AT 8 A.M. ON JUNE 19, the morning after Eisenhower’s party at the White House, the president’s motorcade pulled onto the tarmac at an airfield outside Washington. The crew of the Sacred Cow was readying the aircraft in anticipation of a long flight due west, with Truman aboard. Eisenhower showed up to see Truman off (“I didn’t know you could get up this early in the morning, Ike,” Truman joked). It was Truman’s first jaunt aboard this Douglas VC-54C. He had logged his share of flight miles over the years, but he had never flown like this.
The Sacred Cow’s unpressurized cabin had an executive conference room with a big desk located next to a bulletproof window. There was an electric refrigerator in the galley and a fold-down bed; the president had his own private lavatory too. The aircraft’s four Pratt & Whitney engines produced close to 3,000 horsepower, and a sensational amount of noise and vibration.
Truman’s flight to Tacoma, Washington, was set to land at 5:40 p.m. He planned to visit the state’s capital, Olympia, for a few days’ rest as the guest of an old friend, Governor Monrad Wallgren, who as a senator had served on the Truman Committee. Then the president was scheduled to continue on to San Francisco to address the delegations of fifty nations at the closing ceremonies of the United Nations Conference.
That morning the Washington Post made for good airplane reading. Drew Pearson’s Washington gossip column—“Washington Merry-Go-Round”—was all about the president. “Harry Truman has now been President of the United States for a little over two months—two of the most historic months in the nation’s history,” the column began. There was a new atmosphere in the White House that could be summed up in a word: businesslike. “Truman gives the impression of having a firm grasp on all domestic problems,” Pearson wrote. “He knows them thoroughly—undoubtedly better than Franklin Roosevelt during his latter years, when he was devoting all his time to the war . . . One thing that worries [Truman] most is our foreign affairs. The new President frankly realizes it is his main weakness.”
The Sacred Cow touched down at McChord Field three minutes early (the Washington-to-Tacoma flight took twelve hours and sixteen minutes nonstop). By that time, two other planes had landed at this same airfield—one carrying the White House press corps, the other secret service. Truman stepped out onto the tarmac, where Governor Wallgren and his wife awaited.
“Hello, Harry,” the governor said, offering his hand.
“It sure is swell for you and Mrs. Wallgren to meet me here,” Truman said.
They climbed into an open car and a motorcade cruised through Washington’s capital city, both sides of Olympia’s streets lined with swelling crowds on tippy-toes, straining to catch sight of the new president. The crowds formed “a human lane up the main street,” as one reporter put it. Never had Truman imagined a moment like this one, to be the focal point in such an ebullient celebration of presidential iconography and Americanism. And this western trip was just getting started.
His next few days would enable him to at least attempt to relax; he had but one official appointment, to present a congressional Medal of Honor to a soldier wounded while fighting with General Patton’s Third Army. Truman and Wallgren went fishing. They hiked around Mount Rainier, where the thinness of the air from the high elevation took the president’s breath away. Secret service allowed Truman to drive a car, something he truly enjoyed, and that felt like a grand luxury now. Each morning the press met with Charlie Ross at Governor Wallgren’s mansion, hunting for a story, but there was little Ross could report. Instead, Ross waxed humorously between cigarette puffs about the delicious breakfasts the president and his party were having, knowing that the newsmen were forced to eat Spam, due to rationing.
Behind the scenes the business of running the nation continued. Truman signed bills and issued executive orders. He nominated twelve army officers for three-star general promotions, including Nathan Farragut Twining, a future chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The planning of the Big Three meeting was moving along, cables discussing the details dashing back and forth between continents at electronic speed.
At 9 a.m. on June 25, Truman took off in the Sacred Cow, landing at an airfield in Marin County just north of San Francisco, in the afternoon. With Secretary of State Stettinius sitting beside him, the president rode through Marin. “The whole countryside seemed somehow influenced by the honor of the occasion in which the president of the United States passed by,” Stettinius wrote in his diary. “Suddenly over the shoulder of a hill, there was a view of the mystic white city across the bay—San Francisco, with just a soft touch of sunlight upon it.”
Crossing the Golden Gate, Truman saw a giant WELCOME sign fastened to the bridge’s towering red spires. In the city there was pandemonium; half a million people were out in the streets. “The whole city was all keyed up with excitement,” recalled Henry Reiff of the U.S. delegation to the UN. “Flags flying, crowds gathered about the Hotel Fairmont waiting to catch a glimpse of the president. My, what excitement all over the place!”
Truman must have thought of Woodrow Wilson’s heralded arrival in Paris after World War I, for the League of Nations Conference. Congress had failed to approve the League of Nations treaty, but this time the story would be different. 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.”
