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

by A.J. Baime

Truman was instantly a curiosity in Washington, because he had arrived under dubious circumstances. He was called “the Senator from Pendergast,” and many of his colleagues refused to speak to him.

Ignored by many, he got one good piece of advice from J. Hamilton Lewis, Democrat of Illinois. “Don’t start out with an inferiority complex,” Lewis said. “For the first six months you’ll wonder how you got here, and after that you’ll wonder how the rest of us got here.” On the morning of February 14, 1935, Harry Truman crossed the White House threshold for the first time. He walked through the front door and down a hallway past bored newspapermen fingering cigarettes. Franklin Roosevelt’s appointments secretary had written Truman’s name in the president’s calendar as “Sen. Thomas Truman” with the Thomas crossed out. Harry’s appointment with the president was at 11:15.

Truman followed orders on inconsequential matters, but his voting record on legislation sided with FDR almost every time—even when Roosevelt sparked controversy by trying to “pack” the Supreme Court by adding justices who would vote for his New Deal policies in 1937, a move that historians consider one of FDR’s most embarrassing mistakes.

FDR Increased government

Nearing the end of his Senate term, Truman was in trouble. “Never before or since,” his daughter later wrote, “can I recall my father being so gloomy as he was in those latter months in 1939, after Tom Pendergast went to prison.”

When William Knudsen, president of General Motors (the world’s largest corporation), visited London to check on his company’s interests there, he found the population “scared stiff.” “Airplanes! Airplanes! Airplanes!” Knudsen reported back to his colleagues in the United States. “That is all they think about, and bombs go with them.” In the United Kingdom, children were being evacuated from cities. Gas masks were being handed out by the thousands. “It was really bad,” Knudsen said. “They were just hysterical.”

In 1940

The committee’s most important space became known as “the Doghouse”—a small office attached to Truman’s own, where he conducted confidential meetings and always kept the bar stocked. 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.”

Military preparing in 1941

The afternoon of December 7, 1941, found Truman resting alone in a room at the Sinclair Pennant Hotel in Columbia, Missouri. He had stayed in bed for twelve hours the night before, had breakfasted at 8 a.m., and had retired back to bed because it was Sunday and he was suffering work exhaustion.

Japan was getting 88 percent of its oil from the United States. After the embargo took effect, many in Washington, including Truman, believed Japan would be left with no course of action except attack. And now it had come, a sucker punch at Pearl Harbor. Close to twenty-five hundred Americans had been killed, with nearly twenty naval vessels and more than three hundred airplanes damaged or destroyed—a devastating percentage of the Pacific Fleet.

After Roosevelt left the Capitol, senators, in a roll call, voted unanimously for war. The House voted 388–1. The only negative came from Jeannette Rankin of Montana, a pacifist and the first female American congresswoman.

Due to the Tripartite Pact—which tied the Axis powers together—Germany and Italy declared war on the United States on December 11. The United States declared war on the Axis on the same day, at which point most of Europe’s nations chose sides. Britain declared war on Bulgaria. Holland declared war on Italy. Belgium declared war on Japan.

Soon after Pearl Harbor, the committee released its first wartime report—ten months’ worth of investigations into defense contracting inefficiencies. The report landed with a sonorous thud on desks all over the capital. “To thousands,” the Washington Post noted, “the first question after the shock of the Truman report must have been: ‘Who in the world is Truman?’” The Senate Special Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program was now being called the Truman Committee, and the senator’s work hours knew no end.

For the first time in his life, Truman was getting national publicity for something other than his Pendergast relationship.

On March 8, 1943, Truman appeared on the cover of Time. The committee, according to the story, “had served as watchdog, conscience and spark plug to the economic war-behind-the-lines.” It was “one of the most useful Government agencies of World War II.” Truman himself was the “Billion Dollar Watchdog,” and it was all kind of bizarre, Time stated, because Truman’s seat in the Senate was itself the result of strange circumstances, involving a patron now at Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary.

