AT DUSK, police and secret service locked down the building at 4701 Connecticut Avenue, so that Truman could enter his second-floor home. Never had this apartment felt so small. Margaret wrote in her diary that she had not left the place all day. “We have an army of secret service men around us at the apt. and everywhere we go,” she wrote. “Stayed in all day today.” As Truman wrote, “There was no escaping the fact that my privacy and personal freedom were to be greatly restricted from now on.”
No record of the family’s conversation at the dinner table exists, but surely Harry, Bess, Margaret, and Mrs. Wallace knew they had to pack their bags and fast. They would leave their furniture behind for the time being. Mrs. Roosevelt was still living in the White House. Truman decided to move the family to the Blair House, an official residence normally used to house visiting dignitaries, until Eleanor Roosevelt could move her possessions out of the home where she and her husband had lived for more than twelve years.
Truman had read more words on this day than he ever dreamed possible, but that evening he settled down to a new routine: wading through documents long into the night, his exhausted eyes straining to soak up page after page of information. Earlier in the day the secretary of state had placed a thick memorandum on the desk of Matthew Connelly, a memo that aimed to “bring [Truman] up-to-date on the vital developments.” It provided a snapshot of the global playing field and a crash course in international relations. Truman read the memo that night, when he could do so without interruption.
Great Britain—the United States’ most important ally—was first on the memo’s list. Britain was a nation suffering a grave identity crisis. “The British long for security but are deeply conscious of their decline from a leading position to that of the junior partner of the Big Three,” the State Department document noted. Churchill had exhibited a deep animosity and growing paranoia toward the Russians. “The British government has been showing increasing apprehension of Russia and her intentions,” the document read. Churchill was a trustworthy friend, but it must never be forgotten that he held Britain’s interests paramount, at whatever cost to his allies.
France was next on the list. Paris required construction of a new government following liberation from the Nazis. General Charles de Gaulle had taken power, but he was an erratic figure obsessed with national and personal prestige. France, therefore, had “from time to time put forward requests which are out of all proportion to their present strength and have in certain cases . . . showed unreasonable suspicions of American aims and motives.”
National policy toward Germany prioritized the following goals: destruction of the Nazi regime, punishment of war criminals, banishment of Hitler’s military government, and the prevention of any military manufacturing whatsoever. The American, Russian, and British governments had agreed that Germany would be divided into sectors after the Nazi surrender. Each of the three nations would govern its own sector, with France subsequently given a fourth sector. Thus the mechanics of post-Nazi occupation were roughly in place. That aside, the future of this nation was still a subject of debate in Washington and abroad. What would become of Germany, post-Hitler?
The State Department document pointed out serious problems in Italy, notably Yugoslavia’s occupation of an important piece of the nation’s northeast around Trieste. Further issues plagued Austria and Argentina. “A problem of urgent importance to the United States is that of supplies for areas liberated from enemy occupation,” the document pointed out. “The chaos and collapse which may result in these countries from starvation, unemployment and inflation can be averted principally by making available essential civilian supplies.” If the peoples of bombed-out Europe could not obtain food and coal for heating, they would become easy prey for “extremist groups”—for communist revolution.
The most pressing problem, the State Department document pointed out, was clearly Russia and its control of Poland. As Truman later explained the situation: “The plain story is this. We and the British wanted to see the establishment in Poland of a government truly representative of all the people. The tragic fact was that, though we were allies of Russia, we had not been permitted to send our observers into Poland. Russia was in full military occupation of the country . . . and had given her full support to the so-called Lublin government—a puppet regime of Russia’s own making.”
Stalin had placed his signature next to Roosevelt’s and Churchill’s on the Declaration on Liberated Europe, at Yalta in February. He had agreed in contract that nations liberated from the Nazis would have the opportunity to “create democratic institutions of their own choice.” Now the Russians were boldly flouting democracy in Poland. Truman knew from his time in the Senate how sensitive Congress was to the Polish matter. The freedom of people to choose their own government was the kernel of the ideology for which United States and British soldiers had fought and died in this war. As Senator John Danaher of Connecticut had said on the Senate floor not long before, “There are literally thousands upon thousands of boys of Polish extraction who . . . are fighting all over the world in the firm belief that they are going to help restore the pre-war borders of the homeland of their parents.” Representative John Dingell of Michigan: “We Americans are not sacrificing, fighting, and dying to make permanent and more powerful the Communistic Government of Russia and to make Joseph Stalin a dictator over the liberated countries of Europe.”
