CHAPTER 4
PRESIDENT
Our blows will not cease until the Japanese military and naval forces lay down their arms in unconditional surrender.
President Harry Truman, announcing the defeat of Germany, 8 May 1945
‘I HAVE A TERRIFIC HEADACHE,’ a very ill Roosevelt complained to his physician one afternoon in April. The President sat by the fireplace in the ‘Little White House’, his holiday retreat atop Pine Mountain in Warm Springs, Georgia. He slumped forward. Arthur Prettyman, his faithful servant – ‘Negro valet’, the press called him – and a Filipino mess boy carried the President to his bedroom. He fell unconscious and died in bed at 3.45pm (Warm Springs time), 12 April 1945, of a cerebral haemorrhage. The news broke at 5.47pm.
That evening Eleanor Roosevelt received Harry Truman in her rooms on the second floor of the White House. ‘What can I do?’ the anguished Vice President asked the widow of the man who had led America for 12 years. ‘Tell us what we can do,’ Mrs Roosevelt replied sympathetically. ‘Is there any way we can help you?’ She watched with near pity as the weight of the awesome responsibility that had fallen on this odd, unknown little man, whom many thought unable to carry it, registered.
At 7.09 pm, a dazed Harry Shipp Truman was sworn in as America’s 33rd president. The ceremony, in the West Wing of the White House, took four minutes. Truman, then 60, wore a blue speckled bow tie with a matching spotted handkerchief that seemed a little inappropriate beside the dour black suit of Chief Justice Harlan F. Stone. The new President looked wan and nervous, and had trouble repeating the opening lines of the oath of office. ‘So help me God,’ he concluded, clutching a Gideon’s fetched from the drawer of Roosevelt’s head usher. ‘A faint, sad smile’ lingered briefly on his face, reported the Washington Post, as he shook Stone’s hand. Then came the milling and damp-eyed congratulations of colleagues, commanders and his family – his wife, Bess, and daughter, Margaret.
Surely few men have inherited a greater burden than Truman did that day. Short, compact, usually smiling, Truman looked, blinking out of his thick, round glasses, at a grieving world of high protocol, deep distrust and flashing bulbs. Few believed he could succeed, much less fill Roosevelt’s shoes. He took command of the most powerful nation, then fighting a world war on two vast fronts; 16 million men and women in uniform; the world’s largest navy; and ‘more planes, tanks, guns, money and technology than ever marshalled by one nation in all history,’ as his biographer, David McCullough, observed. He faced the twin challenges of carrying on the tough negotiations with the Soviets and reconverting the American war economy in anticipation of the end of the bloodiest conflict the world had known.
Truman was seen as a nobody. A provincial farmer, failed haberdasher and all-round ‘nice man’, according to New Republic, he appeared out of his depth in almost every way. He knew little of US foreign policy. He was not a military strategist. He had not read the Yalta minutes. He had received patchy information on something called the Manhattan Project, but had little idea of its purpose. Truman was a stranger outside his home state of Missouri. ‘He didn’t know the right people. He didn’t know Harriman [the US ambassador in Moscow],’ wrote his biographer. Many congressmen dismissed him as a failure before he started, labelling him the ‘Missouri compromise’ and the ‘mousy little man from Missouri’.
Roosevelt had ‘consciously excluded’ his Vice President from the detail of military and foreign policy. The extent of Truman’s ignorance, of which he soon became aware, might have unnerved a less confident man, but Truman swiftly rose to the challenge. Within an hour of his inauguration, the new President held a cabinet meeting; he strove to entrench an impression of continuity. He made three decisions that reassured the nation: the San Francisco Conference on the establishment of the United Nations, a new security organisation on which hopes for world peace depended, would go ahead that month as planned; all cabinet members would remain in their posts; and he would meet chief military commanders next morning to talk about winning the war ‘at top speed’.
