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

by A.J. Baime

“If he’d have been voted in, I’d be out waving a flag, but it doesn’t seem right to be very happy or wave any flags now.” She had listened to her son’s speech to Congress over the radio. “Every one who heard him talk . . . will know he’s sincere and will do what’s best,” she said. (Truman’s press advisors told him that Mamma Truman’s comments could not have been more perfect; it was as if they had been written by a seasoned press agent. Truman wrote his mother on the matter on April 18: “I told them that my family all told the truth all the time and that they did not need a press agent.”) Mamma Truman was correct: Her son’s speech had given the nation a boost of morale, at a time when it was desperately needed.

His mom

LeMay had been sent from the European theater to the Mariana Islands in the Pacific to take command of a new fleet of the army air forces’ B-29s. These new aircraft were the biggest, most destructive weapons systems ever devised. Four 2,200-horsepower Wright engines could power the airplane to 357 miles per hour. The Superfortress had a wingspan nearly as long as half a football field, and could carry ten tons of bombs. Boeing had designed the aircraft to attack at high altitudes to avoid flak, and thus it was the first American military aircraft with a pressurized cabin. It was also the first with remote-control machine guns. General H. H. “Hap” Arnold, head of the army air forces, had gambled $3 billion—and his entire career—on the development of the B-29 Superfortress. (The B-29 program cost taxpayers considerably more than the Manhattan Project did.) The stress of the B-29’s development had caused Arnold to suffer numerous heart attacks. By autumn 1944, the airplanes were finally arriving in the Pacific. At only thirty-nine years of age, LeMay had been given the command. His direct superior, General Larry Norstad, had told him (according to LeMay’s account): “You go ahead and get results with the B-29. If you don’t get results, you’ll be fired . . . If you don’t get results it will mean eventually a mass amphibious invasion of Japan, to cost probably half a million more American lives.” In the winter of 1944–1945, LeMay’s B-29 crews flew 2,037 sorties, attempting to kn...

The United States had condemned urban bombing. Earlier in the war, Roosevelt had appealed to the world to keep armies from perpetrating “the ruthless bombing from the air of civilians in unfortified centers of population,” calling this form of warfare “inhuman barbarism.”

On April 15, three days after FDR’s death, the British Second Army reached Bergen-Belsen. What they found there defied description, according to the Second Army’s commander, General Miles Dempsey. “Anything you have seen doesn’t even begin the story,” he told reporters. Prisoners from camps closer to the front had been moved to Bergen-Belsen over the past year, swelling the population to about sixty thousand living people. Due to sanitary conditions, the camp was rife with typhoid, tuberculosis, and other diseases. Heaps of corpses lay scattered around, with one major pit filled with blackened bodies. The victims were Jews, political prisoners, “asocials,” Jehovah’s Witnesses, and homosexuals, among others. “There were children—500 of them—in the midst of this,” reported the Chicago Tribune. “Babies were born here daily.” Estimates put the death toll at thirty thousand, just in the previous few months, and more investigation would push that number considerably higher.

“And now, let me tell you this in the first person,” Edward R. Murrow said over CBS Radio on Truman’s third day as president. Murrow had visited Buchenwald, where the Nazis had murdered at least 56,000 male prisoners, roughly 11,000 of them Jews. Murrow told of bodies “stacked up like cordwood,” innumerable victims of starvation and torture, and hundreds of dying children. “God alone knows how many men and boys have died there during the last twelve years . . . At Buchenwald they spoke of the president just before he died. If there be a better epitaph, history does not record it.”

“Why should we not cross the Elbe and advance as far eastward as possible?” Churchill cabled Eisenhower. The prime minister feared that if the Russians captured all of Austria and Berlin, this would “raise grave and formidable difficulties in the future.” The Soviets were allies, but from the prime minister’s point of view, the Anglo-Americans and the Red Army were in a race to fill the power vacuum left by the conquered Nazis.

Churchill was right

The gap in spending and income had resulted in unprecedented national debt, already well over $250 billion and growing fast. 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.

No businesses working did.

