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

by A.J. Baime

In a 1945 Gallup poll, in which Americans were asked to name world history’s greatest figure, the country put Roosevelt first, ahead of Abraham Lincoln and Jesus Christ.

Where were christians

It was also a time of massacre, when the U.S. military committed acts it still struggles to justify more than seventy years later.

Nazis did this not America

In a town full of East Coast money and stuffed pinstriped suits, guests of the Trumans gathered quickly that the family had little means. The press made colorful headlines of the fact that Bess Truman had no maid; the VP’s wife did her own cooking and washing. (The Trumans’ bank account measured $4,251.12 on this day, though more than $3,000 was owed to the Hamilton National Bank of Washington, from a loan.)

He liked a morning walk—120 paces a minute, “regular Army marching speed,” as he said, every step like a hammer driving in a nail. He was the first VP assigned secret service detail. “You had to get up early,” recalled one secret service man, “because he came out at six o’clock or six-fifteen a.m.”

Eighty miles northeast of Frankfurt on the morning of April 12, the supreme commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force, General Dwight Eisenhower, stepped through the gates of the Ohrdruf death camp, witnessing for the first time the horrors of the Nazi Final Solution. Flanked by Generals George Patton and Omar Bradley, with dozens of military police, army officers, and infantrymen trailing behind, Eisenhower took it all in—the visions and odors of death and torture assaulting his senses.

Like innumerable other Americans, Eisenhower had read of these death camps; now the general was seeing the evidence with his own eyes. He felt it his “duty” to witness the camp’s “every nook and cranny.” In the camp’s center courtyard, dozens of human bodies lay where they had fallen, victims of point-blank gunshots less than two weeks earlier. The Nazis had done this work as they fled Ohrdruf. As Eisenhower would later learn, some twelve thousand prisoners from Ohrdruf had been forced on a death march to Buchenwald, some forty-five miles away, as the Allied troops closed in. In one section of the camp, Eisenhower saw a makeshift crematorium with piles of charred remains. Living inmates with the strength to move demonstrated for the fifty-four-year-old Texas-born general how they had been tortured by the Nazis. Others stared at Eisenhower silently, too fatigued to move the muscles in their faces. The experience, as the general would later recall, strengthened the sense of justice that had been the driving force of his work.

He urged Washington to organize a group of American journalists to come to Europe to begin documenting these horrors at once. There were still those who claimed “the stories of Nazi brutality were just propaganda,” Eisenhower believed. “I felt that the evidence should be immediately placed before the American and British publics in a fashion that would leave no room for cynical debate.”

Nothing symbolized the federal government’s wartime work frenzy more than the new Pentagon, the largest office building on earth, situated on the other side of the Potomac River from the White House next to the Arlington National Cemetery. Completed in 1942, it stood five stories high, with 6.5 million square feet of offices, enough space to keep an army of janitors waxing the floors all year long.

According to a national poll published just as the Chicago convention was set to start in July 1944, only 2 percent of Democratic voters hoped to see Truman as the VP nominee on the ticket with Roosevelt, with five other names ahead of him on the list. Not long before Truman was chosen, Roosevelt had said of the senator from Missouri, “I hardly know Truman.” “I knew almost nothing about him,” Admiral William Leahy, FDR’s chief of staff, said of Truman. Even at the height of the 1944 campaign, as the VP nominee toured the nation stumping for Roosevelt, “Truman [was] still unknown to millions despite [the] fanfare,” according to the Washington Post. Only 55 percent of Americans could name Roosevelt’s running mate, according to a national poll.

The VP before Truman, Henry Wallace, bragged that he had never had so much time to work on his tennis game. “The Vice President has not much to do,” Truman said, referring to himself as a “political Eunuch.” When asked what he would do with his “spare time,” he answered: “Study history.”