Shortly after that meeting, Henry Stimson drew Truman aside. The War Secretary quietly informed the new President of ‘an immense project looking to the development of an explosive of almost unbelievable power’. The revelation jogged Truman’s memory: as chairman of the Truman Committee, set up to unearth waste and profligacy in the armed forces, he had encountered on three occasions dead ends, at which his inspectors’ inquiries were blocked. Back in June 1943, for example, then Senator Truman had been asked by Stimson not to inquire further into the cost of building a series of mysterious factories around America. ‘I am one of the group of two or three men in the world who know about it,’ Stimson had said. ‘It’s part of a very important secret development.’
‘That’s all I need to know,’ Truman had replied. ‘You don’t need to tell me anything else.’ Truman pursued it no further, but grasped something of the secret, as he revealed in a letter to his friend Lewis Schwellenbach, a federal district judge in Spokane. Schwellenbach had been concerned about immense earthworks on the banks of the Columbia River at Hanford, Washington. ‘I know something about that tremendous real estate deal,’ Truman wrote, in a gross breach of security, ‘… it is for the construction of a plant to make a terrific explosion for a secret weapon that will be a wonder. I hope it works.’
Later that year Stimson blocked another Truman Committee investigation of a proposed $500–$600 million factory in the Tennessee Valley: ‘It’s very secret and very, very dangerous,’ Stimson said.
‘A military secret?’ Truman’s inspector asked.
‘It’s the most dangerous one I have. That’s all I can tell you…’
‘… You can tell me this about it,’ Truman’s investigator persisted, ‘whether or not … you might be able to utilize whatever you are doing in this war?’
‘Oh yes,’ said Stimson. ‘It’s to match possible dangers of the same kind, novel kind, from other countries. It’s a race … Some day after the war is over … I can sit down with you over a fire and tell you things that will make your hair stand on end.’
On a third occasion, Truman’s investigator had followed a trail of auditing discrepancies at the Hanford site and threatened Stimson ‘with dire consequences’ if the War Secretary refused to reveal the nature of the project to Congress. Stimson’s patience was exhausted. He recorded in his diary: ‘Truman is a nuisance and a pretty untrustworthy man. He talks smoothly but he acts meanly.’ This was unfair. The members of the Truman Committee were simply doing their job – so well that they ran aground on the shoals of the atomic secret.
* * *
Roosevelt’s remains were transferred to the East Room, where they lay in a casket of gunmetal grey, draped in flags, guarded by a soldier, sailor, airman and marine. Wreaths banked up despite Eleanor Roosevelt’s plea to mourners not to send flowers. ‘A small coloured lad, helping bring in the wreaths, was all but hidden behind a floral offering of white calla lilies,’ wrote one reporter. The late President’s empty wheelchair stood nearby. On the 15th they buried him at his Hyde Park estate in an austere military service without eulogies. Private contemplation seemed the appropriate way to remember one of America’s finest leaders, and only the crunching footfall of West Point cadets and a 21-gun salute broke the silence.
Roosevelt had guided the country from the depths of Depression to the brink of victory. In his last year, however, he had deluded the people and himself about the likely nature of the post-war world. He ‘juggled with balls of dynamite whose nature he failed to understand’, Anthony Eden, the British Foreign Secretary observed. Roosevelt’s misplaced faith in Stalin was regarded as his gravest error of judgment. In his ailing months he failed to confront the world as it was; to attempt more effectively to resist Russian demands and prepare America for the enormous trials ahead. Understandably, he was sick and exhausted. His old-world certainties, his faith in political reason and the power of diplomacy, seemed to expire with him; he died ‘Micawber-like, still hoping for post-war co-operation’, concluded the historian Wilson Miscamble.
Truman found himself shoved under those balls of dynamite, each of which he had to catch, understand and relaunch into the air: the unravelling of Yalta; the Soviet claims on Eastern Europe; the war with Japan; the meaning of ‘unconditional surrender’; and now the greatest secret of all – the atomic bomb – and how and when it might be used. The task ahead plainly awed him. ‘The world fell in on me,’ he wrote to his sister-in-law on 12 April, the night of his inauguration. How could he succeed a man ‘they all practically worshipped’ and assume the ‘terrible responsibility’? ‘Boys,’ he told the media the day after his swearing in, ‘if you ever pray, pray for me now. I don’t know whether you fellows ever had a load of hay fall on you, but when they told me yesterday what had happened I felt like the moon, the stars and all the planets had fallen on me.’
