In the late afternoon of April 12, 1945, a Secret Service agent on Vice President Harry S Truman’s protection detail informed him he was urgently needed at the White House. Truman was surprised. Since their inauguration in January, the sixty-one-year-old Vice President had seen President Franklin Delano Roosevelt only twice, and had never been alone with him.
The story went around that Truman was closer to FDR’s wife, Eleanor, than he was to the ailing sixty-three-year-old.
When Truman got to the White House, he in fact was greeted by Mrs. Roosevelt.
“Harry,” she said. “The President is dead.”
Roosevelt had died hours before in Warm Springs, Georgia, in the company of his mistress, Lucy Mercer.
It has been reliably reported that immediately after Truman was sworn in by Chief Justice Harlan Stone as the thirty-third President of the United States, his first order was: “Get Justice Jackson and Captain Souers over here right now.”
Captain Sidney W. Souers, United States Navy Reserve, and Colonel Harry S Truman, Missouri National Guard, were old and close “Weekend Warrior” buddies from Missouri.
When Souers, at the time the chairman of the board of a large insurance company, was called to active duty in Washington, he moved into the small apartment in which then–U.S. Senator Truman lived. There was room because Mrs. Bess Truman hated Washington and was seldom in the city.
Truman and Supreme Court Associate Justice Robert H. Jackson had become friends when the latter had advised the Truman Committee on how to deal with war profiteers.
The three frequently dined and had a couple of drinks together in the Truman apartment.
Truman neither liked nor trusted the people close to President Roosevelt, and knew he needed the advice of friends whom he could trust without reservation.
The next day, April 13th, there was proof that Roosevelt and the people around him didn’t like or trust Truman either.
U.S. Army Major General Leslie Groves—whom Truman had never met—was shown into the Oval Office by a visibly nervous Secretary of State Edward Stettinius Jr. Then Stettinius left the President alone with General Groves.
Groves told Truman America’s greatest secret: The United States had developed the most powerful weapon the world had ever known: the atomic bomb.
Truman was furious that he had been kept in the dark by Roosevelt, almost certainly at the advice of those around him.
A month after General Alfred Jodl, the chief of staff of the German Armed Forces High Command, had signed on May 7th the unconditional surrender documents ending the war in Europe, the first of Roosevelt’s cronies to go was Stettinius. Truman fired him on June 27, 1945, replacing him on July 3rd—some said at the recommendation of Justice Jackson—with James F. Byrnes.
On August 6, 1945, an American B-29 bomber dropped the world’s first deployed atomic bomb over the Japanese city of Hiroshima.
Three days later, a second B-29 dropped another A-bomb on Nagasaki.
In a radio address on August 15th, citing the devastating power of “a new and most cruel bomb,” Japanese Emperor Hirohito announced his country’s unconditional surrender.
Almost immediately after the formal surrender ceremonies aboard the battleship USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay, Truman came under enormous pressure from the Army, the Navy, the State Department, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. They demanded, for their own interagency rivalry reasons, that he disestablish the Office of Strategic Services—the OSS—America’s first centralized intelligence agency, which FDR had created around the start of World War II.
Reasoning that the war was over, and the OSS no longer needed, Truman did as requested.
He soon realized that that had been a serious mistake, as all the agencies that had cried for the death of the OSS now were fighting one another to take over its functions.
Truman reacted in Trumanesque fashion.
By executive order, he established the Directorate of Central Intelligence, answerable only to him, and named his crony Sid Souers, whom he promoted to rear admiral, as its director.