Only the vice president’s most inner circle knew that Truman suffered acute anxiety. He had failed to crack the inner circle of Roosevelt’s trusted advisors and in fact knew almost nothing about what was going on in the Oval Office. During his eighty-two days as VP leading up to April 12, 1945, Truman had visited the president on official business just twice. He was terrified by what he saw. According to the Washington rumor mill, Roosevelt had suffered a stroke, a heart attack, cancer of the prostate, a nervous breakdown—the story changed every day.

This hospital was one of the few places where Roosevelt would allow the public to see him in his wheelchair, for he believed he could lift these patients’ spirits by rolling out from behind the façade that hid his disability from the rest of the world. He had first come to Warm Springs in 1924, hoping for some miracle cure for his polio, a miracle that had never come. But he loved the place, so he built a six-room white cottage with four colonnades out front in 1933 (the year he took office) and visited often with his dog, Fala, to recuperate from the stress of his job. All the rooms were on one floor, easily maneuvered by wheelchair. Due to the white paint and the colonnades out front, the cottage became known as “the Little White House.”

In the next few years State Department staff in Moscow had witnessed the Great Purge—the bizarre disappearance and subsequent murder of so-called dissidents in the Soviet Union under Stalin’s orders. Many of these victims, it seemed, were innocent of any crime. The Soviet dictator was intent on rooting out the slightest hint of political challenge, and paranoia gripped a populace of some 170 million people. “The purge was everywhere,” remembered the Moscow embassy’s Charles Bohlen. “The number of arrests, exiles, and executions would eventually reach 9 to 10 million—the figure now generally accepted . . . I found no evidence for a conclusion that [Stalin] was mentally unbalanced in the usual sense of the term, although obviously there must have been something wrong with a man who would send millions of people to senseless deaths.”

1934

George Kennan, another young diplomat among the first wave of Americans at the Moscow embassy, came to the following conclusion: “Never—neither then nor at any later date—did I consider the Soviet Union a fit ally or associate, actual or potential, for this country.”

Roosevelt believed that the United States and the Soviet Union would emerge from the war as close allies. “I just have a hunch that Stalin is not that kind of man . . . He won’t try to annex anything and will work with me for a world of democracy and peace,” Roosevelt had told Bullitt. “It’s my responsibility and not yours, and I’m going to play my hunch.”

Bad hunch still in 2019

In the future, many historians would look back on the Roosevelt presidency and find his greatest fault to be his failure to brief his vice president on the critical shift in global affairs, for Roosevelt would not live to see this narrative play out.

And to increase federal government

At the moment of Roosevelt’s death, Truman was presiding over the Senate. Twenty-two minutes after, at 4:57 p.m., the Senate adjourned. Truman headed for what he called his “gold-plated office”—his second office, the traditional office of the vice president (which he rarely used), near the Senate Chamber in the Capitol. When he arrived a phone call was waiting for him from Sam Rayburn, the Speaker of the House.

Labor secretary Frances Perkins was the next to arrive in the Cabinet Room. Perkins was a legend among American women, as she was the only female ever to serve in the cabinet, and had held her position since 1933. No one had ever served as labor secretary longer.

Awkward moments passed while various people went hunting through the White House for a Bible. Truman preferred to use the Bible his grandfather had given him, which was sitting at that moment on a shelf in his Senate office. There was no time to fetch it. The one produced was an inexpensive Gideon edition found in the desk drawer of White House head usher Howell Crim.

In the quiet confines of the White House Red Room, Truman had a moment to gather his thoughts. Stettinius asked him if the San Francisco conference should be called off. This was the international meeting in which representatives of governments from all over the world were set to gather in less than two weeks, to attempt to form a charter for the new United Nations peace organization. Truman was emphatic: the conference should go on. And with that, he had made his first decision as president.

There was a matter of terrific importance to discuss, Stimson told Truman, a matter of grave secrecy. “He wanted me to know about an immense project that was under way,” Truman later recalled, “a project looking to the development of a new explosive of almost unbelievable destructive power.” Truman had heard whispers of some strange military program that was costing taxpayers millions.