The President met the challenge head on, in characteristic fashion. Those who dismissed him underestimated his energy, adaptability and skill at finding practical solutions to complex problems. His great strength was his decisiveness. Nothing precipitate or whimsical governed his decision-making; once in possession of the facts and the views of his colleagues, Truman acted, firmly and decisively, and wholly without ‘that most enfeebling of emotions, regret’, as Dean Acheson, then Assistant Secretary of State, later observed of his friend.
Truman delivered his first congressional address to a traumatised nation on 16 April 1945. It came at an especially difficult time: that morning he had read the casualty figures in the papers. Over the course of the war, America had suffered 899,390 casualties, of whom 196,999 servicemen were dead, and the rest wounded, missing or had been taken prisoner; the names of 6481 had been added in the past week. Many more casualties were expected: on 1 April 183,000 American troops had invaded Okinawa, the first time foreign forces had set foot on the Japanese homeland. Yet most civilians still supported the war; polls revealed a determination to exact revenge on Japan for the American losses inflicted since Pearl Harbor. Amid this injured atmosphere Truman rose to give his first speech as President. After humbly acknowledging the greatness of his predecessor, he laid before Congress the two words that had so delighted Churchill at Casablanca and vexed the British leader at Yalta. Unlike Roosevelt, Truman was not a man to dissemble. He meant what he said:
‘We must carry on,’ he vowed. ‘… both Germany and Japan can be certain, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that America will continue the fight for freedom until no vestige of resistance remains!… America will never become party to any plan of partial victory! To settle for merely another temporary respite would surely jeopardize the future security of all the world. Our demand has been and it remains: Unconditional Surrender!’ He banged the podium with a characteristic chop of his hand. Japan and Germany, he declared, had ‘violated … the laws of God and of man’. He wanted ‘the entire world’ to know that America’s direction ‘must and will remain – UNCHANGED AND UNHAMPERED!’ (Truman’s emphases). He ended with a prayer to ‘Almighty God’, invoking the words of King Solomon, ‘Give therefore thy servant an understanding heart to judge thy people, that I may discern between good and bad: for who is able to judge this…?’ His ovation was long and sincere.
* * *
April 24, 1945
Dear Mr President [Stimson wrote],
I think it is very important that I should have a talk with you as soon as possible on a highly secret matter. I mentioned it to you shortly after you took office but have not mentioned it since on account of the pressure you have been under …
Truman met Stimson the next day and heard the full story of a new weapon so powerful it could ‘end civilisation’. Reading from a long memo, Stimson divulged the details of a secret organisation larger than the biggest US corporation; of tens of thousands working on an enterprise, the purpose of which they were ignorant; of huge factories and laboratories situated on mesas, deserts and valleys; of swathes of American businesses given over to developing new and untested processes; of immense resources, deadly substances and remarkable scientific advances; and of the cost to US taxpayers: upwards of US$2 billion (US$24 billion in 2010).
‘Within four months,’ Stimson continued, ‘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.’ Britain had contributed technical know-how, but the US controlled the resources and processes used in the construction, a position of global dominance it expected to hold for several years.
‘The world … would be eventually at the mercy of such a weapon,’ Stimson said. ‘With its aid even a very powerful unsuspecting nation might be conquered within a very few days by a very much smaller one … Modern civilization might be completely destroyed.’ Control of the ‘menace’ of atomic power ‘would involve such thorough-going rights of inspection and internal controls which we have never heretofore contemplated … The question of sharing it with other nations and … on what terms, becomes a primary question of foreign relations.’
The United States ‘had a certain moral responsibility’ to control the weapon and avoid the disaster to civilization, Stimson added, reprising his deep personal misgivings about the nature of modern warfare; on the other hand, if properly used, nuclear power might afford America the opportunity to bring peace to the world and ‘save our civilization’.
