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

by A.J. Baime

Trumans asked Vietta Garr, an African American housekeeper and cook from Independence, to join them in the White House as cook and companion, and she agreed. (Garr had worked for Madge Wallace for years at the North Delaware Street home and had a close relationship with Margaret.) The Trumans could now enjoy more exciting aromas from the White House stoves, Vietta Garr’s Missouri home cooking—fried chicken, baked ham, sweet potatoes, and Harry’s favorite angel food cake. Meanwhile, Alonzo Fields, the head butler and an accomplished mixologist, had perfected old-fashioneds according to the Trumans’ tastes—bourbon over rocks with water and nothing else. “Now that’s the way we like our old-fashioneds,” Bess said approvingly.

The brainchild of FDR, the Lend-Lease bill was conceived in the winter of 1940–1941, before the United States entered the war, and Roosevelt signed it into law on March 11, 1941. It enabled Roosevelt, and now Truman, to send munitions and supplies to “the government of any country whose defense the president deems vital to the defense of the U.S.” All over the world, because of Lend-Lease, Soviet, Chinese, British, French, and other soldiers had fought with and, in some cases, were still fighting with tools of war built in American factories, and gaining sustenance from food grown on American farms, at the expense of the American taxpayer. (Over the course of the war, more than thirty countries would benefit from Lend-Lease, totaling some $50 billion in American assistance.)

A waste

The American taxpayer was not likely to see all this debt paid back.* As Senator Arthur Vandenberg had said of Lend-Lease: It must not extend “one minute or $1 into the post-war period.”

Vyacheslav Molotov was insisting that members of the UN Security Council—a group formed of delegations from the world’s most powerful nations—should have a veto privilege. What that meant, according to the Russian definition, was the ability of a Security Council nation to veto any action of which the rest of the Security Council nations approved. According to the Russian definition, the veto would allow one nation to block a matter from even being discussed by the Security Council. The Americans found this position indefensible.

George Kennan, Ambassador Harriman’s top aide in the Moscow embassy, wrote around this time, “The idea of a Germany run jointly with the Russians is a chimera. The idea of both the Russians and ourselves withdrawing politely at a given date and a healthy, peaceful, stable, and friendly Germany arising out of the resulting vacuum is also a chimera. We have no choice but to lead our section of Germany . . . to a form of independence so prosperous, so secure, so superior, that the East cannot threaten it.” (Thus the future foundation of West Germany, which formed its official government four years later, in 1949.)

China had been divided by two forces from within—the old republic under Chiang Kai-shek, friendly with the United States, and Communist forces in the north, under Mao Tse-tung. “[Dr. Soong] discussed at some length the attitude of Soviet Russia,” according to Grew’s account of this May 14 meeting with Truman. The Soviets had allied with Chiang Kai-shek’s government during the war, but lately “there had been a change and the Soviet Government seemed to be supporting the Chinese Communists rather than the National Government,” Soong said. What was to keep the Soviets from supplying arms and soldiers to Mao and the Communists in China, to foment a communist revolution in one of the most powerful nations in the East?

Navy secretary Forrestal described Harriman’s position in his diary: “He said that their [the Russians’] conduct would be based upon the principle of power politics in its crudest and most primitive form. He said we must face our diplomatic decisions from here on with the consciousness that half and maybe all of Europe might be communistic by the end of next winter.” What was the best approach: the hard line that Harriman (the current Moscow ambassador) urged, or the soft line that Davies (a previous Moscow ambassador) advocated?

Harriman was right

Only Secretary of War Stimson urged an end to the indiscriminate killing. Stimson went to see the president. “I told him I was anxious about this feature of the war for two reasons,” Stimson wrote in his diary. “First, because I did not want to have the United States get the reputation of outdoing Hitler in atrocities; and second, I was a little fearful that before we could get ready the Air Force might have Japan so thoroughly bombed out that the new weapon would not have a fair background to show its strength.”

How could we outdo Hitler unless genocide against Jews

General Hap Arnold, head of the army air forces, summed up what many military figures in America were thinking, in his diary during the days of the Tokyo firebombings: “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.”

