HARRY TRUMAN HAD long been a skeptic of US isolationism. Years before he would address a joint session of Congress on the urgent need of America containing the growing Soviet threat, Senator Truman spoke to an audience in Larchmont, New York, on April 20, 1937, about “national defense and its relationship to peace.” The former judge whose concerns had been limited to local matters such as building roads a few years earlier was now contemplating the approach of another world war. With admirable clarity, Truman warned, “We must not close our eyes to the possibility of another war, because conditions in Europe have developed to a point likely to cause an explosion at any time.” It would be another four years before President Franklin Roosevelt would speak with such clarity about US interests in yet another World War.
“We all want peace, and we all want to stay out of war, but we must go about it intelligently,” he declared. He warned that the Neutrality Acts that Congress had recently passed were no guarantee of peace, but merely a “hope.” He scolded the United States for having gone “hysterical” over disarmament in the wake of the First World War, and called for “an adequate Navy” and “an air force second to none.” He invoked his hero Andrew Jackson, “the fighting old president from Tennessee,” who said, “We shall more certainly preserve peace when it is understood that we are prepared for war.” But Truman’s warnings more resembled those that Winston Churchill had been sending the British people throughout the 1930s while languishing in the political wilderness where he would remain until 1940.
Reelected against the odds on the other side of the Atlantic that same year, Harry Truman later earned national prominence by organizing a far-reaching review of the government’s military mobilization. America was technically at peace, but Hitler’s blitz across Europe made it necessary for the US government to quietly begin preparing for a possible future conflict. Unprecedented sums of appropriated dollars were being transferred from the government into the pockets of defense contractors and third parties, and much was being wasted and mismanaged. The Special Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program, established more than six months before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, was a bipartisan effort to ensure that government funds were not squandered. It was also an important opportunity for Truman, who became its chairman. Soon known as the Truman Committee, the panel launched investigations into every aspect of the defense industry, uncovering extensive waste and fraud. At Truman’s first hearing, the committee heard from such witnesses as army chief of staff General George C. Marshall, whom the senator would come to revere and who would obviously play an important role in Truman’s future. The blaze of publicity following those hearings would elevate the once-obscure senator into the public eye. In March 1943, Truman would appear on the cover of Time magazine, which was then considered a singular honor.
Much of what the junior Missouri senator uncovered was unflattering to the Roosevelt administration. Despite his passionate support for the New Deal and unfailing loyalty to the president, Roosevelt was often unhappy with the crusading senator. After one episode, Truman wrote of FDR, “He’s so damn afraid that he won’t have all the power and glory that he won’t let his friends help as it should be done.” But despite his frustration with the most patrician of presidents, Truman’s value to both the war effort and the Democratic Party continued to rise.
The punishing schedule of the Truman Committee, with countless hearings on every conceivable subject involving defense, finally proved too much for its chairman. He was hospitalized due to exhaustion and ordered to cut back on his activities. But the crush of his schedule, as well as the coming war, would allow no rest, and Harry Truman threw himself again into the work of the committee. He was driven by a desire to serve his country, an absolutist’s sense of right and wrong, and a near-maniacal desire to expunge the shame of his earlier connections to the Pendergast machine.
BY THE TIME of the 1944 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, which would nominate Franklin Roosevelt for the fourth time, Truman had become a player in the party but remained an outsider to the cadre of East Coast elite who surrounded Roosevelt. Two possible candidates for vice president, both of whom believed they were Roosevelt’s first choice, asked the Missouri senator to nominate them. Truman committed to support former senator James F. Byrnes, but as FDR was leaving the final decision to the convention, any outcome seemed possible. The only result that seemed clear was that the left-wing incumbent, Henry Wallace, would be thrown off the ticket.
As the fateful decision drew nearer, events began to unfold in a way that Truman could not have ever imagined. Days before driving to Chicago, at a martini-fueled meeting with Roosevelt, a group of Democratic influencers considered the question of the number-two slot on the ticket. After hours of contentious debate, they finally settled on Truman. And so it was that Truman answered a knock on his hotel door in Chicago to find the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, Robert Hannegan, standing before him. To Truman’s surprise and dismay, Hannegan told him that he was Roosevelt’s choice. “Tell him to go to hell” was Truman’s undiplomatic reply. But it was too late for protests from a reluctant politician; the wheels had already been set in motion and Truman was left with no choice but to accept FDR’s call. That resistance crumbled completely when Roosevelt, a man who hated to be crossed, snapped loudly enough on the telephone to Hannegan for Truman to hear it from across the room: “Bob, have you got that fellow lined up yet?” Hannegan said no, calling Truman “the contrariest goddamn mule from Missouri I ever dealt with.” With this, Roosevelt growled, “Well, you tell the senator that if he wants to break up the Democratic Party in the middle of the war, that’s his responsibility.” Truman took the phone and weakly protested further, but within minutes he bowed to the inevitable: “Yes, sir, I know you’re commander in chief. Yes, sir. Yes, sir. Well, if that’s what you want, that’s what I’ll do.”