Truman studied the memo with composure; he did not wish to appear alarmed. In the anteroom, the man in overall charge of building the bomb awaited his turn to speak. A large figure of imposing authority, General Leslie Groves had been ushered in via the back door to escape the attention of the press. Groves sat with the President and War Secretary and ran through the details of the operation. Soon he reached the production schedule: the first gun-type (uranium) bomb should be ready for use about 1 August 1945; the first implosion-type (plutonium) bomb should be ready for testing in early July, Groves minuted. Their talks placed ‘a great deal of emphasis on the Russian situation’, in the context of the arrival of nuclear power, Groves later noted. Stimson and Groves proposed that a committee be created to oversee the development and use of the atomic weapon; Truman agreed, and approved the ‘Interim Committee’ on 1 May.
That afternoon the War Secretary drove to Woodley, his Washington home, to dine alone. Shortly afterwards he heard startling news from a Pentagon staffer, interrupting his hopes of an afternoon nap: ‘This active President of ours,’ Stimson later wrote in his diary, has been ‘wandering at large’ in the Pentagon, and had made a phone call to London. In the investigative spirit of his old Truman Committee days, the President had embarked on a private fact-finding mission to gather more information on the bomb.
* * *
Once firmly in office, Truman swept through the White House like a whirling dervish, issuing words of encouragement, reassuring staff and dropping in on surprised officials unused to the backwoods bonhomie of this smiling Missourian, whose easy style contrasted happily with the aloofness of their previous boss. The corridors were full of strangers and whispers: ‘The situation continues confused,’ wrote Eben Ayers, a White House press officer, in his diary. ‘There seem to be all sorts of strange people coming and going. Missourians are most in evidence and there is a feeling of an attempt by the “gang” to move in.’ Truman naturally rewarded his loyal supporters with jobs, but the office gossip turned to Truman’s background association with Missouri’s corrupt Pendergast dynasty, whose family bosses had launched his political career.
The media quickly warmed to the new President’s hoe-and-shovel humour. His meetings with reporters were light-hearted affairs, stripped of the gravitas of high office. He spoke rapidly and to the point, chopping the air with his hand for emphasis: Molotov, the Soviet Foreign Minister, was ‘going to stop by’ [on his way to the San Francisco Conference],’ he revealed at his first press conference on 17 April, the largest hitherto convened in the White House, such was the fascination with this easygoing leader: 348 reporters and observers packed the Oval Office and hall outside to hear Truman announce that he would be ‘happy to meet Marshal Stalin and Prime Minister Churchill’ to further the peace talks. He confirmed that he had no plans yet to lift the wartime ban on horseracing, the brown-out and the curfew. ‘Let’s wait till V-E Day,’ he added, smiling. The reporters loved it.
The President prepared well for his meetings with Molotov, scheduled for 22–23 April. Secretary of State Edward Stettinius had sent two long memoranda on Roosevelt’s key foreign policy initiatives. Truman read with dismay of the rapid deterioration of relations after Yalta, Stalin’s ‘firm and uncompromising position’ on every aspect of negotiations, Soviet intransigence on Poland, and the totalitarian conditions on the ground in Eastern Europe. He also read James Byrnes’ handwritten notes from Yalta. Byrnes, who shared Churchill’s loathing for Stalin, presented a disturbing portrait of a Soviet regime hungry for conquest ruled by a dictator who displayed not the slightest intention of matching his words with deeds. Truman thus inherited – he did not trigger or engineer – Washington’s deep distrust of the Soviet Union. Stalin had called the shots over the ailing Roosevelt, it appeared, handing Truman a difficult and dangerous choice: whether to continue to acquiesce before the Russians – and some observers felt Roosevelt had vacillated – or to adopt a much tougher line.
Several stark warnings buttressed his decision. A letter Roosevelt received before he died caught Truman’s eye. It was from Stalin: ‘Matters on the Polish question have really reached a dead end,’ the dictator wrote. The Soviet government insisted on the appointment of Polish leaders who were ‘friendly’, in recognition of the blood Soviet troops had ‘abundantly shed for the liberation of Poland’.
