“I SURE DREAD THIS TRIP worse than anything I’ve had to face,” Truman wrote Bess of the upcoming Berlin conference. He was set to leave the White House on the night of July 6, and the race to prepare had set the city of Washington on edge. In the midnight hours, office lights could be seen flickering in the executive mansion, the old State and War Building, the Pentagon, and elsewhere, as officials tapped out thick position papers for Truman on every subject from Zionism to the evolving government in Poland to the future economy of Germany. At port in Newport News, Virginia, the crew of the USS Augusta was readying the ship for the president. Truman’s party was now set at thirty-seven individuals, while the secretary of state’s traveling staff would total twenty-six. The Joint Chiefs of Staff’s party would total seventy-five, not including the chiefs themselves.
The Russians were set to host the meeting inside Soviet-occupied territory. The conference would be held in the Berlin suburb of Potsdam, since the city of Berlin had been destroyed, in a prince’s palace that had not suffered bombing damage. Harriman carried the heavy load of making the arrangements for the conference with the hosting Soviets, while Eisenhower’s office was in charge of arranging on-site accommodations. The latter in particular had become a headache, signifying how difficult it was going to be to negotiate with the Soviets on anything. American reconnaissance personnel headed by General Floyd Parks had been refused access to secure a safe location for the president and his staff in Potsdam.
“All attempts to secure permission for General Parks and party to proceed to Berlin immediately for reconnaissance and making necessary arrangements for conference have been unsuccessful,” Eisenhower’s office in Frankfurt cabled Washington. General Parks himself cabled: “No explanation can be given for such a delay except the lack of permission from the Soviet authorities to undertake necessary arrangements.” Only after strong lobbying from Harriman was General Parks allowed to enter Potsdam, to insure safety, inspect quarters, and to set up high-frequency communications systems. Mess, laundry, medical, and pharmaceutical aid—all of it had to be arranged under the careful watch of Soviet intelligence.
Britain was holding an election for prime minister, and the results would not be known at the start of the conference, so Churchill informed Truman that he would bring his opposing candidate, Clement Attlee of the Labour Party, with him, “in order that full continuity of British policy may be assured,” whether Churchill remained prime minister or not. Experts in the State Department had informed Truman that they expected Churchill to win the election, but who knew? Electioneering was full of surprises, as Truman knew as much as anybody.
The names of Truman’s party represented great intrigue in Washington. “There isn’t any doubt that James F. Byrnes, Secretary of State, has emerged as the man closest to President Truman,” the Boston Globe’s chief Washington reporter noted. Secretary of War Stimson was not on the list to attend Potsdam. Neither was Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, who was infuriated. The rumor mill buzzed that Morgenthau was going to get replaced by Fred Vinson, director of the Office of Economic Stabilization. Vinson had been invited to the Potsdam Conference. Morgenthau had not. Morgenthau insisted on talking over the matter with Truman, face-to-face.
The two met in the Oval Office at 10:15 a.m. on the day before Truman was scheduled to set sail. By this time, the Oval Office appeared entirely Truman’s. All remnants of Franklin Roosevelt had vanished—a fact not lost on Morgenthau, who had considered himself one of FDR’s closest confidants and had spent countless hours with Roosevelt in this room. Even the desk was different. Truman had given FDR’s desk to Eleanor Roosevelt and had replaced it with a walnut desk that had belonged to Theodore Roosevelt. Upon this desk now sat a framed photograph of Bess—the same picture that Truman had kept in his pocket while fighting as a soldier in World War I.
“You are leaving,” Morgenthau said, “and there’s all this gossip which has been increasing more and more about my being through.” Morgenthau wanted to know: Was he in or out?
“Let me think this thing over,” Truman said, trying to find a polite way out of the conversation.
“Mr. President, from several remarks you have dropped you must have something in your mind. Either you want me or you don’t, and you know it now.”
Morgenthau offered his resignation. He said that if he was not invited to Potsdam, he should step down. The president had heard enough.
“All right,” Truman answered, “if that is the way you feel, I’ll accept your resignation right now.”
Soon afterward Truman was hosting his regular press conference, prepared to announce Morgenthau’s resignation. When reporters entered his office, they found him sipping a glass of water (“just taking a little something for my nerves!” he said) and wielding a sword that had come off a swordfish (“a good letter opener,” he said). The press had come to rely on Truman’s jocularity as an icebreaker, but Truman’s voice turned sober as he announced the Treasury secretary’s resignation. Morgenthau had run the Treasury for eleven years. When reporters asked Truman if he had decided on a successor, he said, “I have a successor in mind, but he will not be announced until I get back from Europe.”