First, women were sacrosanct. “No one could make remarks about my aunts or my mother in my father’s presence without getting into serious trouble,” Harry later wrote. And then there was work and honor. “He was one of the hardest working men that ever lived,” Harry said of his father. “He raised my brother and myself to believe that honor is worth more than money. And that’s the reason we never got rich.”

His dad

When she noticed Harry having trouble with small print, she took him to a Chinese doctor in Kansas City (an all-day horse-and-buggy round trip), who diagnosed him with “flat eyeballs” and fitted him with glasses. The spectacles were expensive, so Harry was forbidden from playing sports. “It was very unusual for children to wear glasses then,” recalled Mize Peters, a schoolmate of Harry’s. “Kids had a tendency to make fun of people who wore glasses. They’d call him four-eyes. But it didn’t seem to bother him to be called that.”

His mom who taught him

One morning Harry’s mother took him to a new church school. “When I was about six or seven years old,” he later wrote in a diary, “my mother took me to Sunday School and I saw there the prettiest sweetheart little girl I’d ever seen . . . She had tanned skin, blond hair, golden as sunshine, and the most beautiful blue eyes.” Her name was Elizabeth “Bess” Wallace. Her family lived at 608 North Delaware, in a fashionable house with a cupola and a broad porch. The Wallaces were different from the Trumans, who were farm people. Bess Wallace’s father, David, was a prominent town figure, “the most popular man in the county at that time,” according to a schoolmate of Harry and Bess’s, Henry Chiles.

Bess Wallace was everything Harry was not. She was fashionable, athletic, and popular. Harry, in his own words, “was never popular. The popular boys were the ones who were good at games and had big, tight fists. I was never like that. Without my glasses I was blind as a bat, and to tell the truth, I was kind of a sissy. If there was any danger of getting into a fight, I always ran.”

“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.”

On August 23, 1898, upon Mamma Truman’s suggestion, Harry’s father made his first fifty-dollar payment on a piano. It was a W. W. Kimball purchased on credit from a music store in Kansas City, and getting it home to Independence was a chore. Harry was drawn to the instrument. He began traveling into Kansas City twice a week for lessons. Most days his brother and sister would awake before sunrise to the sound of his fingers on the keys.

When Independence High School’s graduating class of 1901 posed for a picture, twenty-four girls and nine boys stared into the camera lens, all gathered on the stairs in front of the school’s doors. Among these students was a future president, a First Lady, and a presidential press secretary. Behind the group, looming above, was a stained glass window with a Latin phrase displayed prominently: JUVENTUS SPES MUNDI. “Youth, the hope of the world.”

There was no inclination that the future held anything else for him—until the cake-plate incident. One day in 1910, twenty-six-year-old Harry was visiting his cousins Ethel and Nellie Noland. Across the street lived Bess Wallace with her mother, Mrs. Madge Wallace. (Bess and her mother had moved to this house, at 219 North Delaware—the home of Bess’s maternal grandparents, which the family had purchased back in 1867.) On this day, there was a cake plate at the Nolands’ that needed returning to the Wallaces. Harry saw opportunity. He walked the plate across the street and knocked on the door, and there appeared Bess Wallace.

“Aunt Ella [Harry’s aunt Ella Noland] told me to thank your mother for the cake,” Harry said. “I guess I ought to thank her too. I had a big piece.” Bess smiled. “Come in,” she said. On that evening, Harry and Bess began a relationship that was not to end until Harry passed away sixty-two years later.

“Politics sure is the ruination of many a good man,” Harry wrote Bess. “Between hot air and graft he usually loses not only his head but his money and friends as well. Still, if I were rich I’d just as soon spend my money buying votes and offices as yachts and autos. Success seems to me to be merely a point of view anyway . . . “To succeed financially,” Harry concluded, “a man can’t have any heart. To succeed politically he must be an egotist or a fool or a ward boss tool.”