A last-minute boomlet for Wallace on the convention’s second day, fueled by fake tickets and other tried-and-true dirty tricks, could not stop Truman’s nomination. He was selected on the second ballot amid scenes of chaos and excitement. Robbed of suspense regarding the presidential nomination, Democrats across the convention hall entertained themselves by indulging in an exceptionally dramatic display for the VP race. Exhausted by a night of raucous campaigning, Truman had little to say by the time he addressed the Democratic delegates at Chicago Stadium, delivering what David McCullough called the shortest acceptance speech in American political history. Truman looked like a small and timid man in the glare of the spotlight, and the press soon dubbed him “the Missouri Compromise.” For many like Indiana senator Samuel Jackson, Truman’s greatet achievement at the convention was stopping the candidacy of the incumbent vice president. Jackson later said that he wanted inscribed on his tombstone the words, “Here lies the man who stopped Henry Wallace from becoming the President of the United States.”
Upon returning to Washington on FDR’s ticket, Truman resigned from the committee that had come to bear his name. He gathered his loyal aides and offered his sincere thanks for their dedication and hard work, and told them that they could be proud of having saved the government as much as $15 billion. The Truman Commission’s success was a notable exception to Woodrow Wilson’s observation that investigations of the executive branch by Congress “do not afford it more than a glimpse of the inside of a small province of federal administration. . . . It can violently disturb, but it often cannot fathom, the waters of the sea in which the bigger fish of the civil service swim and feed. Its dragnet stirs without cleansing the bottom.” Wilson’s protests aside, Truman’s work proved to be an important step toward ensuring a more efficient war effort following Pearl Harbor.
The 1944 presidential campaign was a stormy one, with the war still raging and the president beaten down by illness and overwork. Roosevelt and Truman were a study in opposites, but both had a gift for politics and their own ways of attracting support. They encountered each other only rarely during the campaign, and what Truman saw filled him with dread. So frail was Roosevelt that he feared that the upcoming election would determine not only the next president, but the next two presidents. When a friend told him outside the White House that he would soon be its occupant, Truman replied, “I’m afraid you’re right . . . and it scares the hell out of me.” But Truman worked hard on behalf of the ticket, traveling 7,500 miles across the country delivering speeches on the back of his train. (Roosevelt had told him to avoid airplanes, because “one of us has to stay alive.”)
The effort paid off. Despite predictions of a closer-than-usual race, Roosevelt and Truman handily defeated the Republican ticket headed by Governor Thomas Dewey of New York by 432 electoral votes to 99, winning the popular vote by more than 3.5 million. The American people had heeded yet again Lincoln’s admonition—while he ran for reelection in 1864 during the Civil War—that it was “best not to swap horses in midstream.” Roosevelt would be given the chance to preside over the coming victory, if only he could live long enough to see the war through to its conclusion.
The inauguration on January 20, 1945, was one of the smallest such ceremonies in modern times. With the war still being fought in the Atlantic and Pacific, and with the president ailing, there would be no traditional procession to the Capitol. Truman and Roosevelt took their oaths of office on the South Portico of the White House, speaking briefly in the bitter cold of that January day. Truman remained somber throughout the cereomony, contemplating the fate that appeared to be confronting him. The new vice president could only hope that Roosevelt would somehow find the strength to complete his fourth term. Unbeknownst to him, the president suffered searing chest pains just after the swearing-in, and had to fortify himself with whiskey just to greet guests. Had Truman been aware of just how frail FDR was, his gloom would have certainly deepened.
The new vice president’s old benefactor Boss Pendergast died in St. Louis a few days later. For any number of reasons—the dignity of his office, concern for his political future, or justifiable caution—Truman might have remained in Washington and discreetly sent his condolences. But the Missouri man’s overwhelming sense of loyalty and gratitude compelled him to attend Pendergast’s funeral in person. Though politically unwise, Truman’s decision foreshadowed the kind of fearless tenacity that he would later bring to the presidency. Harry Truman had a strong and innate sense of right and wrong, and decisions that would have caused anguish to other politicians rarely troubled him. His clear-eyed view of the world would guide him through some of the most momentous and terrible decisions ever made by a president.
