NATIONAL PRESS CLUB
WASHINGTON, DC
FEBRUARY 10, 1945
8:30 P.M.
Eight hundred American servicemen cheer patriotically as Harry Truman pulls up a chair and takes his place at the keyboard of an upright piano. It is Saturday night. The air in this crowded ballroom smells of cigarette smoke and male perspiration. There is a microphone to Truman’s left, allowing him to banter and play at the same time. The soldiers and sailors are here for the National Press Club’s weekly canteen—a tradition that entitles them to a few hours of free beer, hot dogs, and a stage show. Celebrities, generals, and politicians often make an appearance to serve food and support the troops. On one occasion, the entire Supreme Court stopped by, which led to the amusing sight of Justice Felix Frankfurter passing out actual frankfurters.
Top billing tonight goes to the man from Missouri. The applause for Truman suggests a mixture of respect and curiosity, for few in the crowd know much about their new vice president. But if Harry Truman is willing to pound out a few standards and tell some jokes, he is okay with them.
Truman is not the only celebrity in the house tonight. Twenty-year-old sex symbol Lauren Bacall, star of the recently released film noir To Have and Have Not, is seated at a table right up front. She is the lupine focus of this all-male audience. Almost to a man, these soldiers and sailors have seen her performance opposite Humphrey Bogart, and can recite her character’s famous come-on: “You know how to whistle, don’t you, Steve? You just put your lips together and … blow.”1
Harry Truman rests his fingertips atop the keyboard and jokes into the microphone, comfortable acting the part of the showman. In fact, playing piano to raise troop morale is one of many aspects of his new job that Truman enjoys very much. The “political eunuch,” as the vice president likes to refer to himself, delights in a schedule that consists of ceremonial speeches, presiding over the Senate, and a standing appointment for a glass of bourbon with Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn each afternoon at 5:00 p.m. Truman is unbothered by the fact that since the inauguration three weeks ago, President Roosevelt has virtually ignored him. FDR has not even spoken to his new vice president in person. Despite the snub, Harry Truman is having a whole lot of fun.
The vice president has played piano since he was ten and can perform Beethoven or Mozart from memory. Alternatively, Truman can launch into the ragtime tune “Missouri Waltz,” a song he despises but which will no doubt elicit cheers from any Missourians who might be in the audience.
Truman’s song selection soon becomes inconsequential. In fact, as the sultry Lauren Bacall stands up and strides toward the vice president in high heels and a knee-length skirt, the lusty roars from the crowd make it clear that it doesn’t matter whether Truman plays anything at all.
With the help of some very willing soldiers, the young siren is boosted atop the piano. Bacall provocatively crosses her legs and dangles them over the edge, showing off her well-toned calves. Despite their forty-year age difference, she flirts with Truman. The actress smiles seductively, then reclines, never taking her eyes off the vice president.
Lauren Bacall vamping with a bemused Vice President Harry Truman
Truman is equally bold. Unflustered, he plays the moment for all it is worth, flirting right back with Bacall. Flashbulbs pop as photographers rush to take pictures of the unlikely scene and Bacall turns her body to strike a new pose. And then another.
“Anything can happen in this country,” marvels one appreciative soldier to a Washington Post reporter.
Anything.
Of this, Harry Truman—a former small-town haberdasher who has risen to the second-highest office in the land—is well aware.
* * *
The man with sixty-two days to live is being steamrolled.
President Franklin Roosevelt sits in the pale Russian sunlight, a black cape draped around his shoulders. His face is gray, his lips are slightly blue, and there is fluid pooling in his lungs—all symptoms of the congestive heart failure that is slowly killing him.
To FDR’s left, also seated, is Soviet premier Joseph Stalin. To Roosevelt’s right sits the portly, constantly chatting British prime minister Winston Churchill. A cigarette dangles from FDR’s left hand, but he lets it burn, knowing that the photographers now capturing this meeting of the “Big Three” will see the palsy that has afflicted his hands for months if he lifts the tobacco to his mouth.
It is morning in Crimea and the Big Three are wrapping up a week of meetings at the Black Sea resort of Yalta. Clearly, it is Stalin who has emerged from this conference as the big winner. “It was not a question of what we would let the Russians do, but what we could get the Russians to do,” diplomat James F. Byrnes later told a reporter.2
The end of the war in Europe is now in sight. American and British troops have just thwarted Nazi Germany’s last great offensive at the Battle of the Bulge. Led by aggressive American general George S. Patton and his vainglorious British counterpart, Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery, Allied forces are now preparing to invade the German fatherland.
In the east, Russian troops have already captured vast swaths of former Nazi real estate, including the nations of Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia. In this way, American, British, and Soviet troops are squeezing tight the vise that will soon crush Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich. In fact, Russian troops are now just forty miles from Berlin.
The purpose of the Yalta Conference has been to define the shape of the postwar world. But even before the conference began on February 4, Joseph Stalin tilted the odds in his favor, beginning with the location. Claiming that his health did not permit travel, Stalin insisted upon meeting in this Soviet city. The truth is, Stalin feels fine—he is simply afraid to fly.
Meanwhile, a visibly declining Roosevelt travels six thousand miles by ship and aircraft, then endures an eight-hour car ride to attend the conference. His villa room is bugged, and the servants in his quarters are Soviet spies, meaning that FDR can never completely relax because he knows his every movement is being scrutinized.
That is as Stalin designed it.