His mother surprised him with a wad of money, cash she had squirreled away so that her oldest son could buy the family’s first automobile. For $650, Harry purchased a used 1911 Stafford, built right in Kansas City. The car put his ambitions on wheels, especially when it came to Bess Wallace. (In 1914 nothing worked to woo a woman like a sixty-mile-per-hour motorcar.) Harry became a regular guest at the Wallaces’ on Sundays. Bess’s brothers George and Frank took to him, with his easygoing charm, but Bess’s mother, Mrs. Wallace, was ice cold. “Mrs. Wallace wasn’t a bit in favor of Harry,” recalled one of the Noland family. “And she says, ‘You don’t want to marry that farm boy, he is not going to make it anywhere.’”

(While the British denied this claim, evidence in recent years suggests the Germans were correct—the Lusitania was apparently carrying munitions.) Americans were repulsed. “The country was horrified,” recalled Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts. If President Wilson asked for war, Lodge said, “he would have had behind him . . . the enthusiastic support of the whole American people.” When German leaders announced unrestricted naval warfare—the right to sink American merchant ships—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.

In March 1917, German submarines sank three unarmed American merchant ships—the Vigilancia, the City of Memphis, and the Illinois—killing many aboard. Reaction in America was violent. “[Germany] is firing upon our ships, sinking them, destroying or endangering the lives of our citizens,” the New York Times responded. “This is the very essence of war.” When President Wilson polled his cabinet, all ten men voted for war, some with tears streaming down their faces.

Wilson’s speech would be remembered as one of the century’s milestones. “I advise that the Congress declare the recent course of the Imperial German government to be in fact nothing less than war against the government and people of the United States,” he said. It would be “a war to end all wars,” he declared, to “make the world safe for democracy.”

Democracy was dead already

On the Fourth of July, 1917, he showed up at Bess’s house in his new uniform. She wept on his shoulder and asked that they get married. After all those years of courtship, he refused: “I don’t think it would be right for me, to ask you to tie yourself to a prospective cripple—or a sentiment.”

He received orders to ship out ahead of his unit to attend Overseas School Detail in France, so he closed out the canteen and sold his Stafford for $200. On March 20, 1918, he boarded a train. In New York he loaded up on a half dozen pairs of glasses, all pince-nez—the kind that pinch the nose, with no arms, since the arms would get in the way of the seal when he donned his gas mask on the battlefield.

The first 100,000 U.S. troops under General Pershing were headed to the front lines as Harry spent his first days in France. Here he learned to fire the “French 75”—World War I’s most heralded gun. It could blast a 75-millimeter shell 4.25 miles, at a rate of fifteen rounds per minute. The gun weighed more than three thousand pounds, and rolled on pneumatic tires, so it could be towed into position by car or horse from one battlefield to the next. It required an understanding of trajectory theory as well as mechanics.

He had just been given command of Battery D, the most incorrigible doughboys in the service. “I think of Battery D as the most mischievous, unpredictable, and difficult-to-handle unit in the whole AEF [American Expeditionary Forces],” recalled one member, Harry Murphy. “Most of the young fellows were athletes of some kind,” recalled Battery D soldier Floyd Ricketts. “I was a semipro ballplayer around Kansas City, and there were fighters, and football players, and basketball players.” Harry was no athlete. Battery D soldiers were predominantly Irish and German Catholics, and Harry was no Catholic, either. He had heard that four other commanders had tried to browbeat Battery D into line, and all had failed.

Bess wrote him, “You may invite the entire 35th Division to your wedding if you want to. I guess it’s going to be yours as well as mine.”

Even on Truman’s wedding day, destiny was at work. On this same day—June 28, 1919—President Wilson signed the Treaty of Versailles in France, a treaty that was meant to bring on lasting peace but was in fact ill constructed and destined to fail.