If Stalin was to succeed in installing a puppet government in Poland, what was to stop him from doing so again, in all the other eastern European nations liberated from Hitler’s grasp?
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Roosevelt’s casket was scheduled to arrive in Washington on the morning of April 14, Truman’s second full day in office. Truman was to meet the train at Union Station. Beforehand, he squeezed in early morning appointments, in a continued attempt to gather the reins of government. He had outlined the broad strokes of the speech he would give before a joint session of Congress in two days’ time, and set a speech-writing team to work in a White House conference room, poking his head in to monitor the progress.
Everywhere in the White House, chaos reigned. “I doubt that there have been few more dramatic, confused moments in American history than the ingress of the people who saw power in their hands under Harry Truman,” wrote press secretary Jonathan Daniels. “There were weird people [in the White House] like a fellow named McKim. I, at this time . . . had the feeling that the aristocracy of Democracy had passed away and the Pendergasts of politics were pouring in.” That feeling was palpable all over the West Wing. “There is a feeling of an attempt by the ‘gang’ to move in,” assistant press secretary Eben Ayers wrote in his diary. “Missourians are most in evidence . . . I have no desire to remain here if we are to have a Democratic ‘Harding administration,’ as some are hinting.” (President Warren G. Harding is remembered for Pendergast-style scandals, notably the Teapot Dome scandal of the early 1920s.)
First to see the president officially on April 14 was John Snyder, a St. Louis banker and one of Truman’s closest personal friends and poker buddies. Truman needed to appoint a new federal loan administrator, and he told Snyder he was the man for the job.
“I don’t think you ought to appoint me to that job,” Snyder said, sitting uncomfortably in the president’s office. “I’m not sure I’m the right man.”
“I think you are the right man,” Truman said. “I’m sending your name to the Senate.”
Jimmy Byrnes was in the room, and said, “Harry, you forget who you are. You’re the president of the United States. Order him to do it.”
Later Truman called Jesse Jones, a powerful New Dealer who had until recently served as secretary of commerce. Truman said “the President” was appointing Snyder as federal loan administrator.
“Did he make that appointment before he died?” Jones said, thinking of Roosevelt.
“No,” Truman answered, incredulously. “He made it just now.”
A quick meeting with Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau followed. For years Morgenthau had served as one of Roosevelt’s most trusted advisors and in fact had been Roosevelt’s neighbor in Hyde Park, New York. Like Roosevelt, Morgenthau was East Coast establishment, raised by a wealthy diplomat father and educated at the finest academic institutions (the Dwight School in Manhattan, then Cornell). Of late, Morgenthau had come under fire for his theories on how Nazi Germany should be handled after surrender—the so-called Morgenthau Plan, which would strip Germany of all its industrial assets, leaving an agrarian nation in the wake with no ability to form a military or any other sort of industrial enterprise. The plan was a subject of heated debate in Washington. The Treasury secretary was the only Jewish cabinet member, and thus many suspected his Morgenthau Plan to be more about vengeance than cogent policy. Nevertheless, he greeted Truman soberly on the morning of April 14.
Truman said, “I think I admired Mr. Roosevelt as much as you did.”
“I don’t think that’s possible,” Morgenthau awkwardly returned. He said, “I feel this war very strongly. I have one son with General Patton and another in the Pacific, and his ship has just been torpedoed for the second time. My first idea is to win the war and then I want to win the peace.”
“That’s what I want to do,” Truman said.
Conversation steered toward the matter at hand. Morgenthau was a man of extraordinary power who knew more about the world’s financial ebb and flow probably than any other individual alive. Truman asked for a full report on the finances of the war and the nation. As Morgenthau moved for the door, Truman said, “Now I want you to stay with me.”
“I will stay just as long as I think I can serve you,” Morgenthau answered.
“When the time comes that you can’t, you will hear from me first direct,” Truman said.
(“Truman has a mind of his own,” Morgenthau wrote of this meeting in his diary. “The man has a lot of nervous energy, and seems to be inclined to make very quick decisions.”)
The president cut out to Union Station at 9:45 a.m., where navy men in crisply pressed uniforms moved Roosevelt’s casket onto a caisson pulled by seven white horses, the casket covered in an American flag. The funeral procession crawled through the streets, turning west onto Constitution Avenue and past the Capitol, the casket surrounded by dozens of police officers on Harley-Davidson motorcycles. Crowds mobbed the sides of the streets, behind rows of soldiers holding rifles topped with bayonets. The president’s motorcade followed behind the casket, Truman sitting between Jimmy Byrnes and the former vice president and current secretary of commerce Henry Wallace. Mrs. Roosevelt rode in another car, and the crowds craned their necks to glimpse her. An estimated 300,000 people stood along the route to witness the procession. Truman would never forget the sight of the grief-stricken faces, many weeping without restraint. Above, two dozen B-24 Liberator bombers roared, striping a blue sky with trails of white exhaust.
