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Things have gone so well I’m almost as scared as I was when Mrs. R. told me what had happened.
Russia will emerge from the present conflict as by far the strongest nation in Europe and Asia—strong enough, if the United States should stand aside, to dominate Europe and at the same time to establish her hegemony over Asia. Russia’s natural resources and manpower are so great that within relatively few years she can be much more powerful than either Germany or Japan has ever been. In the easily foreseeable future Russia may well outrank even the United States in military potential.
In fact, S-1 was the largest scientific-industrial undertaking in history, and the most important and best-kept secret of the war.
To move Mrs. Roosevelt out had required twenty Army trucks. To move the Trumans from Blair House across the street had required only one.
“I always felt that he [President Truman] understood me as a man, not as a servant to be tolerated,” Fields would write, “and that I understood that he expected me to be a man. . . . President Roosevelt was genial and warm but he left one feeling, as most aristocrats do, that they really do not understand one.”
The true situation, it said, could be evaluated “only by men who have firsthand knowledge of the facts involved,
In truth, “Uncle Joe” was one of the great mass murderers of all time, as much as Ivan the Terrible (his favorite czar), as much nearly as Adolf Hitler.
“Never in history has such an aggregation of victorious military force been represented at one conference,” wrote The New York Times; “never has there been a meeting which faced graver or more complex issues; and never have three mortal men borne so heavy a responsibility for the welfare of their peoples and mankind.”
Churchill insisted on defining what was meant by Germany.
Patton seemed to glow from head to foot. There were stars on his shoulders, stars on his sleeves, more stars than Truman had ever seen on one human being. He counted twenty-eight.
There is not one piece of territory or one thing of a monetary nature that we want out of this war.
He himself reached his own conclusion only “after long and careful thought,” he wrote, adding, “I did not like the weapon.”
The fact was Stalin already knew more than any of the Americans or British imagined. Soviet nuclear research had begun in 1942, and as would be learned later, a German-born physicist at Los Alamos, a naturalized British citizen named Klaus Fuchs, had been supplying the Russians with atomic secrets for some time, information that in Moscow was judged “extremely excellent and very valuable.” Stalin had understood perfectly what Truman said.
Not in this or any of the broadcasts was there mention of how much damage had been done at Hiroshima, since no details were yet known in Washington.
After Hiroshima, he remembered, after the realization “that we would not be obliged to run up the beaches near Tokyo assault-firing while being mortared and shelled, for all the fake manliness of our facades we cried with relief and joy. We were going to live. We were going to grow up to adulthood after all.”
In time, it would be estimated that 80,000 people were killed instantly and that another 50,000 to 60,000 died in the next several months. Of the total, perhaps 10,000 were Japanese soldiers.
when Clark was remarried in the little northern Virginia town of Berryville, Truman stood beside him as best man, something he had never done before.
To Truman, Marshall, more than any other man, had been responsible for winning the war, and he spoke now of Marshall as a tower of strength to two presidents.
“The pressure here,” he told his mother, “is becoming so great I hardly get my meals in, let alone do what I want to do”.
“in the doldrums”
“General, I want you to go to China for me,” he said. “Yes, Mr. President,” Marshall replied and hung up.
Truman “paid much less attention to what his actions were doing towards his chances for reelection. . . . Truman did a great many things that Roosevelt, because he knew the effect it would have, never would have done.”
There had never been a total railroad stoppage until now. Almost at once the whole country was brought virtually to a standstill.
Clifford, who had had little knowledge of Truman, or any particular interest in him, prior to coming to the White House, soon found himself greatly impressed—devoted to the man in a way he would never have expected. “The President is intelligent, forthright and reasonable,” Clifford had written to his mother. “I have developed a deep and abiding affection for him and hope and trust that I may be able to be of some small assistance to him. . . .”
The President, who of late had seemed so often bewildered and inadequate, had proved himself extremely tough and decisive when the chips were down, and the reaction of the Congress—and of the country by and large—was instantaneous approval.
Clark Clifford remembered it as a summer of “wallowing.” Even the President’s health declined. He suffered from an ear infection and a return of stomach pains such as he had not had in years, the result, said Wallace Graham, of “a nervous condition.”