Justice Robert H. Jackson of the Supreme Court would take on the most daunting position. As Truman described Jackson’s appointment officially, the justice would be “Chief Counsel for the United States in preparing and prosecuting charges of atrocities and war crimes . . . to bring to trial before an international military tribunal.” Justice Jackson was going to begin to build cases and the foundation for an international court to try them, to bring Nazi war criminals to justice. The only member of the current United States Supreme Court who had never completed law school, Jackson—widely considered brilliant—would become chief prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials.

A day later 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 secretary of state had prepared the president with a confidential memo for the Wise meeting: “We have interests in [Palestine] which are vital to the United States, [and] we feel that this whole subject is one that should be handled with the greatest care.” Truman made Dr. Wise no commitments.

Should have listened

Mrs. Roosevelt stopped by the Blair House on her way out of town, as a courtesy to Bess and Margaret. She apologized for the state of the White House, and admitted that she had recently seen a rat scamper across a porch railing while she was having lunch with friends on the South Portico. Due to the war emergency, the Roosevelts had no time to keep up the home. When Bess and Margaret went to look at the place, they were not happy. “The expression on Mother’s face when she saw the dingy, worn furniture and the shabby white walls, unpainted in twelve years, was more expressive than any paragraph of exclamation points,” Margaret recorded.

Maybe Mrs Roosevelt should have taken care of house instead of being a politican

The secret Yalta agreements caused one major problem, however. Roosevelt’s commitments would require large concessions on the part of the Chinese. Nobody had informed the Chinese. If the Chinese refused to abide by these secret agreements, of which they were never consulted, the entire picture of the war in the Far East would alter, as the Russians could then refuse to join the fight against Japan.

Then, at noon, the secretary of war Henry Stimson, entered the Oval Office. He had written a note to the president the day before asking for a discussion “as soon as possible on a highly secret matter.” Stimson arrived bearing a file. Through a second door in the Oval Office, another man entered, whom Truman quickly recognized. Major General Leslie Groves had been ushered into the White House through a back door and had walked through underground corridors, so as not to arouse the press who stalked the area around the West Wing’s main entrance.

To tell him about the atomic bomb the first time

Stimson handed Truman a memo, and the president read it carefully while Stimson and Groves sat quietly. The memo began with the following sentence: “Within four months we shall in all probability have completed the most terrible weapon ever known in human history, one bomb of which could destroy a whole city.” The secretary of war’s memorandum detailed a new invention in the making called the atomic bomb.

Groves’s memo also made the following statement: “The successful development of the Atomic Fission Bomb will provide the United States with a weapon of tremendous power which should be a decisive factor in winning the present war more quickly with a saving in American lives . . . If the United States continues to lead in the development of atomic energy weapons, its future will be much safer and the chances of preserving world peace greatly increased.”

The U.S. government’s atomic bomb experiment had begun with a letter to Franklin Roosevelt almost six years earlier, dated August 2, 1939. It was a curious missive that would become as famed a document as any produced during the Roosevelt presidency. Signed by the theoretical physicist Albert Einstein, it told of how “the element uranium may be turned into a new and important source of energy in the immediate future . . . This new phenomenon would also lead to the construction of bombs, and it is conceivable—though much less certain—that extremely powerful bombs of a new type may thus be constructed.”

Einstein’s dreams had a way of becoming reality. As the eminent physicist Arthur Compton noted, “Probably no other scientist since Charles Darwin had won as high a place in the history of human thought.”

Dariwn NO

hand-delivered the Einstein letter to FDR). If such a bomb could be devised, Sachs was wondering, could the Nazis build it first? “Alex,” Roosevelt said, “what you are after is to see that the Nazis don’t blow us up.” The president called in an assistant and pronounced three words that set the atomic bomb project in motion: “This needs action.”

Nice for Hitler to kick out Einstein before concentration camps

The secretary of war first learned of this work on November 6, 1941 (just a month before Pearl Harbor). “Vannevar Bush came in to convey to me an extremely secret statement,” Stimson wrote in his diary, “a most terrible thing.” (Stimson was the only high-level government figure involved from this point up until the meeting with Truman on April 25, 1945.) The bomb project fell under the command of the United States Army.