For the brutal dictator well knows that if he gets what he wants from Roosevelt and Churchill at this conference, he will rule almost half the globe. Stalin’s goal is straightforward: return the Soviet Union to the same size and shape as the nineteenth-century Russian empire. His forces now occupy most of the northern Baltic-to-the-Pacific expanse, and the ambitious dictator has no intention of giving up any captured territory.
Yet there is one significant part of the former empire that Russian troops do not yet occupy: Japanese-held Manchuria, in northern China. So when Roosevelt requests that Stalin enter the war against Japan, the president plays right into the dictator’s hands. Stalin agrees to fight Japan, but only after demanding that Roosevelt acquiesce to Russian designs on Manchuria.
The Japanese and the Russians last waged war over this territory during a nineteen-month conflict beginning in 1904. Then, it was Japan that emerged triumphant, sowing the seeds for Emperor Hirohito’s global expansion.
Soon, Stalin will have his revenge.3
* * *
Franklin Roosevelt waits patiently for the ceremonial photographs to be completed as Yalta finally concludes. Churchill’s Great Britain is the biggest loser of the conference and is emerging as a nation impoverished by war; Britain’s former colonies are sure to seek independence at war’s end. Roosevelt is content in the knowledge that the United States will remain a superpower and the world will be divided principally between America and the Soviet Union. Roosevelt has no problem with this; he likes Joseph Stalin and believes he can trust him. There is no reason the two great nations shouldn’t work well together.
Hands shaking, Roosevelt finally takes a long drag on his unfiltered Camel. He smokes at least a pack a day. Doctors have suggested that just six cigarettes should be his daily limit, but he ignores that order. Doctors have also advised the president to get ten hours of sleep each night, limit his drinking to just one cocktail at dinner, minimize his salt intake, and relax for two hours each afternoon.
He refuses. Franklin Delano Roosevelt is president of the United States. Medical advice that makes sense for ordinary men does not apply to him.
But the stress and strain of Yalta are taking an enormous physical toll on him. Though younger than Joseph Stalin by a little more than three years, FDR looks a decade older. The photographers capture the shadows beneath the president’s eyes and the tight set of his jaw. He came into the week tired and will return to the White House exhausted. After an arduous seven days of haggling with Stalin, the president knows that the six-thousand-mile return journey will be painful.
Inside the sixty-three-year-old Roosevelt’s chest, his enlarged heart labors to beat.
* * *
As Yalta ends, Franklin Roosevelt has unwittingly consigned millions of Eastern Europeans to decades of Soviet occupation. They will be deprived of basic freedoms such as unfettered speech and the ability to come and go as they please. All but forgotten is the fact that several years earlier, on February 19, 1942, Franklin Roosevelt himself decreed that tens of thousands of American citizens would suffer similar indignities.
Under Executive Order 9066, authorities were ordered to intern Japanese-Americans simply for being of Japanese heritage. They were incarcerated against their will, having committed no crime other than having ancestors from Japan.
Thousands of Japanese-Americans are placed in camps, one of the most prominent being located on the eastern slopes of the Sierra Nevada mountains, where the Manzanar War Relocation Center rises from the barren soil of California’s high desert. In summer, temperatures routinely rise past 100 degrees. In winter, brutal, freezing winds sweep down from the snowy peaks above, bending trees sideways and sending clouds of sand and dust through the air.
Entire families have been rounded up and sent to live in these prisons for the duration of the war. They sleep side by side in barracks, surrounded by barbed-wire fences. Armed guards look down from high sentry towers, scrutinizing their every movement. Until Emperor Hirohito surrenders, they must remain here, in a place with no such thing as privacy: showers are communal, as are the latrines, which lack the decency of a simple partition.
These Americans are unsure of what their lives will be once the war ends—where they will go, where they will work, how they will rebuild.
Yet, as the people of Eastern Europe will soon learn, they have no choice but to endure the hardships.4
* * *
Nine hundred miles southeast of Manzanar, in another windswept American desert, a team of scientists work feverishly on a device designed to cause mass death and destruction. Utilizing a revolutionary new technology, the team is locking down the final design of a brand-new bomb. Shortly before World War II began, scientists discovered how to split the nucleus of an atom; the “fission” that occurs results in an enormous release of energy. Once news of this development leaked, weapons designers from around the world rushed to find a way to translate the research into a devastating implement of war.
Since April 1939, the Nazis have also tried to build what scientists are calling an “atom bomb.” The Japanese too have been seeking such a weapon. Both have had no luck. Yet here in the New Mexican desert, after years of top secret research, the American effort has finally moved from research to production. Now that Hitler is almost defeated, it is certain that this new bomb will not be used against Germany. Instead, Japan will be the target. The new device is still untested, but if all goes according to plan, B-29 bombers launching from captured Pacific islands will soon drop it on Japan. Estimates are that the explosive force could be equal to as many as ten kilotons of dynamite, even though the bomb will detonate almost two thousand feet above its target, never actually reaching the ground.
But those estimates are merely a guess. No one knows the exact power of this theoretical weapon.
It is not yet known which city or cities will be bombed, but a short list has been drawn up by Brigadier General Leslie Groves, leader of the Manhattan Project, as this deadly undertaking is known. To measure the full power of the blast, Groves wants each bombing target to be previously unscathed. This means that the people of Kokura, Kyoto, Hiroshima, Yokohama, and Niigata, who have largely been left alone by the American bombers up to now, may soon be in grave danger.
In a historical coincidence, Lauren Bacall’s appearance on stage with Harry Truman unwittingly foreshadows an aspect of the new atomic bomb.
Taking inspiration from her soon-to-be husband’s film The Maltese Falcon, scientists code-name this bomb “Little Boy.”5