Despite the radical shifts in daily life, one thing for Truman had not changed. He was still smitten by his wife, whom he proudly called “the Boss.” (“I just always had the impression that Mrs. Truman came first and her happiness was very important to him,” one Truman Committee staffer said. “That wasn’t true of all of the senators on the Hill.”)

The same can be said today of senators except democrats are excused

The vice presidency had become the focus of the hottest gossip in Washington. The current VP, Henry Wallace, was rumored to be out of Roosevelt’s favor. Wallace had proven himself so far to the left, Democratic Party officials referred to his supporters as “the lunatic fringe.” The question was: Who could take Wallace’s place? Truman had no intentions of gunning for the job, and neither did America have such intentions for him. According to a Gallup poll in July 1944, only one in fifty Democratic voters thought Truman should be the vice presidential candidate on the 1944 ticket. The great majority was focused on two others: Henry Wallace (65 percent) and Alben Barkley of Kentucky (17 percent). Byrnes, Virginia senator Harry Byrd, and Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn each had 3 percent.

What would they say of democrats running for president in 2020

The president himself would not attend the convention; he was too busy with war business, he said, though it was rumored that the real reason was because he was a severely ill man. An oft-spoken pre-convention slogan was “You are not nominating a Vice President of the United States, but a President.” The convention would take place at the Chicago Stadium, an indoor arena where the city’s hockey team played. Stadium officials had stocked up with 30,000 hot dogs, 125,000 soft drinks, 96,000 bottles of beer, and rivers of bourbon and rye.

Names bounced around the room, but each potential VP candidate posed a problem. The current vice president, Henry Wallace, was out, all agreed. Sam Rayburn, the Speaker of the House, was not popular anymore in his home state of Texas. Any potential candidate had to guarantee victory in his home state, if nothing else. Senator Barkley of Kentucky would be a popular choice, but the president had recently clashed with him on a political matter, and there was bad blood there. Jimmy Byrnes—though probably best qualified—was from the South and would alienate black voters. And he had abandoned the Catholic Church when he married a Protestant, so Catholics would not vote for him. The president favored William O. Douglas, a Supreme Court justice, but Judge Douglas had no political experience, and he was rumored to have a weakness for alcohol, which could make him a liability.

Roosevelt discussing vp nominees at the WH

Roosevelt admitted: he was not overly familiar with the senator from Missouri. The president knew of Truman as the man “in charge of that war investigating committee.” “I hardly know Truman,” Roosevelt had said on another occasion. “He has been over here a few times, but he made no particular impression on me.” The more the conversation focused on Truman, the more clear it became: Truman was not a strong candidate—in fact, he was quite obscure in comparison with men such as Byrnes and Barkley. Also, there was concern about Truman’s age, that he was too old. But Truman had no enemies. He would not alienate any section of the electorate. Even with his Pendergast past, he seemed the least problematic choice. Roosevelt leaned forward in his wheelchair and placed his hand on Robert Hannegan’s leg. “Now, Bob,” the president said, “you want Truman.” “Yes,” came the answer. “I do.” Roosevelt turned to the committee treasurer, Edwin Pauley. “Ed, do you?” “Yes.” “Do all the rest of you?” asked Roosevelt. All said yes. Exactly what Roosevelt said at this point has been debated, but sources present at this meeting have him saying something very similar: “Boys, I guess it’s Truman.” “Truman just dropped into the slot,” recalled Ed Flynn, a powerful Democratic figure from the Bronx, who was there that night. “It was agreed that Truman was the man who would hurt [the ticket] least,” said Flynn.

Most important, Truman did not want to be president of the United States. The rumors about FDR’s health were rampant. “I’m satisfied where I am,” Truman said. “Just a heartbeat, this little,” he said, gesturing with his fingers, “separates the vice president and the president.” It was clear to Evans: Truman was terrified.