The State Department had instructed Truman to prevail upon the prince to allow U.S. airlines to make use of airfields in Iraq. “If such rights are given to us,” the State Department advised, “Iraq will become one of the crossroads of our post-war aviation system.” Confidential sources had revealed that the British were secretly trying to block the United States’ landing rights in Iraq, because of their own interests in the Mideast. More important was the region’s black gold. “Iraq is extremely rich in oil,” the State Department advised. “Some geologists believe that the oil resources of Iraq are greater than those left in the whole United States.” American investment was extracting considerable profit from oil fields in the Mideast, and the British were doing well too.

When iraqi prince visited

Two major challenges faced the Mideast. The first was Zionism, which was now becoming one of the world’s major issues, following the liberation of Jews from Nazi concentration camps. According to the State Department, “The Arabs, not only in Palestine but throughout the whole [Mideast], have made no secret of their hostility to Zionism and their Governments say that it would be impossible to restrain them from rallying with arms.” On the day of his death, FDR had communicated in his letter to the Iraqi prince that “no decision affecting the basic situation in Palestine should be reached without full consultation with both Arabs and Jews.” Surely the prince had come to Washington for one reason above all others: to implore the United States not to support Zionism.

Truman chose right the Jews

The New Yorker summed up America’s passion for Truman: “There is one thing about President Truman—he is made in the image of the people. You go into a men’s shop to buy a pair of pajamas, President Truman waits on you. You go to have a tooth X-rayed, Truman takes the picture. You board a downtown bus, Truman is at the wheel. Probably it’s those glasses he wears, but whatever it is, we rather like having a President who always seems to be around. President Roosevelt was for the people, but Harry Truman is the people.”

Thus far, Hermann Göring was the most intriguing Nazi in custody. With Hitler dead, there was no more high-profile Nazi alive than Göring. A former World War I pilot who had spent time in a sanitarium in a straitjacket before rising to be Hitler’s number two for much of the Third Reich’s life-span, Göring had surrendered on his own volition to American forces, fearing what the Russians would do with him if he were captured by the Red Army. Truman had received Göring’s jewel-covered baton as a gift from some generals. “Can you imagine a fat pig like that strutting around with a forty thousand dollar bauble—at the poor taxpayer’s expense and making ’em like it?” Truman said of Göring and his baton. “It goes in a military museum.”

What if the United States government was to give the Japanese an evacuation warning, so that the bomb could be used against Japan without killing innumerable civilians? “He thought these weapons might first be used against straight military objectives such as a large naval installation,” according to meeting minutes, “and then if no complete result was derived from the effect of that, he thought we ought to designate a number of large manufacturing areas from which the people would be warned to leave—telling the Japanese that we intended to destroy such centers.”

George Marshall

When Margaret left for Independence, Washington’s most popular political gossip columnist—Drew Pearson, in his “Washington Merry-Go-Round” column—put an uncomfortable spin on her departure. “It came as something of a shock to Washington dowagers and socially-minded young naval officers when attractive, dynamic Margaret Truman suddenly was whisked out of Washington at the very height of the gay June season,” Pearson wrote. “A very wise presidential papa wasn’t happy about the featured newspaper articles of his daughter shagging at this party, cocktailing at that, and bitting merrily through Washington society with the war still bitterly contested in the Pacific.” Truman felt personally wounded. Pearson’s column was the most widely read syndicated newspaper column in the country, and it suggested whimsy and heartlessness on the part of Margaret Truman. He wrote Margie from the White House to apologize, on the day the story was published. “You evidently are just finding out what a terrible situation the president’s daughter is facing,” he wrote. “That was the main reason for my not wanting to be Vice-President. I knew what it would mean to you and your mother—to your Aunts and Uncles and Grandmothers and cousins.”

His daughter insulted by press

Davies left the United Kingdom with quite an impression of Churchill: “A great man, but first, last, and all the time, a great Englishman for Britain and the Empire, first, last, and all the time, with even Peace a second consideration.”

According to Hopkins’s report: “The Marshal expects that Russia will share in the actual occupation of Japan and wants an agreement with the British and us as to occupation zones.” This was a red flag. Truman had no interest in having the Soviets occupy any part of Japan.

Marshall was convinced that “every individual moving to the Pacific should be indoctrinated with a firm determination to see [the invasion] through.” He put the number of troops required for the operation at 766,700. The invasion plan was as follows: (1) to have the Russians attack the Japanese occupying Manchuria in China; (2) to “vitalize the Chinese” with air support and supplies so they could handle the Japanese occupying other parts of their country; and (3) all of which would allow the Americans—with British aid—to go after mainland Japan.