The suit cost Harry $65, and his best man let him have it on credit, since Truman had spent quite a bit on a wedding ring, purchased in New York on his way home from Europe. The reception was at Bess’s home, and if there was one awkward element, it was the mothers. Bess’s mother, Mrs. Wallace, had never been fond of the “farm boy” from Grandview. As for Mamma Truman, she was escorted from the affair at the end by best man Ted Marks. “Well, now, Mrs. Truman,” Marks said, “you’ve lost Harry.” She looked at him with fierce blue eyes (“I can see her face to this day,” Marks remarked decades later). “Indeed I haven’t,” Mamma Truman said.

In May 1922 he drove his Dodge all over the county, knocking on doors. His platform had two major selling points: (1) Honesty. Truman promised not to filch county purses, as was custom in the past. His family had lived in this rural community for years, and people knew the Trumans to be trustworthy and true to their word; and (2) Roads. Henry Ford’s Model Ts had swarmed the county, and Truman believed that a new arterial system of paved roads would usher Jackson County into the future.

He left out one piece of information, the key to machine politics: in return for favors, people would be in Pendergast’s debt. Which meant he told them how to vote, so he controlled elections throughout Jackson County. It was Boss Tom Pendergast—racehorse gambler, saloon owner, the “Big Fellow” and “Democratic Czar” of Kansas City—who really had his fingers on the county purse strings.

It is highly likely that the Pendergasts had engineered the win. As Truman scholar Robert H. Ferrell once wrote: “Certainly Mike and Tom Pendergast used repeaters [repeat voters] . . . They not only took care that absent voters had ballots cast for them, they even voted the dead—a well-known quip on election day was, ‘Now is the time for all good cemeteries to come to the aid of the party.’” Still, Truman emerged victorious and unscathed.

Happens today too

In 1924, after his first two-year term, he lost his bid for reelection (it would be the only election he would ever lose). But he won again in 1926—not as eastern judge but as presiding judge, the county’s chief executive. By this time, Boss Tom Pendergast had become Missouri’s political kingmaker.

Harry wrote bitterly of this crooked judge, in a diary entry: “This sweet associate of mine, my friend, who was supposed to back me, had already made a deal with a former crooked contractor, a friend of the Boss’s . . . I had to compromise in order to get the voted road system carried out . . . I had to let . . . a friend of the Boss’s steal about $10,000 from the general revenues of the county to satisfy my ideal associate and keep the crooks from getting a million or more out of the bond issue. Was I right or did I compound a felony? I don’t know.” As far as the public knew, Truman had come through on his word—spent $6.5 million, every penny honestly.

Two election workers were shot dead, and numerous others were injured. Reporters investigating whether Pendergast’s operatives were “running repeaters” (repeat voters) were assaulted by hoodlums from one precinct to another. The Washington Post reported “outbreaks of gunplay, kidnapping, slugging and fist-fights . . . Tom Pendergast’s Democratic organization tonight moved like a steam roller.”

Truman drove the family a thousand miles straight east to Washington. “I was nearly 51 years old at the time, [and] I was as timid as a country boy arriving on the campus of a great university for the first year,” he later wrote. Bess picked out a furnished apartment in a red brick building at 3016 Tilden Street, about five miles from where Truman’s office would be. The four-room apartment was not much bigger than their garage in Independence. The $150 rent made Truman’s eyes bulge; he borrowed money from a local bank and filled the little home with furniture. The new job would raise his salary to $10,000, but that would still make Harry “undoubtedly the poorest Senator financially in Washington,” as he said. As a consolation to Margie, he rented a piano from a local shop.

On January 3, 1935, Truman entered the Senate gallery for the first time, prepared to take the oath. Before the ceremony, he was called into the vice president’s office down a corridor, where Vice President John Nance “Cactus Jack” Garner of Texas awaited him. Other freshman senators gathered, all strangers to Truman. “Men,” Garner said, “before we enter into these ceremonies I’d like to have you all join me in striking a blow for liberty.” Garner pulled out a bottle “that looked like corn liquor,” according to one man present, and poured shots.