The vice presidency that Truman had so disdained, and that he had done so much to avoid, lasted less than three months. As feared, Franklin Roosevelt had been reelected president of the United States a dying man. The first vice president to succeed to the highest office upon the death of the president, John Tyler, had been disdained as “His Accidency.” But few in such a position could be considered as “accidental” as Harry Truman. Less than eleven years before he sat behind the Oval Office desk, Harry Truman had been the presiding judge of Jackson County, concerned with road building and his county’s payroll. Now he would be in charge of bringing the greatest war in history to a successful conclusion, and building a lasting peace out of the ruins of Europe and Japan.
These awesome responsibilities fell upon him all at once, but none was as daunting as having to decide whether to use an atomic weapon against the Japanese people. In the barren hills of Los Alamos, scientists from around the world had harnessed the most elemental force in the universe, and with remarkable speed created a weapon that could level entire cities. In an act of wanton recklessness, Roosevelt had kept the development of the atomic bomb a secret from his vice president and likely successor. Only after his first cabinet meeting as president, when the secretary of state, Edward Stettinius, asked him for a private word, was Truman informed of, as he later put it, “the development of a new explosive of almost unbelievable destructive power.”
One of Roosevelt’s priorities at the Yalta Conference in February 1945 had been to secure Soviet participation in the endgame against Japan. Though by then the US was only months away from its first and successful test of the atomic bomb, the president could not be certain that the superweapon would work. Conscious of Japan’s fearsome capacity for resistance and the staggering casualties allied forces would likely endure in an invasion of Japan, FDR wanted the Soviets to play a part in the final stage of the Pacific war. And indeed they did, invading Japanese-occupied Manchuria in what has become known as Operation August Storm.
President Truman had been informed of the military’s final plans for America’s invasion of Japan in June 1945. A two-phase assault, beginning with a landing on the southern island of Kyushu, would require some six million men and was predicted to cost the lives of half a million Americans. As that invasion proceeded, US bombers would continue their relentless assault on Tokyo and other cities, hoping to break their leaders’ will with conventional weapons. In early March, a massive raid over the capital had dropped 1,665 tons of bombs, most of them incendiaries, and killed at least one hundred thousand people—more than died at Hiroshima or Nagasaki.
But even this nightmare from the sky did not move the Japanese toward a surrender. It seemed clear to US military planners that the enemy would fight to the bitter end, and that massive American casualties would accumulate before Japan’s government was brought to its knees.
The first detonation of an atom bomb took place in New Mexico on July 16, a successful test that confirmed for Truman that he was “now in possession of a weapon that would not only revolutionize war but could alter the course of history and civilization.” He was informed of the test just after his arrival in Potsdam, Germany, for the first meeting of the American, British, and Soviet leaders (“The Big Three”) since Yalta. But even the news of a successful atomic test did not immediately change US plans for defeating Japan; the mighty invasion was still—officially, at least—“on the books.” And the war was projected to last until the end of 1946. In an effort to convince the Japanese of the futility of further resistance, the United States, the United Kingdom, and China issued a stark warning: “We call upon the government of Japan to proclaim now the unconditional surrender of all Japanese armed forces, and to provide proper and adequate assurances of their good faith in such action. The alternative for Japan is prompt and utter destruction.”
TRUMAN LATER REFLECTED, “The final decision of where and when to use the atomic bomb was up to me. Let there be no mistake about it, I regarded the bomb as a military weapon, and never had any doubt that it should be used.” With the hope that the Pacific war might be swiftly ended, and that countless American lives might be spared, Truman issued the order to begin the atomic bombing of Japan after August 3, 1945.
On the sixth of August, 1945, a silvery Boeing Superfortress B-29 bomber called the Enola Gay, with an atomic bomb code-named “Little Boy” rose from a runway in the Northern Mariana Islands and arced its way northwest to Japan. The day was hot and clear, and after several hours of flying, pilots Paul Tibbets and Robert A. Lewis could see their target: the industrial city of Hiroshima, with a population of 345,000. At an altitude of more than 31,000 feet, “Little Boy” slid out of the bomb bay and fell toward the earth, detonating nearly 2,000 feet above the city. The results were as horrific as the bomb’s creators could have imagined, and far more horrifying than any of those on the ground could have imagined. The equivalent destructive force of 16,000 tons of TNT tore through the city, leveling most of the buildings and killing 80,000 people, most of them civilians. Many more would die later of radiation sickness. Peering down from the Enola Gay, an awed Lewis scrawled in his logbook, “My God, what have we done.”