Stalin’s letter reinforced the grim conclusions of a secret US Office of Strategic Services (OSS) intelligence report Roosevelt had commissioned before his death, and which Truman now read: ‘Russia,’ it stated, ‘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 … 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…’ If a Russian policy of expansion should succeed, ‘she would become a menace more formidable to the United States than any yet known’.
In light of these and other warnings, Truman chose to adopt a tougher line with Moscow; his resolve sharpened after hearing Secretary of State Stettinius’ naive analysis of why US relations with the Soviets had deteriorated: a moderate Uncle Joe, apparently, had been forced to renege on the Yalta deal to appease anti-Western sentiment in Russia. Truman replied with thin-lipped contempt for this analysis: ‘We must stand up to the Russians,’ he said, revealing a glint of steel beneath the bonhomie. ‘We must not be too easy with them.’ The implication was clear: Roosevelt and Stettinius had been exactly that at Yalta, appeasing the dictator despite evidence of Stalin’s reign of terror and aggressive designs on Europe.
‘Molly’ – Vyacheslav Molotov – was a grim, balding man with a little moustache. He appeared at the White House in a dark blue suit and pince-nez. Despite, or perhaps because of, his officiousness (Lenin nicknamed him ‘Comrade Filing Cabinet’) this bland Bolshevik rose to be Stalin’s most trusted deputy, in which capacity he oversaw the Stalinist Terror, approved the forced collectivisation of Soviet agriculture, and stood by as tens of thousands died in the consequent famine in Ukraine. Molotov later emerged as a signatory to the massacre of 22,000 Poles, including 8000 Polish officers, in Katyn Forest in 1940.
Truman received Molotov twice. At the second meeting, the President made clear his deep displeasure at Russia’s failure to honour the Yalta agreements. Molotov replied truculently so Truman pressed him further. ‘I told him in no uncertain terms that agreements [such as over Poland] must be kept [and] that our relations with Russia would not consist of being told what we could and could not do.’ Cooperation ‘was not a one-way street’.
‘I have never been talked to like that by any foreign power,’ Molotov snapped, according to witnesses.
‘Carry out your agreements and you won’t get talked to like that,’ Truman replied. Years later the President wrote of the meeting, ‘Molly understood me.’
Truman’s tough line gave Molotov an excuse to tell Stalin that US policy had dangerously changed emphasis; the President, however, had simply deployed a stronger style, not a different strategy, in trying to check Soviet expansionism where softer techniques had failed. There was some truth, nevertheless, in Chief of Staff William Leahy’s later assertion that Truman’s ‘great single political problem’ would be ‘getting along with the Soviets’.
* * *
Jubilation at the German surrender warmed this chilling atmosphere. On 2 May Truman revealed to the American press the death of Hitler; six days later he announced V-E Day, Victory in Europe. The President used the occasion to reissue the ultimatum to Japan: ‘Our blows will not cease until the Japanese military and naval forces lay down their arms in unconditional surrender [Truman’s emphasis]’. What did ‘unconditional surrender’ mean for the Japanese people, Truman asked. It meant ‘the termination of the influence of the military leaders’ who had brought Japan ‘to the brink of disaster’ and the return of the Japanese armed forces to their homeland. It did not mean ‘the extermination and enslavement of the Japanese people’.
The terms of surrender had thus fundamentally changed since Roosevelt’s ultimatum to the Japanese nation: ‘unconditional surrender’ was now limited strictly to the Japanese armed forces; the people were to be spared. Hirohito’s status, however – the critical stumbling block – remained unclear. Truman’s intent had been to soften Japanese fears of a threat to their Emperor without appearing to weaken before the American people, 33 per cent of whom believed Hirohito should be executed while just 3 per cent thought he should be used as a puppet to rule Japan, according to a poll conducted on 29 May 1945. In a later Gallup poll of 29 June 1945, 70 per cent of Americans supported the execution or harsh punishment of Hirohito.
