“WHO IS TO BE THE CHAIRMAN at our conference?” Churchill asked.
The Russian interpreter Pavlov translated Churchill’s question for Stalin, who responded, “I propose President Truman of the United States.”
Churchill: “The British delegation supports this proposal.”
Truman said, “I accept the chairmanship of this Conference.”
Potsdam’s first agreement was made. The negotiations would never be that easy again. Perhaps Truman did not realize that Stalin had already begun his careful manipulation. Stalin would never offer anything—not even simple graciousness—without asking for something in return, further on down the line.
Sitting at the table from the United States: Truman, with Secretary Byrnes and Admiral Leahy on his right, interpreter Chip Bohlen on his left, and former Moscow ambassador Joseph Davies on the other side of Bohlen. In the background: Ambassador Harriman and various members of the State Department. (The Chiefs of Staff had come to Potsdam, but as military men, they were not in the negotiating chamber.)
From Britain: Prime Minister Churchill, Churchill’s election opponent, Clement Attlee of the Labour Party, and Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, among others.
From the Soviet Union: Generalissimo Stalin, with Molotov on his right, and the translator Pavlov on his left. Also: the fierce negotiator Andrey Vyshinsky—who had served as Stalin’s legal mastermind during the Great Purge trials of the 1930s—and the nearly as cunning foreign minister, Andrei Gromyko.
Much of this first meeting was devoted to procedure. Truman had come prepared, and he launched forward with his first point. “One of the most acute problems at present is to set up some kind of mechanism for arranging peace talks,” he said. “Without it, Europe’s economic development will continue to the detriment of the cause of the Allies and the whole world.” He recommended the establishment of a council of foreign ministers from Britain, the United States, the USSR, France, and China. “That is,” he said, “the permanent members of the Security Council of the United Nations set up at the San Francisco Conference.” This council, Truman said, should play the role of hammering out all the peace treaties for all the belligerents.
As the room filled with smoke, an agenda for the conference began to take shape. The list of questions that needed addressing grew profoundly daunting: the future of Germany and the matter of German reparations, the Polish regime (still clearly Soviet-controlled), the role of China in the peace talks, and the complexity of Italy’s role in Europe. (Under Mussolini, Italy had fought with the Nazis at the cost of many Allied soldiers, but had been the first of the Axis to surrender and had recently declared war on Japan just three days earlier, in hopes of joining the UN.) All these issues formed what Churchill called “the tangled problems of Europe—the volcano from which war springs.”
Truman’s personality emerged early. He wanted efficient talks. He wanted the agenda for the next day’s discussions set before today’s were over. “I don’t want just to discuss,” he said, “I want to decide.” He wanted the talks to begin at 4 p.m. instead of 5. He also took a moment to voice what everyone in the room was thinking: “I am well aware that I am now substituting for a man whom it is impossible to substitute, the late President Roosevelt. I am glad to serve, even if partially, the memory which you preserve of President Roosevelt.”
Before the first meeting was over, the first conflict arose, an omen of what was to come. This fray was over German warships, which were in British possession.
“There is only one other question,” Stalin said, as the session neared its end. “Why does Mr. Churchill deny the Russians their share of the German navy?”
“I have no objections,” said Churchill. “But since you have asked me this question, here is my answer: This navy should be either sunk or divided.”
“Do you want it sunk or divided?” asked Stalin.
“All means of war are terrible things,” said Churchill, avoiding the question.
“The navy should be divided,” said Stalin. “If Mr. Churchill prefers to sink the navy, he is free to sink his share of it. I have no intention of sinking mine.”
“At present, nearly the whole of the German navy is in our hands,” said Churchill.
“That’s the whole point,” Stalin came back. “That’s the whole point. That is why we need to decide the question.”
Truman ended the session here before any decision on the German fleet was made, after one hour and forty-five minutes of sparring. “Tomorrow,” he said, “the sitting is at four o’clock.”
With the meeting adjourned, the delegations funneled to an adjoining room where the hosts had prepared an elaborate buffet. As Truman was soon to learn, this was the Russian way of doing things. “The table was set with everything you could think of,” he recalled. Goose liver, caviar, every kind of meat one could imagine, along with cheeses of different shapes and colors, and endless wine and vodka.