By June 1945, Oppenheimer’s secret laboratory in the New Mexico desert had become a full-blown town. The pace of the work was astounding, especially to the men performing it daily. In March 1943, “Oppie” (as most people at Los Alamos called him) had arrived with the first members of his research team. Now, barely more than two years later, about 4,000 people were living at Los Alamos in some 300 newly constructed apartment buildings, some 50 dormitories and 200 trailers. The residents had their own radio station and their own Los Alamos town council.

Roughly a million people lined the streets to praise Eisenhower—“definitely the biggest crowd in the capital’s history,” according to the city’s police department. Here was “Iron Ike,” who had led Operation Torch, the invasion of North Africa in the fall of 1942; who had commanded the 1944 D-day invasion of Normandy; who had served as supreme commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Europe. When he marched down the aisle in the House Chamber to the speaking platform, a who’s who of political and military power was there to see him: the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Supreme Court justices, senators, congressmen, diplomats, Mrs. Mamie Eisenhower, everyone but Harry Truman, who chose not to appear, to give Eisenhower all the spotlight. The Washington News called Eisenhower’s roaring reception Congress’s “greatest ovation in 25 years.”

Eisenhower brought his son John with him, who had graduated from West Point on June 6, 1944—D-day—and had then joined his father on the beaches of Normandy. The day after Eisenhower’s White House fete, Truman wrote Bess: “Eisenhower’s party was a grand success . . . He is a nice fellow and a good man. He’s done a whale of a job. They are running him for President, which is O.K. with me. I’d turn it over to him now if I could.”

Certainly public opinion was all for the UN. According to the American Institute of Public Opinion, over 80 percent of Americans believed the United States should join this “world organization with police power to maintain world peace.”

That never did work

Truman had sent ahead a messenger, George Allen of the Democratic National Committee, to inform Stettinius that he would be replaced by Jimmy Byrnes as secretary of state. Stettinius was out, and he could not hide his disappointment. At this triumphant moment for the United Nations—which Stettinius could claim as a great personal victory—he was a wounded man. Truman was appointing him the first U.S. representative to the UN.

The charter itself was laid on a circular table surrounded by the flags of fifty nations, which represented over 80 percent of the world’s population. The charter was five hulking tomes, facsimiles in five languages—English, Russian, French, Chinese, and Spanish. The logistical challenges of creating this document were staggering; a staff of 135 translators had worked around the clock in seven-hour shifts for days, on twenty electric reproduction machines.

UN starting

Every seat was full when Harry Truman stepped up to the rostrum to address the crowd. “The Charter of the United Nations,” he said, “which you have just signed, is a solid structure upon which we can build a better world. History will honor you for it. Between the victory in Europe and the final victory in Japan, in this most destructive of all wars, you have won a victory against war itself.”

When he delivered his climactic sentence, he shook his hands in the air awkwardly. The United Nations was being born, he said, for one major purpose: “to find a way to end war!”

Still waiting for that to happen

The English version of the United Nations Charter, with all its signatures, was couriered by a special messenger to an army plane for transport back to Washington. The special messenger’s name was Alger Hiss, a member of the United States delegation to the UN Conference who would later, in 1948, be accused of spying for the Soviet Union, and would be convicted in 1950 of perjury due to this charge. At the time, however, Hiss was an official entrusted with the delivery of this charter. On the airplane, the UN Charter sat inside a locked safe with its own parachute in case of emergency. The safe bore a sign that read, FINDER! DO NOT OPEN. SEND TO THE DEPARTMENT OF STATE, WASHINGTON.

Something wrong there

When Truman arrived in his Independence neighborhood, soldiers with white helmets and MP brassards on their arms lined the roads to keep the crowds back. He could see that the old family house at 219 North Delaware had received a fresh coat. It wouldn’t do to have the “Summer White House”—as the press was now calling it—badly in need of paint. The house sat on roughly three quarters of an acre, and gardeners had spruced up the property. Along the driveway, red, pink, and white peonies—Bess’s favorite flowers—were in bloom. On the northwest corner of the lawn, Truman saw a brand-new thirty-four-foot flagpole set in cement. It was a gift from the city of Independence, and the Stars and Stripes had been raised on this pole for the first time the day before his arrival.