On July 15—the day Truman arrived in Chicago, and four days before the convention was to begin—a train pulled into the city’s Fifty-first Street rail yard shortly after noon, to be serviced. One of the cars was the Ferdinand Magellan. From the outside, it looked like any old train car, but a close look revealed it was not ordinary at all. The train car weighed about 285,000 pounds, far more than a regular Pullman, due to its bulletproof window glass and 5∕8-inch nickel-steel armor plate on the track. It had been purposely built with so much heft that a dynamite charge would not derail it. Aboard in his special train car was the president of the United States. Roosevelt was bound for San Diego and a cruiser for Hawaii, where he would hold secret meetings with General Douglas MacArthur and Admiral Chester Nimitz regarding the Pacific war.

was dated July 19 (the first day of the convention, four days after this meeting). It read: Dear Bob [Hannegan]: You have written me about Harry Truman and [Supreme Court Justice] Bill Douglas. I should, of course, be very glad to run with either of them and believe that either of them would bring real strength to the ticket. Always sincerely, Franklin Roosevelt According to Roosevelt’s secretary, Grace Tully, Hannegan came out of the president’s study on the train car with a handwritten note, and he asked her to type it up for him. He also asked, according to Tully, that she reverse the names of Truman and Douglas as they originally appeared in Roosevelt’s note, so that Truman’s would come first, and thus appear as if he was the preferred candidate. Hannegan later insisted this part of the story was apocryphal. Nevertheless, the train pulling the Ferdinand Magellan left Chicago with the president aboard. Hannegan kept the letter a secret.

Truman later recalled, “he always talked in such a strong voice that it was necessary for the listener to hold the receiver away from his ear to avoid being deafened, so I found it possible to hear both ends of the conversation.” “Bob,” Roosevelt said to Hannegan, “have you got that fellow lined up yet?” “No,” said Hannegan. “He is the contrariest goddamn mule from Missouri I ever dealt with.” “Well, you tell the Senator that if he wants to break up the Democratic party in the middle of the war, that’s his responsibility.” According to Tom Evans, Truman took the phone and spoke to Roosevelt. Evans remembered Truman saying these words: “Well, I just think, Mr. President, that I’ve done a good job where I am and I’m happy, and I want to stay there. Yes, sir, I know you’re Commander-in-Chief. Yes, sir. Yes, sir. Well, if that’s what you want, that’s what I’ll do. I have always taken orders from the Commander-in-Chief.” Finally, Truman said into the phone: “I’ll do it.”

Soon after this conversation, Robert Hannegan shocked the convention by releasing the letter he claimed Roosevelt had given him aboard the Ferdinand Magellan days earlier. (“You have written me about Harry Truman and Bill Douglas . . .”) The letter sparked a feeding frenzy among the press. Justice Douglas was not at the convention; he was hiking in the Wallowa Mountains of Oregon and had no idea what was happening in Chicago. More important, the authenticity of the letter was instantly attacked by Wallace supporters, who questioned among other things the date (the letter was dated the nineteenth, the first day of the convention, though Hannegan had admitted that he had obtained the letter from the president on the fifteenth).

Looking around, Truman saw the arena had suddenly grown remarkably overcrowded. “To say the place became overcrowded is a mild statement,” remembered the Democratic National Committee’s Ed Pauley. “It was one of the world’s catastrophes.” Pauley remembers canvassing his assistants trying to find out what was going on. Where were all these people coming from? It turned out that Wallace supporters had flooded the arena bearing counterfeit entrance tickets. “No delegate can sit in his own seat,” Pauley was told. “The Wallace people have taken the whole thing over.”

Realizing that Wallace was running away with the vote, Democratic National Committee members panicked. And yet, the organist kept playing the “Iowa Corn Song,” in support of Wallace. Pauley turned to Neale Roach and said, “Stop that organ!” He pointed to a fire ax. “Neale,” he said, “do you see that ax up there above the organ? Go up there, get that ax and chop every goddamn cable there is, every one. That’s the only thing that will stop [the organist]. We’re going to call off the convention tonight.” Minutes later the organ music suddenly stopped. Democratic Party leaders scrambled to end the proceedings, which they managed to do, claiming that overcrowding had caused a fire hazard. Mayor Kelly took the stage and declared, “By the authority of the Mayor of the City of Chicago, we herewith declare the hall be vacated, immediately.”