Minutes after 7 p.m., Truman left the palace in his motorcade. At a checkpoint along the road back to the Little White House, Russian soldiers stopped the president’s car for questioning, at which point a Russian lieutenant appeared and berated the soldiers for holding the American president up. Leahy leaned into Truman’s ear as the driver put the car in gear. “I’ll bet that lieutenant is shot in the morning,” he said.
Later that night, at his villa, Truman received Secretary of War Stimson, who came bearing another cryptic communication from Washington regarding the atomic bomb test in New Mexico.
Doctor has just returned most enthusiastic and confident that the little boy [the bomb being ready for use against Japan] is as husky as his big brother [the Trinity test shot]. The light in his eyes discernible from here [Washington DC] to Highhold [Stimson’s private estate on Long Island] and could have heard his screams from here to my farm.
Numerous accounts of Potsdam describe Truman in moments of pensive repose at his villa. He was worried. All three delegations understood that, even before the conference began, powerful forces were at work, undermining its success. The Big Three were emerging from the war as victors, but they were entrenched in economic and political instabilities that set their best interests in conflict. Historians would forever debate the cause and effect of these instabilities, and while certain circumstances seem self-evident today, they were not at the time.
The Americans saw themselves as world policemen and moral arbiters. But did their capitalist interests and their suspicion of the Soviets subjugate objective reasoning? Would the inexperience of their new president come into play? Britain—the Gilded Age’s greatest power—was a fading flame. Even as the Potsdam Conference began, the Big Three was being called the Big Two and a Half. The Soviets were the most vexing. While their objectives at the negotiating table seemed relatively clear, their motivations were far from it. These motivations would only become more understood through time. The world’s only communist nation saw itself as an island in a sea boiling with predators. The story of Russia had been a story of invasions. Through the years, Russia had been attacked by everyone from the Mongols to Napoleon. For centuries, marauding tribes had plundered the land now known as the USSR. In more recent times Russia had fought two wars against invading German armies and had lost a war with Japan, in 1904–1905. Only now after all these generations had the country emerged as a major global power. Stalin saw in every neighboring state a chance to influence the future and create security for the USSR through control of these neighboring governments via secret police, authority over the press, and puppet regimes.
Herein lay the reason why Stalin had committed so much blood to the war and was willing to sacrifice more in the fight with Japan. Stalin would see some twenty-four million of his subjects, military and civilian, die as a result of World War II, millions more than had died from any other nation. (China was second with roughly 20 million military and civilian deaths, while the United States lost about 418,500.) Now the Soviets intended to capitalize on this investment in blood; they believed that this bloodletting entitled them to power and expansion. This thinking informed Stalin’s every statement at Potsdam.
Only one thing felt certain: the United States and the Soviet Union were going to enter the second half of the twentieth century as global superpowers of unprecedented strength. George Kennan of the Moscow embassy defined the USSR at this time: “Two hundred million people, united under the strong and purposeful leadership of Moscow and inhabiting one of the major industrial countries of the world, constitute a single force far greater than any other that will be left on the European continent when this war is over; and it would be folly to underestimate their potential—for good or evil.”
The negotiations were at hand. Populations and borders had shifted or disappeared during the war, so vast frontiers, such as those along the edges of Poland, the USSR, and Germany, needed to be remapped and millions of peoples potentially moved. New governments in many nations had to be agreed upon, according to principles of government that were themselves not agreed upon. Meanwhile, millions in Europe were starving, the Pacific war was raging, and the Americans had a secret that had the potential to change everything.
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On the morning after the first Potsdam plenary session, Truman breakfasted with his nephew Sergeant Harry Truman—the son of the president’s brother, Vivian. Sergeant Truman had been aboard the Queen Elizabeth ready to sail home for America when army officials plucked him up and delivered him to Babelsberg. “They gave him the choice of sailing or coming to see his uncle,” Truman wrote Bess. “The nicest looking soldier you can imagine.”