At the Fairmont, someone leaned over to Truman and said, “What a tribute this has been to you,” referring to the city’s wild excitement.
“It’s what we stand for—the United States,” Truman said. “They were cheering the office, not the man.”
That afternoon, behind closed doors, Truman had a private talk with Edward Stettinius. 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.
“Well, you certainly have done a grand job out here,” Truman said, steadying himself with an old-fashioned. “Are you satisfied with what I am planning?” he asked, referring to Stettinius’s new job.
“We can have a leisurely talk tomorrow,” Stettinius said in between sips of a martini.
“You have got to be satisfied,” Truman said earnestly. “I want you to be.” He promised Stettinius that, with the aid of Charlie Ross, they could spin the move to make it look like somewhat of a promotion for Stettinius. “Don’t you have full confidence in Charlie Ross? Don’t you trust him?”
Stettinius said, “First I want you to know that I respect you and I think you are a straight shooter.” But then: “Mr. President, do you really believe that you can do this thing and put Byrnes in without its appearing publicly like a kick in the pants for me?”
“I sincerely believe it can be done that way,” Truman said.
The following day, Truman, Stettinius, and the other members of the U.S. delegation entered the War Memorial Veterans Building for the signing of the United Nations Charter. 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.
Stettinius signed the charter, then Senators Tom Connally and Arthur Vandenberg signed as the two other ranking members of the U.S. delegation. It took hours for all fifty nations to sign, and even then the United Nations had not yet been born, from the point of view of the Americans. The charter would be flown back to Washington, where the Senate would have to vote on it.
As it now stood, the UN consisted of a fifty-nation General Assembly, an eleven-nation Security Council (which would serve as the most powerful peace enforcement agency in the world), an eighteen-nation Economic and Social Council, plus smaller agencies such as a Trusteeship Council and an International Court of Justice. It was, in the words of one reporter covering the conference, “an omen of great hope.” After the signing, the delegations settled in to hear the keynote speaker. 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.”
There were some Battery D boys in the audience that night, personal guests of the president. Many noticed the strange absence of Bess Truman in the crowd. Truman’s speech was well written by all regards, but he had never mastered the art of public speaking. 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!”
At the close of ceremonies, Truman looked forward to laying his head on his pillow in a quiet room at the Fairmont. 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.
The day after the closing ceremony, Truman boarded the Sacred Cow again for a flight to Kansas City, where he was about to experience the homecoming of a lifetime.
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The biggest crowds in the history of Jackson County turned out to meet the president when he arrived home in Missouri. His flight landed at 1:28 p.m. on June 27 at Fairfax Field outside Kansas City, Kansas. As soon as the gangway was in place, Margaret Truman ran inside the airplane to hug her father. Bess remained at home, far from the popping camera bulbs. When Truman stepped out of the Sacred Cow, his old friend Roger Sermon—the mayor of Independence—stepped forward.
“By jove, look who’s here,” Truman said. “Hi, Roger, how are you?”
Truman’s motorcade swept through Kansas City, Kansas, and over the bridge into Kansas City, Missouri, led by a squadron of motorcycle police. He sat in the back seat of an open car, with Margaret and his brother, Vivian, sitting next to him. A parade of cars followed, many of them open automobiles overflowing with locals. A sign at Grand Avenue read, WELCOME HOME, HARRY! Mobs pushed from the sidewalks into the streets. From the windows of a Woolworth’s store, women waved mini-American flags mounted on little sticks. In front of Kansas City’s Jackson County Court House, which Truman had led the charge to build eleven years earlier, a familiar face yelled, “Hello Harry!” Others screamed for “Mr. President” awkwardly—as if, one Washington Post reporter noted, “the things that had happened to put this man in the White House were still a bit incredible.”
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. Behind the house, there was a new doghouse for Margie’s Irish setter, topped by a sign with the dog’s name, MIKE.
The family gathered in the house. There was one particular piece of news to celebrate. During Truman’s 1940 Senate campaign, a bank had foreclosed on the family farm in Grandview, where Truman had toiled for years as a farmer and where his mother had lived for most of her life. Now, with the financial help of some friends, the family had repurchased the home, and the deed was fully paid off.
“That gives you a rent free home for the rest of your life,” Truman informed his mother and his sister. “So now take good care of yourselves and live as long as you can.”
In the afternoon Truman enjoyed a quiet moment with his daughter in his backyard, then he rushed off to hold his regular press conference, this time at Independence’s Memorial Hall. Every seat in the place was full, but no one was sitting when the president walked onto the stage, where a simple desk and chair had been placed for him. Reporters sat in chairs in the front row, with seemingly the entire town of Independence behind them. Press secretary Charlie Ross called the meeting to order.