After UN signing

“All attempts to secure permission for General Parks and party to proceed to Berlin immediately for reconnaissance and making necessary arrangements for conference have been unsuccessful,” Eisenhower’s office in Frankfurt cabled Washington. General Parks himself cabled: “No explanation can be given for such a delay except the lack of permission from the Soviet authorities to undertake necessary arrangements.” Only after strong lobbying from Harriman was General Parks allowed to enter Potsdam, to insure safety, inspect quarters, and to set up high-frequency communications systems. Mess, laundry, medical, and pharmaceutical aid—all of it had to be arranged under the careful watch of Soviet intelligence.

Before Truman came

Each official was assigned a mess area and times when he could eat, and given information on the locations of bars where Americans could gather, where films would be shown, plus the locations of barbershops and laundry. Each man received a “Safeguard Your Health” memorandum, with instructions to drink water only from “authorized sources,” not to enter unauthorized buildings, and to consume only U.S. ration liquor, as “the cleanliness and purity” of foreign liquors were questionable. To accommodate all these figures, the army had requisitioned an extraordinary amount of materials: 5,000 linen sheets, 50 vacuum cleaners, 20 lawn mowers, 100 bedside lamps, 250 bottle openers, 250 corkscrews, 500 ashtrays, 25 reams of paper, 100 garbage baskets, 20 electric typewriters, and 3,000 rolls of toilet paper. All of Truman’s food would be served at his villa, where also his valet would handle his laundry. The army had flown in a physician for the president—Dr. Wallace Graham, who had attended wounded men at the D-day invasion and the Battle of the Bulge and had been wounded himself in the fighting. A Missourian, Dr. Graham would become Truman’s physician from this point onward, for the rest of Truman’s life.

Potsdam

At the center of Berlin, the car turned down the Wilhelmstrasse to the remains of Hitler’s Reich Chancellery. Truman could now see the shattered balcony where the Nazi leader had so often addressed his brainwashed followers. “That’s what happens,” Truman said to Leahy and Byrnes, “when a man overreaches himself. I never saw such destruction. I don’t know whether they learned anything from it or not.”

In 2019, still No

The test site was sixty miles northwest of the tiny village of Alamogordo; the Spanish had referred to this stretch of rattlesnake-infested desert as Jornada del Muerto—historically translated as Journey of the Dead Man, or Journey of Death. The gadget itself hung 100 feet above the ground, inside a tower.

The bomb

The group watched as a mushroom cloud climbed to a height of over ten thousand feet. Farrell approached Groves and said to his boss, “The war is over.” Oppenheimer himself later recalled the moment. “We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita . . . ‘Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.’”

The sentence regarding “local press release” signified that the Trinity shot had been so loud, citizens living great distances away had heard the blast and had contacted authorities, and so the army had put out a faux press release to throw off any suspicion. The press release indicated that an unexpected explosion had occurred at the Alamogordo Army Air Base, and that there had been “no loss of life.”

Informing Truman at Potsdam

Lunch was served at 1:40 p.m. Stalin revealed at the table that he did not believe Adolf Hitler was dead. “I think he’s loose somewhere,” Stalin said—maybe in Argentina or Spain.

At first meeting in Potsdam

Women, according to Arnold’s diary, were part of this black market’s trade. At one point, according to a story told by Truman’s driver, Floyd Boring, the president was getting into his car when an army colonel whispered to him: “Listen, I know you’re alone over here [without your wife] . . . If you need anything like, you know, I’ll be glad to arrange it for you.” Truman responded furiously: “Hold it; don’t say anything more. I love my wife, and my wife is my sweetheart. I don’t want to do that kind of stuff . . . I don’t want you to ever say that again to me.”

Hooray for Truman. democrats today should listen!

The communication concluded: “If today, when we are still maintaining our strength, the Anglo-Americans were to have regard for Japan’s honor and existence, they could save humanity by bringing the war to an end. If, however, they insist unrelentingly upon unconditional surrender, the Japanese are unanimous in their resolve to wage a thorough-going war.” By “Japan’s honor and existence,” the communication clearly referred to the emperor. If the emperor was permitted to remain in power, the Japanese would bring “the war to an end.” If not, the Japanese would continue to kill and be killed. This communiqué noted that Japan was “still maintaining our strength,” suggesting to the Americans that the enemy could keep fighting for a long time to come. Years after the war, Truman confirmed that he had read Magic intercepts while at Potsdam, so he knew of these discussions.