At 1:15 p.m. Truman walked the few blocks to Churchill’s villa, accompanied by a half dozen officials including Charlie Ross and Harry Vaughan. The president lunched with Churchill alone, however. The prime minister expressed melancholy over the state of the British empire. Britain was deeply scarred by Nazi bombing, and the country was emerging from the European war with a debt of ₤3 billion. Truman was sympathetic, implying that there would be future economic aid. The United States owed Britain for giving so much to defeating the Third Reich. Truman said, “If you had gone down like France, we might be fighting the Germans on the American coast at the present time. This justifies us in regarding these matters as above the purely financial plane.”
Truman brought up the Trinity test, of which Churchill had been informed the day before during a meeting with Secretary of War Stimson. (“The experiment in the New Mexican desert has come off,” Stimson had said. “The atomic bomb is a reality.”) Churchill referred to Trinity as “world shaking news,” though it was not unexpected. Since the early days of the Manhattan Project, Churchill had been a coconspirator with Franklin Roosevelt.* As the bomb became more and more of an American phenomenon, there was certainly jealousy on the part of Churchill. Now FDR was gone, and Truman must have felt to the prime minister like an interloper. Nevertheless, Churchill was thrilled with the news of Trinity, and he had come to immediate conclusions, which he shared with Truman. Churchill was deeply disturbed by the idea of an invasion of Japan. It could cost a million American lives and another half million British, he believed. With the bomb, there was an alternative.
“Now all this nightmare picture had vanished,” Churchill later wrote, due to this “supernatural weapon.” “In its place was the vision—fair and bright indeed it seemed—of the end of the whole war in one or two violent shocks.” From the point of view of both Truman and Churchill, the genius of the bomb was that it could save lives by putting an end to the fighting and giving the Japanese a reason to surrender. “By using this new agency,” Churchill believed, “we might not merely destroy cities, but save the lives alike of friend and foe.”
Churchill also believed that the Russians were no longer needed in the war against Japan, a question that Byrnes and Stimson and the American chiefs of Staff were now examining from every angle. With the bomb, Churchill believed Stalin’s bargaining power with the Japanese war was now gone. But, the prime minister added, the employment of the atomic bomb—without Stalin’s knowledge of its existence—would be construed by him as a shocking betrayal. Truman made no commitment on whether the United States favored having the Soviets in the Japanese war, but the president did agree: the time was near to reveal this secret to Stalin.
“I think,” Truman told Churchill, “I had best just tell him after one of our meetings that we have an entirely novel form of bomb, something quite out of the ordinary, which we think will have decisive effects upon the Japanese will to continue the war.”
Churchill agreed.
In his diary, Truman wrote on this day, “Believe Japs will fold before Russia comes in. I am sure they will when Manhattan appears over their homeland.”
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Minutes after 3 p.m., Truman and Byrnes paid a visit to Stalin’s villa, with the translator Chip Bohlen in tow. Inside, the Soviets presented the Americans with yet another buffet of delicacies, then Stalin led Truman out onto a balcony overlooking Lake Griebnitz. Toasts were made and diplomatic language was exchanged. There were serious misunderstandings about each leader in the opposing nation, both agreed. Truman suggested Stalin visit the United States, as a means of changing public opinion, in both countries. Stalin made no commitment, but he did admit that it was going to be harder for the Soviets to cooperate with the United States in peacetime, as they had in war.
Stalin brought up a peace feeler from Japan that had arrived via an emissary in Moscow. Chip Bohlen was taking notes of the conversation in Stalin’s villa, and he later formulated the following depiction of this moment: “Stalin said that the Soviet Union had received a communication from the Japanese, and he handed to the president a copy of a note from Sato, the Japanese ambassador at Moscow, with a message from the [Japanese] Emperor . . . Stalin inquired of the president whether it was worth while [to] answer this communication. The President replied that he had no respect for the good faith of the Japanese.”
Truman, Stalin, Byrnes, and Molotov talked over the issue, concluding that news of this Japanese peace feeler was so vague, it deserved no serious response. Surely, leaders in Tokyo were becoming aware of the Red Army forces amassing along the border of Japanese-occupied Manchuria, and they feared what the Russians were about to do next. If Emperor Hirohito wanted peace, he would make a more formal approach. This discussion was cut short, however. Truman left Stalin’s villa with Byrnes and Bohlen, and less than an hour later the delegations were back at the negotiating table.