“Gentlemen, and ladies—ladies and gentlemen.” (Cries of shshshshhhh.) Ross read the rules: No direct quotes, unless it’s a formal announcement. “Now, no one is to leave the conference until it is adjourned.” Ross turned to Truman. “I believe that’s all, Mr. President.”
“All right,” Truman said. “I guess we’ll start.”
He began by announcing that Edward Stettinius would be moving to a new job: representative of the United States to the United Nations. He refused at that moment to name the new secretary of state.
One reporter yelled, “Is it Mr. Byrnes, Mr. President?”
Laughter filled the room, for Byrnes’s appointment had by this point become common knowledge.
“That question,” Truman said, “I cannot answer.”
Following the press conference, Truman was whisked off to a dinner with old army buddies at Independence mayor Roger Sermon’s house, then to the auditorium at the town’s Reorganized Latter Day Saints Auditorium, where again locals jammed the room to see the president, who stood on a stage and spoke extemporaneously. The flag-festooned church auditorium had thousands of seats, and Truman packed the house. Behind him on the stage sat Bess and Margaret, and one Miss Caroline Stoll, age eighty-four, who had been a grade school teacher of Harry’s. “This is the most wonderful day of my life,” she said. “To think that God should let me live to see this come to pass.”
“Time and again, I have tried to fill this great auditorium,” Truman said, referring to his adventures as a novice politician in Jackson County, “and this is the first time I have succeeded.” He told the story of the night he had become president. “I arrived at the White House and went to Mrs. Roosevelt’s study and she informed me that the president had passed away. You can understand how I felt at that moment. It was necessary for me to assume a greater burden, I think, than any man has assumed in the history of the world.”
There were two things Truman needed to achieve as president, he explained. “The first one is to win the war with Japan, and we are winning it.” The crowd erupted in thunderous applause. “The next one,” Truman said, “is to win the peace.” He spoke of the Big Three meeting in Berlin, fast approaching, where negotiations would lead, he hoped, to “peace of the world, for generations to come.”
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Truman’s homecoming cast a spotlight on the state of Missouri the likes of which its residents had never known. The whole country wanted to know about the place that had given rise to this figure who had inadvertently become a subject of intense fascination. Missouri had never had its own president of the United States before. It had, however, cast its vote for every president since the turn of the twentieth century, and thus it was said that, as Missouri goes, so too goes America. The state had both northern and southern roots (southerners were more likely to pronounce Missouri with an a at the end), and while it was home to two vastly different cities—St. Louis and Kansas City—the majority of the land was carved into farming communities. Missouri did not practice segregation on buses, elevators, or streetcars, but it did in schools, toilet facilities, restaurants, and hotels.
Kansas City, the metropolis most associated with the president, still had the air of the Wild West. It was cut in half by the chocolate-colored Missouri River, with Kansas City, Kansas, on one side and Kansas City, Missouri (the larger, more well-known metropolis), on the other. More than three hundred passenger trains and five hundred freight trains passed through Union Station in Kansas City, Missouri, every day. Until recently, the city had boasted some of the most celebrated jazz clubs in the country, stages that had given rise to Bennie Moten, Count Basie, and hometown saxophone wunderkind Charlie “Yardbird” Parker. But many of those clubs had shuttered during the war, and many of those musicians were now serving in the military. While the sizzling Kansas City steak was the local gustatory claim to fame, this cut’s smoky fragrance had all but disappeared, due to rationing.
The war had fueled the city’s booming economy. Action in the slaughterhouses had pushed Kansas City past Chicago during the war as the world’s largest cattle market. Aviation and ordnance plants employed tens of thousands, notably a freshly constructed B-25 bomber plant on the Kansas side of the Missouri River. One example of the wartime boom: the Vendo Company of Kansas City, Missouri—previously a soda vending machine company with 150 workers—had become a military electronics factory employing 1,500.
Independence, meanwhile, was a town that could be dropped into any other state and not look out of place. It had shops, auto garages, banks, corner drugstores, all surrounding Independence Square. There was one thing Independence had, however, that other towns did not: Harry Truman.
“It looks to us,” one longtime resident told the New York Times, “like you writers and newspaper people are trying to paint a lot of glamour on a fellow who just won’t glamorize. Harry Truman isn’t any genius. He’s just like the rest of us around here, only he’s a little smarter. We’ve known that ever since he was a kid.”
The day after Truman’s appearance at the church auditorium, he went for a walk through Kansas City, with secret service in tow. At Thirty-Ninth and Main Streets he visited an old friend—Eddie Jacobson—in Jacobson’s new shop, Westport Men’s Wear.
