Chapter 1
Too Much Too Soon
ON AUGUST 18, 1944, HARRY S. TRUMAN LOOKED DEATH IN THE face, over lunch. This sunny afternoon, seated beneath his favorite tree, Truman was taking lunch with the president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and although Truman at sixty brimmed with life, a deathly pallor darkened the sixty-two-year-old Roosevelt's famous face.
Senator Truman had arrived believing that the purpose of the lunch was to discuss his role as vice presidential nominee in the forthcoming election. And Roosevelt had evidently sought to please him by dining in the shade of what Truman called "the Andrew Jackson tree"—a splendid magnolia at the top of the South Lawn planted more than a hundred years earlier by his political hero.
Roosevelt told him there was a big experiment under way that could help win the war, but did not offer details. Truman chose not to press him for any. Instead, they turned their discussion to the upcoming campaign. It soon became clear, though, that Roosevelt did not expect Truman to do much, or even to add much to the ticket.1
There seemed to be only one thing Roosevelt wanted to convey, and that was a warning: "Harry, don't fly! You can't tell when you will have to take over this job." FDR's shaking hands made the same point: when Roosevelt tried to pour milk into his tea, most of it went into the saucer. His voice had lost its confident timbre, and he seemed to find even a brief conversation exhausting. When Truman returned to his office, he told his old friend Harry Vaughan, "Physically, he's going to pieces." And a few days later, when an old friend remarked that Roosevelt looked so ill that Truman might soon succeed him, Truman replied, "And it scares hell out of me."2
A month earlier, Truman had no intention of being on the ticket and had arrived at the Democratic convention in Chicago pledged to support James Byrnes of South Carolina for the vice presidency.
The current vice president, Henry Wallace, was too liberal for southern voters and too intellectual for the big-city bosses who dominated the party machine. Byrnes saw himself as the compromise candidate, but Roosevelt saw something else—Truman. As the chairman of a much-admired Senate committee dedicated to preventing corruption in wartime appropriations, Truman had won a national reputation.
He was also popular with other senators. Woodrow Wilson's dream at the end of World War I for a League of Nations that would enforce the peace had died in the Senate. Truman looked as though he might be just the man to see that Roosevelt's dreams for a new world body— the United Nations—did not die there too.3
The second day of the convention, the Democratic Party chairman, Robert Hannegan, got Truman together in a hotel room with some of the most powerful people in the party. We want you to be Roosevelt's running mate, they told him. And I don't want it, he told them. He was like a nail: the harder they hammered him, the deeper he dug in. Truman loved being a senator. There was not the remotest desire there to be president, still less to step into a dead man's shoes.
Hannegan finally put a call through to Roosevelt, in San Diego. The president was on his way to meet with MacArthur in Hawaii. Hannegan held up the telephone so that Truman could follow the conversation. "Bob, have you got that guy lined up yet on that vice presidency?" said Roosevelt.
"No," said Hannegan. "He's the contrariest goddam Missouri mule I ever saw."
The response came in those singular, patrician tones the whole country knew well: "You can tell him from me that if he wants to split the Democratic Party in the middle of a war and maybe lose that war, that's up to him."4
The threat of a split and the prospect of the Republican challenger, Thomas Dewey, replacing a giant such as Roosevelt was too serious to ignore. Truman agreed to run, provided Byrnes released him from his pledge, as Byrnes did.
"The week at Chicago was the most miserable I've ever spent, trying to prevent my own nomination to be vice president," he later told a family friend, Emmy Southern. "I was afraid of what would happen." Over lunch beneath the magnolia, those latent anxieties became powerful certainties. Roosevelt did not look like a man who could survive another four years as president.5
Soon after the inauguration in January, something happened to Roosevelt's signature. Once strong, even, and so stylish it looked worthy of gracing historic documents, it suddenly became a palsied scrawl, lacking energy and authority. If Truman saw it, and he may well have done so, seeing that he now presided over the Senate, it would have come as a shock to him, as it did to everyone else.6
Like many a southern or border state politician, Truman enjoyed hoisting a glass of bourbon around five o'clock almost any afternoon, which happened to be the hour when the Democratic speaker of the House, Sam Rayburn of Texas, held a soiree in his office for political friends and acolytes. Those invited knowingly and half-jokingly referred to these gatherings as "the Board of Education." After all, along with the booze, they imbibed Rayburn's political wisdom.
The afternoon of April 12, Truman had got his hand around a whiskey glass just as the Board went into session. Then Rayburn's phone rang. It was Steve Early, Roosevelt's press secretary, calling for Vice President Truman. "Come to the White House at once," said Early, "through the main gate."