Informed of the bombing of Hiroshima while sailing home from Potsdam on the USS Augusta, Truman said to those around him, “This is the greatest thing in history. It’s time for us to get home.” In a statement released soon afterward, the president warned that if the Japanese failed to surrender, “they may expect a rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on this earth. Behind this air attack will follow sea and land forces in such numbers and power as they have not yet seen and with the fighting skill of which they are already well aware.”
But Japan remained unmoved.
Three days later, another bomb, this one code-named “Fat Man,” was dropped by another B-29 over the city of Nagasaki, causing less damage than “Little Boy” but still instantly incinerating tens of thousands of people.
Japan finally recognized the futility in continued fighting, and surrendered on August 14. In a radio broadcast the following day, Emperor Hirohito uttered one of the great understatements of the twentieth century when he observed that the events had gone “not necessarily to Japan’s advantage.” The war was over, and when General Douglas MacArthur formally accepted the Japanese surrender on the deck of the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay, he declared, “Let us pray that peace be now restored to the world and that God will preserve it always. These proceedings are closed.”
No newly sworn-in president could have expected to receive such a baptism by fire as Harry Truman. But Truman’s goal of “seeking a peaceful world,” even through the most horrific means, had just begun with the defeat of Japan. A world left in ruins now had to be rebuilt, and as the only nation on earth to emerge from the bloody war both stronger and economically unscathed, it fell upon the United States to guide postwar reconstruction, and preserve the gains that had been won against Hitler’s Axis powers. Leading the nation through that perilous journey was a man who had failed to keep a haberdashery in business, and whose education had ended after a year at Spalding’s Commercial College in Kansas City.
IT IS TEMPTING to idealize the humble beginnings of great leaders, and to see in their rise proof of America’s exceptional promise. But while a person blessed with good fortune and a capacity for hard work can often change their circumstances, they cannot always leave behind some of the limits of their origins. Lincoln came close: though his rustic prairie manners alarmed and offended the genteel Washington elite, his refinement of spirit and magnanimity rendered him immune to petty squabbles.
But in the Oval Office, Truman proved quickly to those around him that he was no Lincoln. Even as president, Truman never lost the rough and combative streak born out of his hardscrabble background. Those mocking taunts of the “sissy” in thick spectacles developed in Truman a pugnacious personality later in life. His rhetoric could be crude and slashing, even when directed against a nominal ally. He was even more vituperative about those working to block his agenda. And when his daughter, Margaret, an aspiring singer, received an unkind review from Paul Hume of the Washington Post (“she is flat a good deal of the time. . . . Miss Truman has not improved in the years we have heard her”), the president infamously dashed off a furious letter to the critic, calling him “a frustrated old man who wishes he could have been successful,” and continuing: “Some day I hope to meet you. When that happens you’ll need a new nose, a lot of beefsteak for black eyes, and perhaps a supporter below!” After his 1948 election to the presidency in his own right, Truman fired the director of the Secret Service for having attended his opponent’s abortive “victory party.” This rhetorical excess and occasional coarseness of spirit would make the effort to secure support for the Truman Doctrine even more challenging. Its eventual success was a testament to the seriousness of the issues at hand and the ability of Congress to set partisanship aside—even temporarily.
In spite of these rough edges, however, the United States was blessed to have Harry Truman at the helm of its government in 1947. Though he was often unfavorably compared to men like Acheson and the other expensively educated diplomats who served under him, Truman’s voracious appetite for reading and his profound historical knowledge gave the new president a perspective that others around him lacked. As New York’s Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan once told a legendary young lawyer named Tim Russert after being asked what he could offer compared to the Ivy League grads who filled the senators office, “Son, you know things already that they will never know.” Like the future Meet the Press legend, Harry Truman’s mind was uncluttered by the constant equivocation and paralyzing doubt that often make intellectuals better suited for the academy than high office. As one of his aides observed, “There is . . . such a thing as being too intellectual in your approach to a problem. The man who insists on seeing all sides of it often can’t make up his mind.” And having ascended to the White House fully aware of his own limitations, Harry Truman stubbornly resolved to do his duty to the best of his ability and surround himself with the finest minds that Washington and the world could provide. As the events of 1947 came hurling toward Truman and his team, those assets would prove to be enough to make Harry Truman the greatest foreign policy president of the postwar era.