The President’s change of emphasis reflected a secret Washington line that cautioned against the destruction of Hirohito. Hanging or dethroning the Emperor would be ‘comparable to the crucifixion of Christ to us’, concluded a gloomy study by General MacArthur’s South West Pacific Command. ‘All would fight to die like ants. The position of the gangster militarists would be strengthened immeasurably. The war would be unduly prolonged; our losses heavier than otherwise would be necessary.’ Attacking the Emperor, warned an Office of War Information (OWI) directive, would provide ‘Japanese propagandists with excellent material for unifying the people behind the militarists and for whipping up their fighting spirit’. James Forrestal, the Secretary of the Navy, approved the OWI proposal that modified the surrender formula. The British Foreign Office, for its part, ‘believed the rigid demand for unconditional surrender would prolong the war’.
Some of the press picked up Truman’s meaning; some urged him to go further: ‘Japan should be told her fate immediately,’ declared a Washington Post editorial on 9 May, ‘so that she can be encouraged to throw up the sponge … What we are suggesting, to be sure, is conditional surrender. What of it? Unconditional surrender was never an ideal formula.’ But reducing the punishment of the regime responsible for shedding so much American blood was a fraught political exercise.
The Japanese people heard nothing of this; only their rulers in Tokyo had access to American press reports and US announcements. The old samurai puzzled over and swiftly rejected the new terms. Truman had not mentioned the Emperor by name, they noted; surely Hirohito, as supreme commander, was among those ‘military influences’ whose ‘termination’ could only mean death? The Japanese thus pressed on with their resolve never to capitulate. Nor did Germany’s defeat sway them: Foreign Minister Shigenori Togo, nominally of the ‘peace party’, declared that Germany’s surrender would ‘not affect’ the Japanese Empire’s determination to continue the war against the United States and Britain.
* * *
Just who is Harry Truman, Americans wanted to know of this beaming Midwesterner who stood up to Russia and Japan and presumed to fill Roosevelt’s shoes? A few weeks after being sworn in, Truman went to church alone – he relished his anonymity – and slipped into a rear pew ‘without attracting any notice whatsoever. Don’t think over six people recognized me’, he recounted. And there he prayed.
Harry Truman was a kind, consciously humble farmer from Independence, Missouri, who loved poker, bourbon (though never to excess) and fashionable clothes – colourful bow ties, two-toned shoes and sharp double-breasted suits. ‘There is one thing I notice about the President,’ wrote press secretary Eben Ayers. ‘He … seems to be one of those men who always wears matching combinations of socks, tie and handkerchief for his breast pocket. Perhaps it’s a hang-over from the days when he was in the clothing business.’ At first glance his wardrobe ill-suited him; he seemed dressed to compensate for something – perhaps his ‘orneryness’. But if he looked as though he were about to sell you something dubious, his obvious sincerity removed those suspicions.
Truman appeared extraordinarily ordinary, an impression he indulged: ‘[I am] just a common everyday man whose instincts are to be ornery; who’s anxious to be right,’ he wrote as a young man in a love letter to Bess Wallace, his future wife. He grew up in harsh times, working long days on the family farm. At school he had been the swot, the unpopular kid who ‘ran from a fight’ and was ‘blind as a bat’ when he lost his glasses.
Farm work and the army toughened him; as an artillery officer in World War I he showed great mettle under fire. The men under his command in Battery D came to love this kind officer who shared the same background as many, and showed such fortitude in battle; his unit would remain a close-knit group for years after the war.
Truman overcame the deep prejudices of his childhood. His grandparents had been slave owners, as were most white folk on the ‘nigger-hating’ side of the Kansas–Missouri border. He had grown up ‘in a family of negro haters’, he wrote – the table conversation peppered with references to niggers, Chinks, Japs, wogs and kikes (Jews).
Truman came to see the value of people for what they did and said, not according to how they looked or to whom they prayed. The black workers at a nearby oil refinery contributed no more or less to society than he did, as a farm labourer, he observed. In 1924, the 38-year-old political aspirant faced down a Ku Klux Klan meeting, telling 1000 Klansmen that anybody who had to work under a sheet was ‘off the beam’, after which, he later recalled, he got down off the podium and strode through the parting crowd. He adopted a courageous civil liberties policy that dismayed many of his colleagues. ‘I believe,’ he told a mostly white audience in 1940 ‘in the brotherhood of man; not merely the brotherhood of white men, but the brotherhood of all men before the law … The majority of our Negro people find but cold comfort in shanties and tenements. Surely, as freemen, they are entitled to something better than this.’ It was as radical as it got in Missouri in 1940 and won few local votes.