He was on his own again, much as he had been in the 1940 Senate race, when Tom Pendergast was out of the picture and Roosevelt had abandoned him; or as he had been on the farm when his father died, or in France in 1918, when, with his new captain’s bars, he stood alone, trembling, and speechless before his new command.
Like George Washington, with whom he was often compared, Marshall was a figure of such flawless rectitude and self-command he both inspired awe and made description difficult. Churchill called him “the noblest Roman.” Bill Hassett on Truman’s staff spoke of the “reverence” Marshall inspired. Imperturbable under pressure—“the imperturbability of a good conscience,” George Kennan called it—invariably courteous, he was without a trace of petty vanity or self-serving ambition.
the President’s favorite Chopin Waltz in A Minor,
In private conversation with friends, however, he would concede it had been a bad mistake. “Yes, it was terrible,” he said.
Later somebody can sit around for days and weeks and figure out how things might have been done differently. This is all very well and very interesting and quite irrelevant.”
The stricken countries of Europe needed everything and could afford to buy nothing. Financial help was imperative, but, as Acheson stressed, the objective was not relief, it was the revival of industry, agriculture, and trade.
Wish I could go along and smooth all the rough spots—but I can’t and in a career you must learn to overcome the obstacles without blowing up. Always be nice to the people who can’t talk back to you. I can’t stand a man or woman who bawls out underlings to satisfy an ego.
Mamma is ninety-four and a half because she never lived in the past.”
The whole pattern of his life had been a succession of increasingly difficult tests of his capacity to prove equal to tasks seemingly too large for him. Nor had he failed to meet this latest and greatest of tests. The feelings of inadequacy that had so troubled him after Roosevelt’s death were by now past. He liked being in charge. It showed in his face and in the way he carried himself.
To the Arabs it seemed they were being made to pay for the crimes of Hitler.
“This is just straight politics,” Marshall said. “I don’t even understand why Clifford is here. This is not a political meeting.” “General,” Truman answered softly, “he is here because I asked him to be here.”
To be a professional in politics required patience, often great patience, and the strength not to take things too personally, and Truman and Barkley were two veteran professional politicians.
“You can’t stay cold about a man who sticks out his chin and fights,”
I have always spoken out and I have taken a stand on every issue as it has come up. I don’t wait for any polls to tell me what to think. That is a statement some of the Republican candidates cannot make.
Election day, up at five, he took his usual morning walk, read the papers, and had breakfast.
But what most impressed those in the room was Truman’s perfect calm at such a moment.
A cumulative shift of just 33,000 votes apportioned to the three states would have done it.
there was never any question as to why Truman won. He had done it by being himself, never forgetting who he was, and by going to the people in his own fashion.
Passing the stone-fronted offices of the Washington Post, Truman looked up to see a big sign strung across the second floor: WELCOME HOME FROM CROW-EATERS. The day after the election, the staff of the Post had sent a telegram asking him to attend a “Crow Banquet,” to which all newspaper editorial writers, political reporters, pollsters, radio commentators, and columnists would be invited. The main course was to be old crow en glâce. Truman alone would be served turkey. Dress for the guest of honor would be white tie, for the others, sackcloth. In response Truman had written that he had “no
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He was extending the promise of America beyond America. Poverty, he had said in his State of the Union address, was just as wasteful and just as unnecessary as preventable disease.
The country, Truman assured reporters, was not going to hell. They ought to read some history. America had been through such times before. “Hysteria finally died down, and things straightened out, and the country didn’t go to hell, and it isn’t now.”
Sometime earlier that fall, when Bess had returned from a long stay with her mother in Independence, both she and the President had been so “jubilant,” so obviously happy to be with each other again,
That is what all of us must learn to do in the United States; to limit objectives, to get ourselves away from the search for the absolute, to find out what is within our powers. . . . We must respect our opponents. We must understand that for a long, long period of time they will continue to believe as they do, and that for a long, long period of time we will both inhabit this spinning ball in the great void of the universe.
With the onrush of so much sensational, seemingly inexplicable bad news—China lost, the Russian bomb, Alger Hiss, the treason of Klaus Fuchs—breaking