Fred Vinson would in fact be the new Treasury secretary, and had already begun to assume the role.
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Not long before Truman’s departure for Europe, the secretary of war came to see him. Stimson came to discuss Japan. He produced a document, and Truman read the memorandum—called “Proposed Program for Japan”—carefully, as Stimson sat by. The planning for the invasion of Japan was “now actually going on,” Stimson wrote. “There is reason to believe that the operation for the occupation of Japan following the landing may be a very long, costly and arduous struggle on our part.” Stimson was second-guessing the invasion plan. He believed that the Japanese would refuse to surrender, under any cost, if their homeland was invaded by foreigners. They would fight to the last man and the last square foot of territory. The United States would have no choice but to destroy Japan completely, at the cost of countless American casualties.
“A question then comes,” Stimson’s memo read. “Is there any alternative to such a forceful occupation of Japan which will secure for us the equivalent of an unconditional surrender of her forces and a permanent destruction of her power again to strike an aggressive blow at the ‘peace of the Pacific’?” The memorandum read further: “Japan has no allies . . . She is terribly vulnerable to our concentrated air attack upon her crowded cities, industrial and food resources . . . We have inexhaustible and untouched industrial resources to bring to bear against her diminishing potential. We have great moral superiority through being the victim of her first sneak attack. The problem is to translate these advantages into prompt and economical achievement of our objectives.”
The secretary of war did not mention the atomic bomb in this memorandum. (As Stimson noted, “On grounds of secrecy the bomb was never mentioned except when absolutely necessary.”) Behind closed doors in the president’s office, however, they spoke freely on the matter.
Stimson recommended a kind of warning to Japan, and he had written a draft of what such a warning would look like, with the help of his colleagues. It spoke of the “overwhelming character of the force we are about to bring to bear on the islands.” It spoke of “the inevitability and completeness of the destruction on which the full application of this force will entail.” Whether or not such a warning would use the words atomic bomb was a subject to be discussed. But either way, Stimson argued, by issuing a public and official warning, the United States could convince Japan to capitulate. And if Japan did not (more likely the case), history would record the moral position of an attacking nation that had done its best to warn its victim of what was to come—annihilation of a city, perhaps more than one.
Truman liked what he was hearing. Stimson’s memorandum was the impetus for what would become the Potsdam Declaration—an ultimatum to Japan that the whole world would see, warning utter destruction.
The secretary also believed that no harm would come from allowing the emperor to remain in power in Japan. He believed such an offer would “substantially add to the chances” that Japan would surrender. Truman remained uncommitted on this matter.
Finally, Stimson thought it would be a good idea to inform Stalin at the upcoming meeting about the atomic bomb, before it was used. (The secretary was assuming at this point that Oppenheimer’s test shot would be a success, which was not assured.) Stimson thought Truman should tell Stalin “that we were busy with this thing working like the dickens and . . . that we were pretty nearly ready and we intended to use it against the enemy, Japan.” The time was now to inform Stalin of the bomb, Stimson urged, “with the purpose of having it make the world peaceful and safe rather than to destroy civilization.” Here again, Truman was in agreement. The question remained: How to inform Stalin?
Before leaving the president’s office, Stimson asked why he had not been invited to Potsdam. He was nearing his seventy-eighth birthday; he was an elder statesman who was clearly pained by the idea of missing out on what would be the climactic moment of a much heralded career. He wondered aloud to the president: Was it because of his age?
“Yes,” Truman answered, trying to lighten the moment with a bit of laughter. “That was just it.” He feared Stimson’s overexertion.
Stimson was fit and ready. He could produce nothing less than the endorsement of the surgeon general of the United States, he said. He thought he could do some good if he came along in an unofficial capacity. Truman agreed, and Stimson left to go make last-minute arrangements for the most important trip of his life.
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On the eve of Potsdam the global picture looked grim. The course of international relations depended on various plot lines of which Truman had no control, and the once great Grand Alliance had lost its grandeur, like a bad three-way marriage turned bitter by suspicions, betrayals, and money problems.