The roll call began at 4:52 p.m. It took hours, and at the end, Truman had 319½ votes to Wallace’s 429½. Fifteen other candidates had gotten votes, and no one man had a majority. Two things became clear: There would have to be a second ballot, and those who had voted for anyone other than Wallace or Truman would have to choose from one of those two, in order for one to achieve a majority—589 votes. Democratic committee members scrambled to sway the vote in Truman’s favor. The final ballot kicked off around 7 p.m. Halfway through, no clear winner had emerged—until, that is, the roll call reached Maryland. Governor Herbert O’Conor, who had himself received his state’s 18 votes in the first ballot, switched all his delegation’s votes to Truman. Maryland’s choice started a chain reaction, and one by one, other delegations followed: Oklahoma, Texas, Virginia. The stampede for Senator Truman was on.

this moment Truman was at a concession counter ordering a hot dog and a Coca-Cola. Jackson formally made the announcement. “There being 1,176 qualified votes of which Senator Harry Truman has received more than the majority, I do now declare him to be the nominee of the Democratic Party for vice president and the next vice president of the United States.” The roar of the crowd was so loud, Truman heard none of this. He was standing behind the stage with a hot dog and a Coke in his hands as Jackson yelled into the microphone: “Will the next Vice President of the United States come to the rostrum? . . . Will the next Vice President come to the rostrum?” Finally, Truman heard the call.

Bess reluctantly held the first press conference of her life. She was introduced to the female political press corps, who fired questions and watched as she squirmed in discomfort. When asked her age, Bess said that no woman older than twenty should have to answer that question. When asked if she planned to become a public figure, Bess answered, “I never have and I never intend to make any speeches.”

The 1944 election would be all-consuming, and as VP nominee, he could not have his actions in committee work be construed as political, so he was stepping down. He was proud of the committee’s work. Their efforts had saved taxpayers $15 billion, he estimated. “It was obvious sincerity,” recalled committee investigator Walter Hehmeyer. “And when he got all through there was a sort of silence and everybody in the room stood at their desks.” Truman walked around and shook every hand, thanking every committee worker personally. “This is the kind of man that Truman was,” said Hehmeyer. “He clearly wasn’t looking for votes. I mean, there was no crowd, no reporters.”

“He is no great campaigner, no sparkling public figure,” wrote one Christian Science Monitor political reporter. “Poor Harry Truman. And poor people of the United States,” wrote the political columnist Richard Strout in the New Republic, noting the rumors about Roosevelt’s health. “[Truman] will make a passable Vice President. But Truman as President of the United States in times like these?” Even Mamma Truman had something to say. “I would rather have had him stay in the Senate,” said the ninety-one-year-old. “He did not want it. They shoved him into it.”

Then the VP nominee headed back to his office in the Senate building, where his friend Harry Vaughan was hanging around. “You know,” Truman said soberly, “I am concerned about the president’s health. I had no idea he was in such feeble condition. In pouring cream in his tea, he got more cream in the saucer than he did in the cup. His hands are shaking and he talks with considerable difficulty. It doesn’t seem to be any mental lapse of any kind, but physically, he’s just going to pieces.”

and Eddie McKim, who would serve as security. McKim would stand next to Truman during speeches and rallies, pretending to have a gun. “Nobody knew whether or not I was a Secret Service man,” McKim noted. The candidate had worked through hard-fought Missouri elections before, but this was a national campaign. The Democratic National Committee called the shots and covered the bills. The committee’s secretary, George Allen, was the “advance man,” going from town to town to drum up a crowd so when Truman arrived on his train, he could step out onto a platform on the back, where a loudspeaker system was set up. He would give a speech—sometimes to hundreds, other times to a dozen people—then head to the next town.