Nearing 4 p.m. the funeral services were set to begin in the White House’s East Room, a space that had seen its share of historic moments. The East Room had hosted numerous presidential family weddings over the decades. The funeral services for William Henry Harrison, Zachary Taylor, and Abraham Lincoln had taken place here. Theodore Roosevelt had hosted boxing matches in this room. Now it would be remembered as the site of Franklin Roosevelt’s White House funeral service.
Mourners had already filled the room when Truman entered, with Bess and Margaret by his side. According to custom, people stood when the president of the United States walked into a room. This time no one did. “I’m sure this modest man did not even notice this discourtesy,” recalled Robert Sherwood, FDR speech writer, who was present. When Mrs. Roosevelt arrived, however, everyone stood. Flowers filled the corners of the room from floor to ceiling, and heat drew beads of sweat from the formally dressed mourners. The service began with “Faith of Our Fathers,” Roosevelt’s favorite hymn, and ended with the dead president’s most famed pronouncement, delivered in his first inaugural address: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”
Later, at 10 p.m., a funeral train left Union Station on an all-night journey bound for Roosevelt’s home in Hyde Park, where he would be interred. The train was seventeen cars long, packed with high-powered government officials, the Trumans staying in Roosevelt’s train car, the Ferdinand Magellan. It was 9:30 a.m. when the train pulled into Hyde Park. Harry, Bess, and Margaret stood in the crowd as West Point cadets in scarlet capes moved the casket to Roosevelt’s final resting place. Few could forget the sight of Eleanor Roosevelt with her head bowed in the rose garden of the Roosevelt mansion on the Hudson River, as soldiers shoveled dirt into the grave.
By noon, the Trumans were once again aboard the Ferdinand Magellan, headed back to Washington. Truman could see out the window thousands of Americans who had gathered along the railroad tracks to glimpse the train rushing by. “Old and young were crying on the streets,” he wrote in a diary. “Old Negro woman sitting down on curb with apron up was crying like she had lost her son. Most of the women and half the men in tears.”
Truman spent most of the ride attempting to work on his speech, but he was interrupted constantly. “Now, the real politicking began,” recalled Margaret. “Every congressman and senator on the train was trying to get to see the president.” Truman had never enjoyed the gift of oration. In twenty-four hours’ time, he would make his presidential debut before Congress with a speech he hoped would spark confidence in the new administration. In all his life, he had never shouldered such pressure. That night, as he lay in his bed, he prayed that he would be up to the task.
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When Truman entered the House Chamber in the Capitol on April 16, the day after FDR’s burial, the eyes of Washington were on him. He was greeted by a standing ovation. The applause for Truman was so loud it reverberated in the chamber’s nearly hundred-year-old bones. The time was 1:02 p.m. when Truman climbed the stairs to the podium, and when he looked out at the crowd, he spotted Bess and Margaret in the gallery, glancing at them so quickly, he could not see that tears were rolling from Bess’s eyes. “Dad was terribly nervous up there on the rostrum,” Margaret recalled. “He was always nervous before a speech, but this one, so enormously important, doubled his normal tension.” He put his lips before the podium’s microphones and started in, but Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn stopped him.
“Just a minute, Harry,” Rayburn whispered, forgetting to address Truman as Mr. President. “Let me introduce you.” Rayburn turned and said at great volume, “The president of the United States!” Again, the room roared—senators, congressmen, military leaders, the justices of the Supreme Court.
Had there ever been more of an underdog standing on this rostrum? The ovation was as much for Roosevelt as it was for Truman, but one got the sense that the American people wanted Harry Truman to succeed.
He began. “Mr. Speaker . . . Members of the Congress . . . It is with a heavy heart that I stand before you, my friends and colleagues in the Congress of the United States. Only yesterday we laid to rest the mortal remains of our beloved president Franklin Delano Roosevelt. At a time like this words are inadequate. The most eloquent tribute would be a reverent silence. Yet, in this decisive hour, when world events are moving so rapidly, our silence might be misunderstood and might give comfort to our enemies.” Truman spoke of Roosevelt (“no man could possibly fill the tremendous void left by the passing of that noble soul”), the war (“we dare not permit even a momentary pause in the hard fight for victory”), and the role of the United States in a world engulfed in violence, death, and outrageous acts of evil.