Truman had by this time met with the Chinese foreign minister, T. V. Soong, and had finally informed him of the secret Yalta agreements. “There was a long discussion of every point,” Undersecretary of State Joseph Grew wrote in his notes of this meeting, “the president making it clear that he was definitely committed to the agreements reached by President Roosevelt.” Soong understood that the Chinese would have to make major concessions in order to get the Soviets into the war against Japan, and he told Truman there was no way the Chinese could honor these agreements, about which they were never consulted.
For Truman, an agreement between China and the USSR was imperative, not just because he wanted Soviet commitment to the Pacific war but also because he wanted Stalin to be aligned with the current Chinese government under Chiang Kai-shek, not the rebel Chinese Communists, currently gaining power under Mao Tse-tung in the north. Regarding the concessions to the Soviets, Soong declared that China would prefer to “settle the controversy by military action.” The Chinese would fight rather than make these concessions to the Soviets. But both Soong and Truman knew that China had no resources to wage war above and beyond the war it was already fighting. Soong had since left Washington en route to Moscow, in an attempt to negotiate directly with Stalin.
In the New Mexico desert, a construction crew reporting to a Harvard experimental physicist named Kenneth T. Bainbridge was putting the finishing touches on a proving ground, where the test shot was set to go off. After more delay, the atomic bomb test was now scheduled for July 15, just as Truman would be arriving at Potsdam. Truman and his closest aides were awaiting news from New Mexico with great anticipation.
Truman rushed through his final personal arrangements in anticipation of his journey. He saw his dentist, who made a house call to the White House. (“A lot has happened since I saw you last,” he told his dentist, who in turn told the president he needed a root canal, and performed the procedure on the spot.) Truman packed his finest suits, formal wear for the evenings, cold weather clothes for the ship cruise across the Atlantic, and hot weather clothes for summer in Berlin. He needed his “high hat, top hat, and hard hat,” he joked.
“It’ll be a circus sure enough,” he wrote Bess. “But we will get it done I hope.”
There was no letup in the schedule on July 6, the day Truman and his party were set to leave Washington. At the morning staff meeting, all talk was of the voyage to Europe. Neither Truman nor Jimmy Byrnes had any experience negotiating with the likes of Stalin and Churchill. Eben Ayers admitted in his diary after the morning meeting what many in Washington were feeling: fear that Truman and Byrnes were going to make mistakes at Potsdam, mistakes that the American public, perhaps even future generations, was going to have to pay for. Ayers feared Potsdam would be a “‘babes in the wood’ affair.”
The president’s calendar on this day listed no fewer than twenty appointments. He had a budget meeting and a cabinet meeting. He issued three executive orders, most notably an order to create an emergency board to investigate labor strikes at midwestern railroad companies critical to the war effort. Exhausted, he left the White House by motorcade at 9:40 p.m. with members of his party. He made sure to surround himself during his travel with old friends, men who set him at ease: Charlie Ross, Harry Vaughan. He even brought along his old pal Fred Canfil. At 9:50 the party boarded a special train at track 2 in Union Station, bound for the shipyard in Newport News.
Truman had a strong wind at his sails. At the time of his departure, a new Gallup poll set his approval rating at a miraculous 87 percent. Never during any of Franklin Roosevelt’s days as president had FDR enjoyed an approval rating that high. America found Truman to be “fair-minded . . . a hard worker . . . a realist who looks at things squarely and seeks good advice,” according to the poll. He was “better at handling people than Roosevelt,” and he “had no crackpot ideas.” Still, no approval ratings could ease Truman’s fears. As Robert Nixon wrote of Truman in the Washington Post, “The present conference projects him into the world spotlight.”
He knew his country was counting on him, and that he would be held accountable. As Judge Sam Rosenman wrote in a memo to the president, “The American people expect you to bring something home to them.”
While still on the train, Truman wrote Bess. They had spoken by phone recently, and she had seemed to him rather upset. The stress of living a public life was maddening her, and they had years left to go before it would be over. Their marriage was suffering. “I’m sorry if I’ve done something to make you unhappy,” Harry wrote Bess, sitting in the swaying belly of the president’s Pullman car en route to Newport News. “All I’ve ever tried to do is make you pleased with me and the world. I’m very much afraid I’ve failed miserably . . . Now I’m on the way to the high executioner.”
Churchill had given this Big Three conference an ominous code name: Terminal. The president and his party boarded the USS Augusta on the morning of July 7. Truman had not stepped foot in Europe since he was a soldier in 1918. Less than three months had passed since the moon and all the stars had fallen upon him. As he wrote in his diary on July 7, the day the Augusta pulled out of port: “How I hate this trip!”