Saying he'd probably be back in a few minutes, Truman returned to his office to collect his hat, and had his driver take him down Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House. When he reached the private quarters upstairs, Eleanor Roosevelt was waiting for him. She placed an arm around his shoulders. "Harry, the president is dead." A minute or so later the secretary of state, Edward Stettinius, arrived in tears.
No one seemed sure what to do next. Stettinius suggested a cabinet meeting be held immediately, and Truman reached, almost instinctively, for a gathering of other men around him. Truman was a joiner, a man who sat on a wallet stuffed with membership cards, and a member of the Masonic elite. He was rarely alone and then never for long.7
When the cabinet met at 6:00 p.m., it really had nothing much to discuss. There was too much grief. The purpose of this gathering was mutual support, not serious discussion, but they had to talk about something. Steve Early saved the moment. He came into the room and said the reporters outside wanted to know if there would be any change in the arrangements for the conference due to meet in San Francisco on April 25 to write a charter for the United Nations. "No," said Truman. "It will proceed as planned." In years to come, he would refer often to this moment as proof of two things—his commitment to world peace and the fact that he had been decisive from the first minutes of his presidency.
After the brief cabinet meeting broke up, Henry L. Stimson, the elderly secretary of war, asked for a word alone. He told Truman that the United States was developing a new kind of explosive. "It has almost unbelievable destructive power." Truman was physically and emotionally drained. It was too much to take in at such a moment.8
At 7:09 he was sworn in as President of the United States, in the Cabinet Room by the chief justice, Harlan Fisk Stone. Truman swore the oath on a red-edged Gideon Bible found after a brief, frantic search of West Wing bookcases and desks. When he reached the end of the oath, Truman bent over and kissed the Bible.
There were so many journalists and photographers, congressional leaders and White House staffers milling about in and around the Cabinet Room, it was a struggle getting out to where his car was waiting. He, Bess, and his daughter, Margaret, were driven back to their apartment at 4701 Connecticut Avenue, where dinner was a sandwich and a glass of milk. And then, he recalled, "Went to bed, went to sleep, did not worry any more."9
That was not true. In the morning he met with the leaders of Congress, and as they offered him their support, he burst into tears and wailed, "I am not big enough! I am not big enough!" And over the weeks that followed, Truman asked any number of people, "Pray for me." He assured others that he did not see how he could be president. "I'm the last man fitted to handle it," he told one. "If there ever was a man who was forced to be President, I'm that man," he told another.10
These outbursts expressed a characteristic humility, yet they were also an oblique reflection of crushing pressures suddenly brought to bear. Some hours after meeting with the leaders of Congress, Truman had recovered his composure and had a meeting with Byrnes. At Stimson's behest, Byrnes proceeded to give his old friend Harry an account of the Manhattan Project, the enormous secret program to build an atomic bomb. This time, Truman understood. By making atoms disintegrate and set off a chain reaction similar to the process that produced the light and energy of the sun, it would be possible to make a new kind of bomb. "It will be great enough to destroy the whole world," said Byrnes.11
What Truman had just been handed by Byrnes was not simply responsibility for the United States, great as that was, but responsibility for the future of the planet and the whole human race. How could he know he was up to it? Could anyone?
Less than two weeks into his presidency, Truman received a note from his secretary of war: "I think it is very important that I should have a talk with you as soon as possible on a highly secret matter." The bomb again. Stimson arrived the next day, bringing the director of the Manhattan Project, Major General Leslie Groves, with him.
Groves assured Truman that the first atomic bomb would be ready sometime in the summer. Stimson was confident that it would work. What troubled him was what might follow. The bomb would almost certainly force Japan to surrender, but then? It was only a matter of time before the Soviets produced one. There was a more worrying risk—some smaller nation might build a bomb in secret and use it against another country.
