very best I can; and I mean to keep doing so to the end. If the end brings me out all right, what is said against me won’t amount to anything. If the end brings me out wrong, ten angels swearing I was right won’t make any difference.”