Truman was in terrific form at the second plenary session, which was called to order minutes after 4 p.m. on July 18. His style was different from his predecessor’s. Roosevelt improvised, while Truman stuck to the script. Roosevelt’s discourse rambled, but Truman was “crisp and to the point,” according to Bohlen, who served as Russian translator to both presidents. “Where Roosevelt was warmly friendly with Churchill and Stalin,” Bohlen noted, “Truman was pleasantly distant.” At one point during the conversation, Truman scribbled on a piece of paper—“Joe, how am I doing?”—and passed it across the table to Joseph Davies, who wrote back, “You are batting 1000 percent. You are holding your own with the best at this table.”
Churchill was not himself, on the other hand. He appeared ill prepared, to the dismay of his delegation, who assumed he had become distracted by the current election count, which could end his term of office in a matter of a few days. This second meeting’s major topics were control of Germany and Poland’s government. Churchill seized on questions posed and deconstructed them by asking more questions. “What is the meaning of reference to submission of the United Nations?” “What do we mean by Germany?” “Are we going to have uniform control or different practices in the four [occupation] zones?” Truman grew frustrated by the prime minister’s verbosity. The president wrote in a diary on this day: “I’m not going to stay around this terrible place all summer just to listen to speeches. I’ll go home to the Senate for that.”
Stalin, on the other hand, was laconic, friendly, and fiercely protective of his interests. Of all the poker faces Truman had ever stared down, none beat the Man of Steel. “Stalin,” Truman concluded, “is as near like Tom Pendergast as any man I know.”
Meanwhile, outside the negotiating chamber, the scene at Potsdam had become a beehive of rumor and intrigue. “This whole environment at Berlin is somehow beyond words,” Stimson wrote in a letter to his wife. The Russian sector was closed and closely guarded. Stimson described his impression of the Soviets: “There was evident . . . palpable and omnipresent, the atmosphere of dictatorial repression. Nothing in [my] life matched this experience . . . What manner of men were these with whom to build a peace in the atomic age?”
In the American and British sections, the experience was different. “The general atmosphere at Babelsberg between the British and American sectors was that of a community compound,” noted one member of the British group, “where people lived in self-contained working units, invited each other to their houses, [and] greeted each other in the street. Absolutely everyone was there. It was the last great beano of the war.”
In Berlin itself, thousands of journalists from around the globe lounged wherever they could, unable to get access to concrete facts, as they were forbidden from attending the conference. Warriors from three conquering armies rubbed elbows in the streets. Soldiers would describe a psychological darkness in Berlin; it was a city balanced on a razor’s edge. Chip Bohlen recalled his one night free at Potsdam, going to the only open nightclub in Berlin: “The hall was filled with soldiers of three armies, most of them intoxicated and all of them heavily armed.”
A black market thrived openly in Berlin’s streets, with goods and services readily traded. At one point all the eggs in the president’s villa disappeared, to the chagrin of Commander William Rigdon, in charge of the pantry. Rigdon inquired among secret service men, who could not solve the mystery but could provide this piece of information: a single egg on the Berlin black market could bring ten dollars. General Arnold wrote in his diary of Berlin’s black market: “Jewels, rings traded for bread but principally for canned meat. Trading posts in action with hundreds of people all day long.” Women, according to Arnold’s diary, were part of this black market’s trade. At one point, according to a story told by Truman’s driver, Floyd Boring, the president was getting into his car when an army colonel whispered to him: “Listen, I know you’re alone over here [without your wife] . . . If you need anything like, you know, I’ll be glad to arrange it for you.”
Truman responded furiously: “Hold it; don’t say anything more. I love my wife, and my wife is my sweetheart. I don’t want to do that kind of stuff . . . I don’t want you to ever say that again to me.”
Truman was all business at Potsdam. The night after the second plenary session, he described his view of the scene in a letter to Bess. He was handling himself all right, he told her.
“Admiral Leahy said he’d never seen an abler job and Byrnes and my fellows seemed to be walking on air. I was so scared I didn’t know whether things were going according to Hoyle or not [a reference meaning in accord with the rules]. Anyway, a start has been made and I’ve gotten what I came for—Stalin goes to war August 15 with no strings on it . . . I’ll say that we’ll end the war a year sooner now, and think of the kids who won’t be killed! That is the important thing.”