Unlike Roosevelt, ‘who had been given things all his life – houses, furniture, servants, travels abroad’, Truman had been ‘given almost nothing’, as he recorded. It amazed him, as much as those around him, that a man of such humble origin could rise to the office of Vice President; but to inhabit the White House seemed altogether unnatural. He ascribed his early success to luck rather than personal skill: ‘No one was ever luckier than I’ve been since becoming [President],’ he wrote on 27 May. ‘Things have gone so well that I can’t understand it – except to attribute it to God. He guides me, I think.’ Truman was not the first American leader to claim divine guidance. Yet it was not idolatrous or presumptuous; rather a sincere expression of faith.
‘There was nothing of Uriah Heep about him,’ wrote the author Merle Miller, who interviewed Truman at length. He carried an air of the perennial underdog, and always seemed slightly put-upon; self-doubting. His happy reception from the American people was due to the fact that he was one of them, hopeful, fearful, down to earth … always trying. He had none of the grandeur of Roosevelt; nor the judicial steel of James Byrnes or the seductive idealism of Henry Wallace, the Secretary of Commerce, both of whom had been Truman’s rivals for the vice presidency. He used the common touch, the open smile, the slap on the back, to remarkable effect. He seemed friendly, human, normal, in a world with its share of dilettantes and phonies.
Truman read deeply of history, chiefly the history of war: war was preventable only if you understood the causes, he believed. Historians rarely agreed, he realised – an observation drawn from his study of the Gospels: ‘Those fellas saw the same things in a different manner,’ and all presumed to be telling the truth. Only action would clear a path through the confusion that divided scholars, disciples and political advisers. A leader must decide, then act – and to hell with his detractors. Beside this paragraph in his heavily thumbed copy of Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations – ‘When another blames or hates you, or when men say injurious things about you, approach their poor souls, penetrate within, and see what kind of men they are. You will discover that there is no reason to take trouble that these men have a good opinion of you…’ – Truman had scrawled ‘True! True! True!’
The story of mankind was a moral continuum in Truman’s mind, and the great political truths he read in ‘old Plutarch’ were as applicable now as then. Nothing really changed in human history, only the methods and the names of those who used them, according to this thinking. Good and evil, crime and punishment, hubris and nemesis, were ineluctable laws of the moral universe. There were bad men and good men, bad states and good states, and if the power to destroy wickedness should fall in the lap of the good men and good states, then they should use it without restraint. Alliances with states considered less wicked were a necessary evil, he believed – that is, until the war was over.
Truman’s personal philosophy boiled down to his faith in the fundamental goodness and moral destiny of mankind. He was a straight shooter at a time when ‘honest men took honest stands against unmistakable evil’. To the American people, at his best, he represented an era of family communities, honest dealing, and traditional values.*
Yet this comforting, if rather crude, delineation of good and evil led Truman to utter some awful clangers. When Germany launched a surprise attack on Russia in June 1941, then Senator Truman said, half in jest: ‘If we see that Germany is winning we ought to help Russia; and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany; and that way let them kill as many as possible.’ To Washington’s elite the remark sounded worse than boorish; it was unforgivably parochial.
* * *
May 1945 concentrated the President’s mind on the Soviet question and the war with Japan. That month Soviet–American relations during the war reached a nadir. After Truman’s missile to Molotov, Stalin accused the President of colluding with Churchill and dictating terms to the Soviet Union. Behind the scenes a knot of senior officials discussed the atomic question and its effect on Soviet–American relations. In top-secret talks on 14 and 15 May, Stimson made clear to Assistant Secretary of War John McCloy that possession of the bomb would give Washington a great advantage in post-war negotiations with the Russians. If the bomb worked, ‘we really held all the cards’ in a ‘royal straight flush’ in dealing with Moscow, he said. The problem, however, was whether the bomb would be ready before the peace negotiations with Stalin and Churchill in the Berlin suburb of Potsdam, scheduled to begin on 1 July 1945: ‘We [probably] will not know until after … that meeting, whether this is a weapon in our hands or not,’ Stimson said. ‘It seems a terrible thing to gamble with such big stakes in diplomacy without having your mastercard in your hands.’ The bomb had already acquired a ‘diplomatic’ role in Washington’s relationship with Moscow, in the minds of Stimson and Truman.