At Madison Square Garden a young crooner named Frank Sinatra introduced Truman. In Pittsburgh, the Truman entourage enjoyed a twenty-six-motorcycle police escort to a speaking hall, where the film star Orson Welles turned up to campaign for the ticket. Truman’s speeches were still awkward and devoid of charisma.

In early November the train pulled into Kansas City. In front of his hometown crowd, Truman delivered the most ironic sentence of his life: “Ask yourself if you want a man with no experience to sit at the peace table with Churchill, Stalin, and Chiang Kai-shek.” The irony was apparent to no one at the time.

All night the race rocked back and forth, and the clock read 3:45 a.m. in Washington when Dewey conceded. Franklin Roosevelt would be the first fourth-term president, and Harry Truman his number two. That night, after the guests had gone, Truman eased himself onto a bed in his suite at the Muehlebach Hotel. No longer in the public eye, he felt the impact of what was about to happen. A friend named Harry Easley was with him. “[Truman] told me that the last time that he saw Mr. Roosevelt he had the pallor of death on his face and he knew that he would be President before the term was out,” Easley recalled. “He said he was going to have to depend on his friends.”

The ceremony was held on the White House’s South Portico rather than at the Capitol. It would be the smallest and soberest inauguration on record, out of deference to soldiers fighting overseas. The Marine Band played “Hail to the Chief”; the Episcopal bishop of Washington, Reverend Angus Dun, offered a prayer; then Chief Justice Harlan Stone approached the speaker’s platform. In the crowd were Eddie Jacobson, Truman’s old haberdashery partner, and Ted Marks, the best man at Truman’s wedding. So too was Jim Pendergast, the nephew of Tom Pendergast. The incoming VP was the first to take the oath, and Bess and Margaret watched from nearby.

With legs locked straight by steel braces, Roosevelt stood coatless and hatless in a bitter wind; his speech was brief—barely longer than Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. The world had changed so much in recent times, he told his audience. “We have learned to be citizens of the world,” he said. “We have learned the simple truth, as Emerson said, that ‘the only way to have a friend is to be one.’” Roosevelt looked so weak at this moment, his jaw dangled open, as if he was too weary to pull it closed. Many would recount their shock at his appearance.

Citizens of the world are fighting each other!

As Truman greeted well-wishers outside, a dramatic scene unfolded in private inside the White House. The president went to the Green Room to rest, where he was seized suddenly by stabbing chest pains. He grabbed his son James’s arm and said, “Jimmy, I can’t take this unless you get me a stiff drink. You’d better make it straight.” A minute later, Roosevelt was pouring whiskey into his mouth, fortifying himself for the reception.

Truman left the proceedings forty minutes before it was over, catching a ride with a friend back to the Senate building. When he got to his office (he chose to keep the same one, suite 240, which he had recently moved into), a custodian was painting a new sign on the door: THE VICE PRESIDENT. He took the opportunity to call his mother. “Now you behave yourself,” Mamma Truman told him. With correspondence piled on his desk, Truman began his new job—what little of it there was.

Two days after the inauguration, Truman presided over the Senate for the first time. He received an ovation, and when the moment was right, he smacked a gavel to begin the proceedings. The gavel was said to be carved from a tree planted on the Capitol grounds by George Washington. One day later, January 23, Roosevelt left for Yalta with his entourage, where the group would meet with the Soviets and the British in what would turn out to be the most controversial of the secret Grand Alliance conferences. All of Roosevelt’s trusted advisors would attend, from Jimmy Byrnes to Harry Hopkins, Admiral Leahy to George C. Marshall. Truman remained behind in Washington.

With Connelly’s help, Truman commandeered a military plane and took off. His presence at Pendergast’s funeral was the talk of the town in Washington; even Truman’s political opponents had to admit, it was a gutsy move. “That was one of the greatest things he ever did in the minds of the political public,” Connelly said. “It was awfully popular.”