General Marshall and the secretary of war agreed to hand the day-to-day supervision of the project to Major General Leslie Groves on September 17, 1942. Groves was tasked with directing the expansion of work from the theoretical to the industrial phase.

There was an air of fate about this rugged land; as a young man, Oppenheimer had once said, “My two great loves are physics and New Mexico. It’s a pity they can’t be combined.” Now, at Los Alamos, that dream had been realized.

Groves, meanwhile, supervised the construction of two facilities even more ambitious than the Pentagon, all in secret. The first was at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where uranium would be enriched for bomb making. The main building where this work took place spread out across forty-four acres, making it the largest building in the world. Housing had to be constructed for tens of thousands of workers, who had no idea what it was they were laboring to produce, because the project was so secretive. The site was not far from the city of Knoxville. “While I felt that the possibility of serious danger was small,” Groves later recalled, “we could not be absolutely sure; no one knew what might happen, if anything, when a chain reaction was attempted in a large reactor.”

In oak ridge, no signs are over 6 ft tall even today

Keeping this work secret from the American public required the strictest of security measures, and a bit of luck. Roosevelt had agreed with Churchill at a conference in Quebec in August 1943 to share all atomic technology with the British, that the two nations would work together on the project, which Churchill code-named “tube alloys” in his top-secret correspondence with the president. And yet the work at Los Alamos, Oak Ridge, and Hanford remained mostly an American phenomenon.

Soon after Truman’s meeting with Stimson and Groves on the atomic bomb, his day took an unexpected turn. The first sign of the Nazi surrender reached the White House on this afternoon, April 25. Truman received word that Heinrich Himmler, head of the Gestapo and one of the chief architects of the Nazi Final Solution, had submitted a surrender proposal to a high-ranking member of the Swedish Red Cross.

Surrounded by some of his highest-ranking advisors (Leahy, Marshall, Admiral King), Truman picked up a telephone and was patched through to Britain. He heard for the first time the unmistakable voice of Prime Minister Winston Churchill, crackly over a secure transatlantic phone line. A transcript of this conversation exists. “Is that you, Mr. President?” Truman said, “This is the president, Mr. Prime Minister.” “How glad I am to hear your voice.” “Thank you very much, and I am glad to hear yours.” Churchill told Truman that Himmler had approached Count Folke Bernadotte of Sweden, claiming that Hitler had suffered a cerebral hemorrhage and was not expected to survive long. Thus Himmler was offering the surrender of the German forces to the United States and Britain. However, nothing was said of the Russian forces, who had on this very day surrounded Berlin completely.

Invoking the “great humanitarian” Roosevelt, Truman told the gathering in the Opera House: “You members of this Conference are to be the architects of the better world. In your hands rests our future . . . “The world has experienced a revival of an old faith in the everlasting moral force of justice,” Truman said. “At no time in history has there been a more important Conference, nor a more necessary meeting, than this one in San Francisco, which you are opening today.”

Opening of UN conference. still waiting for justice

Truman could recall as a young man reading avidly of Woodrow Wilson’s attempts to convince Congress to embrace the treaty of the League of Nations, after World War I. The League of Nations would save the world from future wars, Wilson argued. But Wilson failed in his mission to get Congress on board, and the League of Nations failed, as a result. The league’s collapse crushed Wilson physically (he suffered a stroke) and—many believed—had a great deal to do with the war now being fought all over the world.

It did

Truman could only hope that this time the new peace league would survive, and that it would fulfill its role: to prevent war.

Never happened

Representatives of the American, British, and Russian armies were present. On this same day, at Giulino di Mezzegra near Lake Como, Italian partisans shot to death former Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini along with his young mistress, Clara Petacci, and seventeen other Fascist followers. Mussolini—who had aligned himself with Hitler and the Axis powers and had hurled Italy into the war with all the resources he could muster—had been caught trying to flee into Switzerland.