“Hello there, Eddie,” Truman said, shaking his old friend’s hand.
“Hello, Harry.”
Surely the memories flashed before Truman’s eyes—running the canteen with Jacobson at Camp Doniphan in Oklahoma, two young soldiers on their way to war. Or the ill-fated Truman & Jacobson. That shop had now been closed for twenty-three years. Jacobson had opened his new store just months earlier.
“I want some shirts,” Truman told Eddie. “Size 15½, 33 lengths.”
Jacobson searched the store, but he did not have Truman’s size. By this time, mobs had crowded the front door, and photographers snapped away at the old partners. It was a moment neither man would ever forget.
Once again, Bess managed to escape the attention, secluding herself behind the doors of 219 North Delaware during her husband’s visit. Thus far, she had decided the role of First Lady did not suit her. (A year later, in 1946, Bess was asked, “If it had been left to your own free choice, would you have gone into the White House in the first place?” She answered, “Most definitely would not have.” Would she want Margaret to become a First Lady? “No.” Did she think there would ever be a female president? “No.” Had living in the White House changed her view of politics and people? “No comment.”)
Truman promised his family that he would have no official duties on his last full day at home—Saturday, June 30—for he could not even guess when he would be able to come home again. But pleas from the press lured him out onto his front porch with Margaret for some pictures, in the late afternoon. The photographers asked for Bess to be in the photographs, and Truman went inside to fetch the First Lady. He came back alone. As Margaret remembered, “Mother had flatly refused to join us.” Truman offered a halfhearted smile, telling the photographers, “Take a few more of us, why don’t you, boys.”
Early the next morning, July 1, the president’s limousine left Independence for the airport. Truman arrived back in Washington at 2 p.m., alone without his family in the White House again. Later in the afternoon he was at his desk looking over documents in his second-floor study when a knock came at the door. White House staffers Bill Hassett, Eben Ayers, and Matt Connelly entered, along with Charlie Ross and Sam Rosenman. A few minutes later a naval aide ushered in Alger Hiss of the State Department, who held in his hands the UN Charter.
Truman suggested a drink to celebrate—with ice, as the summer heat was bearing down on the White House. He made a call, and minutes later servants brought in a tray of glasses, a bucket of ice, and bottles of bourbon and scotch. Truman raised a toast to the United Nations.
The following day, just after lunch, he stood at the podium in the Senate Chamber and formally presented the charter. As an international treaty, the document would have to be approved by the Senate by a two-thirds vote, or it would land in history’s dustbin, right next to Woodrow Wilson’s League of Nations charter. Truman delivered a short, heartfelt speech.
“No international document has been drawn in a greater glare of publicity than has this one,” he said. “The choice before the Senate is now clear,” he continued. “The choice is not between this Charter and something else. It is between this Charter and no Charter at all.”
The Senate began its talks the moment Truman left the gallery. The deliberations would grow heated at times, the UN hanging in the balance.
At 11 a.m. the following day, James F. Byrnes was sworn in as secretary of state. Truman watched Justice Richard Whaley conduct the ceremony on the White House’s East Portico, which was surrounded by rosebushes in bloom. The affair was quick, simple, and sultry hot, with Mrs. Byrnes and Henry Stimson standing by as witnesses with the president.
Byrnes now joined Truman as chief architect of American foreign policy. Ever since Thomas Jefferson served as the first secretary of state, the role had been defined by decisions as to how much the United States should get involved in other nations’ conflicts, and how to exploit international relations for the purpose of national security and economic growth. The end of World War II would pose complexities that no secretary of state had faced before.
The new secretary of state was a polarizing figure—certainly more so than Truman realized at the time. Byrnes had a rare résumé; he had served in all three branches of government—executive (as secretary of state), judicial (as a Supreme Court justice), and legislative (as a former senator from South Carolina). He had angered some of his colleagues in the past, who considered him Machiavellian and, at times, remarkably self-interested. Before his swearing in, Sam Rosenman, White House special counsel, had warned Truman: “I don’t think you know Jimmy Byrnes, Mr. President. You think you do. In the bonhomie of the Senate, he’s one kind of a fellow; but I think you will regret this [appointment], and if I were you, I wouldn’t do it.” Others were furious over the sacking of “Brother Ed” Stettinius, who was responsible more than any other man for bringing the UN Charter to fruition. “It just shows how cruel and ruthless ‘politics’ can be,” Senator Vandenberg wrote in his diary.
Truman felt sure that in Byrnes he had the right man. “My, but he has a keen mind,” he wrote of Byrnes. The timing of the appointment was key. The president was set to leave for Berlin in two days’ time, and blue-eyed Jimmy Byrnes would be by his side as his most trusted advisor.