Byrnes had sought the advice of Cordell Hull, who had been Roosevelt’s deeply respected secretary of state for most of the war, and who had resigned due to ill health in 1944. (Hull had been a major force behind the original planning of the United Nations, and would be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1945 for these efforts.) Hull responded that if the Americans agreed to allow the emperor to remain in power, “terrible political repercussions would follow in the United States.”

In a courtyard of a building that was formerly the Nazi Air Defense Command—run by Hermann Göring, chief architect of the Luftwaffe—Truman watched as soldiers raised the Stars and Stripes up a flagpole. Honors were accorded by an honor guard from the Forty-First Infantry. This flag now flying over Berlin was the same flag that flew atop the White House at the time of Pearl Harbor and on the day the United States declared war on Nazi Germany.

Freedom prevailing

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 would be held accountable, and it was hard to fathom now, motoring in a car from the Cecilienhof Palace, how Congress would react to the Potsdam proceedings. According to Davies’s recollections, Truman said during this short car ride that he was thinking of resigning the presidency “if, now, the president is not supported by the Senate and Congress.” A keen student of history, Truman was well aware what this would mean to his legacy; no American president had ever resigned.

“Now, in the car,” Eisenhower recalled, “he suddenly turned toward me and said: ‘General, there is nothing that you may want that I won’t try to help you get. That definitely and specifically includes the presidency in 1948.’” Eisenhower laughed aloud. “Mr. President,” he said with sincerity, “I don’t know who will be your opponent for the presidency, but it will not be I.”

The only way Germany would be able to pay out $10 billion was through loans from the United States, which would likely never be paid back. The American government had made that mistake before, after World War I, and the American people would not stand for it again. Byrnes had come up with a different course of action—“namely, that each country would obtain its reparations from its own zone [of occupation] and would exchange goods between the zones,” Byrnes said.

That very afternoon the pilot of this B-29, Paul W. Tibbets, had named the airplane Enola Gay, after his mother. Surely Mrs. Tibbets had never dreamed that her legacy would carry such historical import, for the Enola Gay was about to become the most infamous military aircraft ever flown.

Thousands of miles away aboard the Augusta in the Atlantic, at nearly this exact moment, Truman was attending his own church services in the ship’s forward mess hall, for it was still August 5—a Sunday. Truman was the butt of jokes that morning, because he had “overslept”—remaining in bed past five thirty. With Byrnes and the Augusta’s skipper, Captain James Foskett, by his side, Truman prayed as the ship’s chaplain, Kenneth Perkins, led the group in a hymn: Faith of our fathers, we will strive To win all nations unto Thee And through the truth that comes from God Mankind shall then indeed be free. They sang “Come Thou Almighty King” and “The Old Rugged Cross.”

While the first bomb was on its way

Truman read his statement for newsreel cameras also, speaking soberly into the camera. “The Japanese began the war from the air at Pearl Harbor,” he said. “They have been repaid many fold.” At the same time, Prime Minister Attlee released a statement, and the War Department released its own, with an image of the Little Boy bomb and an aerial photograph of Hiroshima—how it appeared before the event. Immediately, American and British news sources began monitoring Japanese radio, where already, cryptic announcements were being made—rail service in and around Hiroshima had been canceled, and the scene in that city was under investigation.

Truman spent the afternoon catching up. He signed the United Nations Charter on August 8. (On this same day, the Allies signed the London Agreement, which officially set the stage for the war crimes trials at Nuremberg.)

Before sunrise in the South Pacific on August 9 (it was still August 8 in Washington), a task force of B-29s took flight to deliver the Fat Man bomb on Japan. 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. William L. Laurence of the New York Times was embedded with a crew on this mission. “We are on our way to bomb the mainland of Japan,” he wrote while aboard one of the B-29s that morning.

But now, in the cabinet meeting, Truman said that he was ordering an end to the atomic bombing. He could not stomach the idea of wiping out another 100,000 people, of killing “all those kids,” he said to his cabinet.

Also on August 11 Truman informed the Allies that General Douglas MacArthur would be the supreme commander over Japan and alone would represent the Allies in the surrender process.