During Truman’s regular press conference on May 2, a reporter put forward the question: “Mr. President, would you care to comment on the death of Adolf Hitler reported, or Mussolini?” “Well, of course, the two principal war criminals will not have to come to trial,” Truman said, the room jammed as usual. “And I am very happy they are out of the way.” “Well, does that mean, sir, that we know officially that Hitler is dead?” “Yes . . . We have the best—on the best authority possible to obtain at this time that Hitler is dead. But how he died we are not—we

“Any person guilty of maltreating or allowing any Allied prisoners of war, internees or deported citizens to be maltreated, whether in battle zone, on lines of communication, in a camp, hospital, prison or elsewhere, will be ruthlessly pursued and brought to punishment.” Eisenhower reported that German soldiers and commanders had begun surrendering en masse to the Americans and British to be taken prisoner, because they feared torture and execution if they were taken prisoner by the Russians. “All resistance collapsed,” Eisenhower recorded. “Swarms of Germans . . . began giving themselves up to the Anglo-American armies. American troops standing on the Elbe daily received these prisoners by the thousands.”

Now a different image of Stalin and his Red Army had come into focus. The Soviets had pushed Axis forces over a thousand miles across the continent in a campaign of savage fighting; rumors of these Red Army soldiers’ behavior had reached the West, stories of pillage and rape reminiscent of conquering armies from medieval times.

The delegations faced so many disagreements in the opening days at San Francisco, it seemed the UN Conference was destined not to bring the world together but to push the major forces farther apart. The two powers quarreled over which countries should be recognized and invited to the conference, which should get votes in the UN Security Council, and whether or not a world peace organization should take precedence over already-established regional treaties.

The only thing the delegations in San Francisco could agree on was how beautiful the city was.

It had required twenty trucks to haul Eleanor Roosevelt’s possessions out of the executive mansion. The Trumans required one to move in, for they owned very little, and most of what they did own was in Missouri. Truman had never had the money to buy his own house. Now he was living in the most famous house in America.

Tall and kind-faced, Alonzo Fields was the first African American to serve as head White House butler, having gotten the job under Herbert Hoover thirteen years earlier, just before the Roosevelts moved in. In the basement, the White House’s nervous chief of mails, Ira Smith, carefully inspected all incoming packages with a staff of twenty-two. “Cranks are just as likely to use the postal service as any other method of trying to get explosives into the president’s office,” Smith admitted.

The president was responsible for food, however, for his family and for the staff. For the first time in his life, Truman was making a lot of money; the president’s salary was $75,000, up from $15,000 as VP. But food for the staff and for personal guests could get expensive. Mr. Crim advised Truman to set aside $1,000 a month for food. That was half as much as the Roosevelts allowed, but as Crim told the president, surely the Trumans would not live on the grand scale that the Roosevelts did. Mrs. Roosevelt had left the kitchen well stocked, so Bess wrote her a check and a thank-you note.

Margaret Truman had asked that the “dark, clunky furniture” in her sitting room be moved. This furniture, it turned out, had been purchased during Abraham Lincoln's administration, and the Trumans had it moved to a room on the opposite end of the house, into a space renamed the Lincoln Bedroom—an ironic name, since Lincoln never slept in it. (He had used this space as his office, and it was in this room where, on January 1, 1863, he signed the documents that emancipated slaves in the eleven seceded Southern states.)

“The West is free, but the East is still in bondage to the treacherous tyranny of the Japanese.” Millions heard these words, huddled around their radios. Among them, in her home in Hyde Park, New York, Eleanor Roosevelt listened in. “I can almost hear my husband’s voice make that announcement, for I heard him repeat it so often,” she wrote of this moment in her newspaper column.

As for delivery, the army’s 509th Composite Group had been training at the newly constructed Wendover Army Air Base in Utah, for a top-secret mission, with specially outfitted Superfortresses stripped of all their gun turrets, except one in the tail, so the aircraft could accommodate the weight of the bomb.

Pilots had been practicing sharp diving turns and bombing runs with hyper-fast getaways. Recently the 509th had moved to the South Pacific, continuing training at an air base on the island of Tinian. Not one man in the 509th had any knowledge yet of what he was training for, with the exception of one—a crack pilot who had been specifically chosen to fly the B-29 that would drop the first bomb, Colonel Paul Tibbets of Quincy, Illinois.