Indeed, the President was determined to go to Potsdam fully armed. In a meeting with Joseph Davies, an influential Washington lawyer and former US ambassador to the Soviet Union, on 21 May, Truman intimated that the meeting with Stalin should be delayed until the bomb was ready: ‘The president did not want to meet [Stalin] until July,’ Davies later wrote, because the ‘atomic bomb experiment in Nevada’ had been postponed from June until then.
The next day Truman wrote in his diary of ‘our deteriorating relations with Russia’. He put his faith in the forthcoming face-to-face meeting with Stalin, and held out the hope that the Potsdam meeting might bridge the differences between the two superpowers. Harry Hopkins, a trusted diplomat and old Soviet hand, was to take a message to Moscow the next day. Truman rather naively told Hopkins that he wanted – ‘and I intend to fight to get it’ – peace for the world ‘for 90 years’. That included ‘free elections’ for Poland, which was on the point of disappearing behind the Iron Curtain. Hopkins could use diplomatic language ‘or a baseball bat’, whichever he felt the best way of handling Stalin, Truman granted.
Between 26 May and 6 June, Hopkins had six long discussions with Stalin, impressing upon the Soviet leader that the President expected him ‘to carry his agreement [at Yalta] out to the letter’. The outcome was inconclusive: Stalin obfuscated and fogged, as usual, but at least the Soviets were in a negotiable frame of mind, the US ambassador to Moscow Averell Harriman, who attended the meetings, informed Truman; Harriman was not easily moved: he had described Soviet hegemony as ‘a barbarian invasion of Europe’. This time, Stalin impressed upon the Americans his enthusiastic willingness to attend the Three Power Conference in Potsdam to discuss the occupation of Germany and the war with Japan. Thanks to Hopkins’ visit, the Russians seemed amenable to modifying their stridency at Yalta; a far better atmosphere for Soviet–American relations prevailed in advance of the conference. Hopkins had opened the door.
Truman reciprocated with a gentler approach. He tempered the hard line used in his bruising encounter with Molotov. He refused, for example, Churchill’s offer to meet privately before they travelled to Berlin to avoid aggravating the Soviet leader’s suspicions. ‘Stalin already has an opinion we’re ganging up on him,’ Truman wrote on 7 June. ‘To have a lasting peace, the three great powers must be able to trust each other. And they must themselves honestly want it.’ While he loathed the communist system, the President saw no reason why the two countries could not ‘be friends’. Truman urged patience in order ‘to try to understand that form [of government] and their views’. He would meet Stalin in July not without hope but also with deep distrust of the nation that many in Washington and the Pentagon – General Groves and leading Republicans – already saw as America’s most dangerous future adversary.
* * *
Shadowing these great proceedings was the prospect – as yet incomplete and untested – of the atomic bomb, which drew diverse reactions in the minds of the American leadership. While both Truman and Stimson saw S-1, should it work, as a weapon of mass destruction and as a diplomatic lever, Truman had a pragmatic view of the bomb’s utility and eschewed Stimson’s ‘virtual obsession’ with the weapon’s spectacular power. The President had little patience with apocalyptic images and biblical metaphors. He considered – at first – the bomb as simply another weapon, albeit a rather large one. A decorated artilleryman, he cast a gunner’s eye over the new technology: it would be, in effect, just another shell, he reflected – though one with the power of millions of the shells he had fired at the Germans in 1918. In May, his view became more complex – and indeed, positive: the bomb would change the world if it succeeded, Truman thought – but not necessarily in the way Stimson feared. The President envisaged a nuclear-armed United States with the power to stare down the regimes that threatened it, and lead the world to a more peaceful place, secure in the knowledge that the nuclear secret was safe in American hands.