After Stimson and Groves departed, a deeply troubled Truman pushed his anxieties onto the next person he saw, J. Leonard Reinsch, a radio executive and political campaign adviser. "I am going to have to make a decision which no man in history has ever had to make," said Truman. What Reinsch made of this is unknown; sympathetic while mystified, probably. "I'll make the decision," Truman added, sounding resolute, "but it is terrifying to think about what I'll have to decide."12
Meanwhile, with the war in Europe drawing to a close, crucial decisions had to be made about America's future relationship with the Soviet Union. Shortly before he died, Roosevelt revealed that at Yalta he had agreed that the Soviet Union would have three seats in the United Nations General Assembly, and the British Commonwealth countries would have six. This revelation had astounded his new vice president. All the same, Truman told Stettinius, he intended to follow Roosevelt's lead. Any and every agreement the late president had made with the Soviets would be honored, whatever the consequences. As he explained to Averell Harriman, the U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union, "Roosevelt was elected to the presidency, not me." It was his duty to carry out Roosevelt's policies and make good on his promises.13
First, though, he needed to find out what these promises were. Before he became president, Truman had not been shown a single secret war message between Roosevelt and the military or between Roosevelt and the Allies. In the first few months of his presidency, Truman spent hours each day reading these files, weighing their implications.14
Roosevelt's secret archive, crammed with messages to and from the Joint Chiefs, Churchill, Stalin, Jiang Jieshi (a.k.a. Chiang Kai-shek), Charles de Gaulle, American diplomats, and leading figures in the war industries—this was where the waters were deepest. At moments Truman felt that he risked drowning in them.
Having grown up disgusted, as most decent people were, at the crimes of Lenin and the Soviet system, Truman also lacked the intellectual sophistication of a Franklin Roosevelt, who could see possibilities beyond Communism. Truman's thinking was driven mainly by his emotions. When Hitler attacked the Soviet Union in June 1941, he was thrilled. "If we see Germany is winning, we ought to help Russia," Truman told a journalist. "And if Russia is winning, we ought to help Germany"15
The first test of how Truman would deal with Soviet Communists came early. On April 22 the Soviet foreign minister, Vyacheslav Molotov, stopped off to pay his respects to the new president. Molotov was on his way to the UN charter-writing conference in San Francisco. The dour Molotov—with his badly fitting serge suits, fedora, rimless spectacles, and slightly menacing air—was a figure familiar to millions of Americans from wartime newsreels that praised hard-fighting Ivan, impervious to snowdrifts and ice, advancing stolidly through Red Army artillery fire to defeat the German war machine.
Before Molotov arrived, Truman held a cabinet meeting to prepare for this, his first high-level diplomatic encounter. Stettinius said the Russians were trying to force a puppet government on Poland, in violation of the agreements Roosevelt had made with Stalin at Yalta. William D. Leahy, a five-star admiral who had served as Roosevelt's military chief of staff, disagreed.
With an office in the White House and an office in the Pentagon, Leahy had acted as the linchpin between Roosevelt and the senior military at a time when there was no chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. And unlike Stettinius, Leahy had been present at Yalta. He told Truman there were two ways of interpreting the agreement on Poland. Stimson took the same view. Besides, great powers nearly always insisted on having friendly governments in states along their borders, said Stimson. In terms of great power politics, what the Soviets had demanded at Yalta was reasonable.
Truman was still trying to fathom what Yalta required. The borders of Poland had been the cause of wars and debates since before the United States came into existence, and for a time Poland had disappeared from the map. Establishing clear borders now meant casting them in an ambiguous language that drew on history, international law, and the facts of power on the ground—especially the presence across Eastern Europe of the Red Army. Ambiguity almost invariably brought Truman's excitable nature to the heights of impatience. He was being forced to state his position on the Yalta accords without feeling for a moment that he really understood them. "Every time I go over them, I find new meanings," he complained.
Yet a decision maker has to decide. He cannot retreat into general ignorance, but selective ignorance offers freedom of a kind. Whatever the deal at Yalta meant, however much Truman felt he ought to follow Roosevelt's policies, he still did not trust the Russians. He agreed with Stettinius, said Truman. He also had some advice on how to deal with Molotov if he caused any problems at the charter conference: "Tell him he can go to hell."16
When Molotov arrived, there was an initial exchange of pleasantries. Truman said he would support Roosevelt's promise to allow the Soviets to have three seats at the United Nations. Then, according to Truman's account, he tore into his visitor. So far, he said, every agreement made between the United States and the Soviet Union had turned out to be "a one-way street." The Americans had scrupulously adhered to every commitment, while the Soviets had violated all of them. Molotov protested, "I have never been talked to like that in my life." Truman brushed that aside. "Carry out your commitments and you won't get talked to like that," he claims to have said, but probably didn't.17
Molotov's recollection was different, as it was almost sure to be. Rare is the diplomat who admits to losing an argument. "I cannot talk with you if you take such a tone," Molotov responded, which brought Truman up short. "Rather stupid to my mind . . . he wanted to show who was boss," thought Molotov.18
Molotov had come only to pay a courtesy call on the president, but Truman had been anything but courteous in return. A man shaped by small-town friendliness and kindness had not only been aggressive without provocation, but he gloated about it later. He told Joseph E. Davies, a former ambassador to the Soviet Union, how he had humiliated Molotov. "I let him have it. It was the straight one-two to the jaw."19
This was a different Truman—thrust onto the world stage, self-conscious and unsure of himself despite a deep core of self-belief. The president was not the same man as the senator. He described his new, split existence to his staff, his family, or his friends. The old Harry S. Truman they had always known was still much as before. But now he found himself looking at a president of the United States called Harry S. Truman and constantly asking himself, What should the president do?20
Truman was relying for advice on Davies, a millionaire Democrat whom Roosevelt had made ambassador to the Soviet Union, where he'd gotten on well with Stalin. Davies was appalled at how Truman had handled Molotov. Roosevelt had secured the respect of the Soviets by ignoring Communist ideology and Stalin's crimes for the sake of defeating Hitler. The war represented a chance for a fresh start in relations between the two countries, a chance that Davies and Roosevelt alike intended to seize if they could. They might not succeed, but they had a responsibility to try. Davies was hoping to bring Truman to the same realpolitik approach. Truman's temperament got in the way.