“We saw, of course, what everybody has seen there,” Senator Alben Barkley reported, “the instruments of torture, the starvations, barbarisms, unsanitary conditions, dead, cremations, strangulations, everything that has been represented as being there . . . We found in that camp [Buchenwald] where they had a crematory that had six ovens, six compartments, and the capacity of that crematory was to burn 200 a day.” Barkley told of a room with forty-eight hooks, where prisoners were strangled with rope, and if they did not die fast enough, they were beaten with mallets to quicken the process. “They told us that one day they had executed 126 of these people on these hooks.” “By strangulation?” asked Stimson. “Yes, and by the use of this mallet.” The senators and congressmen continued with details “so gruesome that it is difficult to realize that such a thing could happen,” as Barkley put it. Congressman James Richards of South Carolina ended the meeting on a sickening note. “Many of the inmates of the camps we inspected,” he said, “testified to us that other camps were much worse to be in than the camps we saw.”

Seeing death camps

“An iron curtain is drawn down upon their front,” Churchill wrote, using the term iron curtain for the first time. “We do not know what is going on behind.”

After germany surrendered

“She’s certainly a grand old lady,” the Sacred Cow’s pilot, Lieutenant Colonel Harry T. Myers, said. It was Mamma Truman’s first airplane ride, her first visit to Washington, and her first time seeing her son since he had become president of the United States.

His Saturday was free, and his mother’s visit coincided with Mother’s Day weekend. He played a joke on his mother, escorting her into the Lincoln Bedroom, with the family in tow. “Mamma,” Truman said, “if you’ve a mind to, you may use this bed while you’re here.” “What?” she cried. “Sleep in the bed THAT MAN used?” She still had not gotten over the South’s losing the Civil War, and she certainly would not be sleeping in any bed of Abraham Lincoln’s. She chose a less heralded spot down the hall, much to the amusement of the whole Truman family.

After the service, the Trumans headed to the Washington Navy Yard to board the USS Potomac—which Roosevelt had christened the presidential yacht. A cruise aboard “the Floating White House” offered views of the banks of the Potomac River, which had played such an important role in the war that Mamma Truman could never let go of, the war lost by the Confederacy in the days of Lincoln.

At some point during those early days, a sign appeared on his desk displaying a motto borrowed from Missouri’s own Mark Twain: ALWAYS DO RIGHT. THIS WILL GRATIFY SOME PEOPLE AND ASTONISH THE REST.

Unlike the Roosevelts, who were accustomed to ignoring hovering servants, Truman insisted on addressing the kitchen staff by first name. His driver, secret service man Floyd Boring, recalled his first conversations with Truman while at the wheel. “By the way,” Truman said to him, “I see you are driving most of the time. How are you connected with me?” “Well, Mr. President,” said Boring, “I’ve been assigned to drive you.” “Well, could you tell me your name?” It was Floyd Boring. “You don’t mind if I call you Floyd, do you?” Recalled Boring: “So that’s the kind of guy he was.”

Margaret enjoyed the perks of being the president’s daughter. She had her own car and driver, and she had a library of films to choose from in the White House movie theater. But the job of First Daughter came with difficulties. “I had to learn to say as little as possible when reporters were around,” she recalled.

She did, however, host her first White House tea, at 5 p.m. on May 24. Bess Truman had never imagined any party quite like this one. Dozens of women—the wives of diplomats—converged, representing thirty-nine nations, including Bolivia, Cuba, Iran, Latvia, Paraguay, Thailand, and Russia. When Bess went to her bridge club to play cards with her friends for the first time since she had become First Lady, all the women rose and applauded when she entered the room. She felt humiliated. “Now stop it,” she said, “stop it this instant. Sit down, every darn one of you.”

As historian Michael Beschloss wrote of Mrs. Wallace, “The imperious dowager, proud of her place atop the social hierarchy of Independence, Missouri, still believed that this dirt farmer and failed haberdasher was unworthy of her daughter Bess.”