Ambassador Averell Harriman’s communiqués from Moscow sounded the alarm; the mood in Moscow had suddenly turned paranoiac and sinister. “We now have ample proof that the Soviet government views all matters from the standpoint of their own selfish interests,” Harriman cabled the State Department in early April, just days before Roosevelt’s death. “We must clearly realize that the Soviet program is the establishment of totalitarianism, ending personal liberty and democracy as we know and respect it.” Truman had almost no more knowledge of the international situation than the average American who studied the newspapers. Privately, the president disparaged Truman. “He never regarded the new Vice President as part of his operational relationships,” said Thomas Blaisdell, who worked in Washington’s Office of War Mobilization and Reconversion. “I was custodian of the President’s secret war files,” recalled White House assistant naval aide William Rigdon. “But not once had I been instructed to show any document to the vice president. He simply had not been worked into the Roosevelt administration.”

And Truman campaigned on not needing a novice president at that time!

(Already, Roosevelt’s body was traveling by train from Warm Springs to Washington, the route guarded by two thousand soldiers dispatched from Fort Benning.)

The day after he died

Then Truman said he was considering Byrnes for secretary of state. The head of the State Department was next in line for the presidency, and the current secretary, Stettinius, had come from the private sector. If Truman were to die or become incapacitated, he wanted a successor who had held public office, who had been elected by the American people to serve. And he trusted Byrnes, who had nearly twenty-five years’ experience in Congress. Besides, Byrnes, like Truman, had come from humble beginnings.

The Byrnes appointment was as good as done but would have to remain a secret for the time being. It would soon become the worst-kept secret in Washington.

Before leaving Truman’s office, Byrnes brought up a taboo subject. “With great solemnity,” Truman recalled, “he said that we [the United States] were perfecting an explosive great enough to destroy the whole world.” Truman was aware of this extraordinary project’s existence, he told Byrnes, but he knew few details. Byrnes believed the new invention had potential not just as a military weapon but as a political one as well—that “the bomb might well put us in a position to dictate our terms at the end of the war,” as Truman recalled Byrnes saying.

Stalin had placed his signature next to Roosevelt’s and Churchill’s on the Declaration on Liberated Europe, at Yalta in February. He had agreed in contract that nations liberated from the Nazis would have the opportunity to “create democratic institutions of their own choice.”

A lie by stalin

Representative John Dingell of Michigan: “We Americans are not sacrificing, fighting, and dying to make permanent and more powerful the Communistic Government of Russia and to make Joseph Stalin a dictator over the liberated countries of Europe.” If Stalin was to succeed

Too bad we did

A quick meeting with Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau followed. For years Morgenthau had served as one of Roosevelt’s most trusted advisors and in fact had been Roosevelt’s neighbor in Hyde Park, New York. Like Roosevelt, Morgenthau was East Coast establishment, raised by a wealthy diplomat father and educated at the finest academic institutions (the Dwight School in Manhattan, then Cornell). Of late, Morgenthau had come under fire for his theories on how Nazi Germany should be handled after surrender—the so-called Morgenthau Plan, which would strip Germany of all its industrial assets, leaving an agrarian nation in the wake with no ability to form a military or any other sort of industrial enterprise. The plan was a subject of heated debate in Washington. The Treasury secretary was the only Jewish cabinet member, and thus many suspected his Morgenthau Plan to be more about vengeance than cogent policy. Nevertheless, he greeted Truman soberly on the morning of April 14.

Nazi germany slaughtered his people! While leaders did nothing

Mourners had already filled the room when Truman entered, with Bess and Margaret by his side. According to custom, people stood when the president of the United States walked into a room. This time no one did. “I’m sure this modest man did not even notice this discourtesy,” recalled Robert Sherwood, FDR speech writer, who was present. When Mrs. Roosevelt arrived, however, everyone stood. Flowers filled the corners of the room from floor to ceiling, and heat drew beads of sweat from the formally dressed mourners. The service began with “Faith of Our Fathers,” Roosevelt’s favorite hymn, and ended with the dead president’s most famed pronouncement, delivered in his first inaugural address: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”