“Today, the entire world is looking to America for enlightened leadership to peace and progress,” Truman said. “All of us are praying for a speedy victory,” he told his audience. “Every day peace is delayed costs a terrible toll . . . Our demand has been, and it remains . . . unconditional surrender.”
The speech ended with a prayer, a quote from 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 thy so great a people?” Truman had but a fraction of FDR’s gift for oratory, but his voice was steady and firm. For twelve years the president who addressed the world from this pulpit spoke in the intonations of the moneyed East Coast establishment. This voice was different. It was the voice of a common man, asking God for guidance, and the response was the loudest affirmation Truman’s ears had ever encountered.
Secret service logged the president back into the White House at 2:37 p.m., which already made him late for his afternoon meetings. He had been gone from his office only a little over two hours. Much of the afternoon would be spent worrying over the Russians.
On this day Truman met with British officials for the first time, notably Churchill’s foreign minister, Anthony Eden, and together they finalized wording for a communiqué to Joseph Stalin—Truman’s first direct communication with “the Man of Steel” regarding the situation in Poland. The cable was titled “Personal and Secret from the President and the Prime Minister for Marshal Stalin,” and it pleaded with the Soviet leader to back down on his position. “The British and United States Governments have tried most earnestly to be constructive and fair in their approach and will continue to do so,” the communiqué read. The cable was signed in all capital letters: TRUMAN.
But the friction with the Soviet Union had grown only more heated. The day that Truman addressed Congress, he received reports of a meeting between ambassador to Moscow Harriman and Stalin, in the Kremlin, a meeting that grew so acrimonious, one American official present noted that Harriman and Stalin had nearly come to physical blows. Stalin accused the Americans of using army aircraft in Poland to aid the anticommunist Polish underground, now organizing an uprising against the Soviets. Harriman thundered back that Stalin’s information was false, that he was accusing the Americans of treachery, and thus he had insulted the integrity of the commander of the United States Army, General Marshall. “You’re impugning the loyalty of the American high command and I won’t allow it,” Harriman yelled at the Soviet dictator. “You are actually impugning the loyalty of General Marshall.”
Meanwhile, Harriman had gotten a firm commitment that Vyacheslav Molotov would meet with Truman. The Soviet number two would leave Moscow the following day (April 17), traveling the longer route over Russia rather than over Europe, out of fear for his safety. En route to the San Francisco conference, Molotov would make an appearance in Washington on the twenty-first, in five days’ time.
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That night Truman left the White House to the now familiar chant from the usher in the lobby: “The President has left his office.” During the day, Bess, Margaret, and Mrs. Wallace had moved out of the Connecticut Avenue apartment and into the elaborately furnished Blair House, diagonally across the street from the White House on Pennsylvania Avenue, so Truman decided to walk to his new home. This threw his secret service detail into a fury of last-second preparations. The yellow four-story stucco Blair House dated back to 1813 and had played host to numerous visiting dignitaries during the war, from King Peter II of Yugoslavia to General Charles de Gaulle. But never had a president of the United States lived in it, even temporarily.
In his new study that night, Truman got a chance to catch up on correspondence. Letters had begun to pour into the White House mailroom from friends in Missouri; these missives would arrive by the bushel for days to come. “Little did you think when you were first elected Judge of the Eastern Division of the Jackson County Court, or did your fellow townsmen ever think, that you would become President of the United States,” wrote Rufus Burrus, a Jackson County lawyer. “You are a good man, Harry,” wrote C. D. Hicks, a St. Louis railway equipment manufacturer, “and God will direct you.” Of all the missives Truman received from his Missouri friends, none were likely to move him the way Eddie Jacobson’s did. “You know that I am not the praying type,” his old haberdashery partner wrote, “but if ever we did pray, we did on the night of April 12. The task you inherited is unequalled in world’s history.”
Truman wrote his mother and sister from the Blair House on the night of April 16. “I have had the most momentous, and the most trying time anyone could possibly have, since Thursday, April 12th. My greatest trial was today when I addressed the Congress. It seemed to go over all right . . . Things have gone so well that I’m almost as scared as I was Thursday when Mrs. R told me what had happened. Maybe it will come out all right.” He signed the letter, “Your very much worried son + bro, Harry.”