During a long talk at the White House on May 13, Davies and Truman held an earnest discussion about the Soviets. The two men were surrounded by piles of books that Truman had brought from his apartment and was putting on the shelves. The president was still in his shirtsleeves. If we pursue a tough policy, Davies told him, they will be just as tough in return. They will take it as proof that the capitalists are trying to encircle them. We must be realistic about this—push them too hard, and they won't hesitate to go it alone.21
Truman stayed up late at night reading and rereading the Yalta accords. Davies's successor as ambassador to the USSR, Averell Harriman, told him, wrongly, that they meant there had to be a completely independent Polish government, one that included members of the anti-Communist/anti-Soviet Polish government in exile in London, one that guaranteed a free press and free elections. Harriman allowed his emotions to dictate his views and offered himself as a counterweight to the older and wiser Davies and Stimson.
The London Poles were anathema to Stalin, for an obvious and widely publicized reason. When Hitler attacked Poland in September 1939, so did the Russians. Among their many prisoners were thousands of Polish officers, educated young men who, if they survived, would eventually become part of the Polish political and cultural elite. As ardent patriots, they could be expected to be equally ardent anti-Communists. In March 1940 Stalin reached out to shape the future by murdering nearly 26,000 Polish POWs.
Three years later, the Nazis came across one of the major Soviet execution sites, in the Katyn Forest, near Smolensk. The Germans made a propaganda coup out of these mass graves, as if they were not already murdering Jews and other prisoners by the thousands every week. The Russians tried to pin this atrocity on the Nazis. The London Poles placed the responsibility on Stalin.
After that, Stalin would never agree to allow any of these Polish political exiles to return and participate in government. Nor did the Yalta accords require him to do so. With calculated ambiguity, the accords squared what Roosevelt wanted and Stalin demanded. There was a text, crafted to satisfy public opinion in their respective countries, and a subtext that said that where the Soviets had the power, they would get their way. In all, a cynical agreement put together by two cynical men. Then one of them died.
As the Red Army advanced across Poland, a compliant provisional Polish government was established in Lublin in 1944. Harriman advised Truman to withhold recognition from the Lublin government.
The son of a railroad and shipping tycoon, Harriman had grown up in a hundred-room mansion, looked after by a hundred servants. An upper-class dilettante whose name and money had brought him an ambassadorship, he was almost a caricature of the anti-Communist plutocrat. Over time, he would come to understand the sheer complexity and messiness of the world, but for now his mind was made up. Yalta meant a free press and free elections for a free, anti-Communist Poland. Byrnes, like Leahy, had been at Yalta, and he too told Harriman, who had not been there, that he was completely wrong.22
Truman was showing signs of developing the "cushion effect"— bearing, that is, the impression of the last person to sit on him. When he was with Davies, he agreed with Davies; when he was with Harriman, he agreed with Harriman.
Even the German surrender, an event that ought to have marked the high point of alliance amity, had produced friction. After Hitler's suicide, his generals wanted to surrender to Eisenhower. Truman, Churchill, and Stalin rejected that. The surrender would take place in Reims at one minute past midnight, local time, the night of May 8–9. As the time approached, the Germans continued to fight hard in the east while ceasing fire in the west. Some members of the press, having been informed that the surrender would take place at one minute past midnight, couldn't keep their word, and broke the story. The Germans got what they wanted: they surrendered to Eisenhower. Infuriated, Stalin demanded that the German high command be ordered to surrender all over again, to a Soviet general, and they did so.
Excerpted from Commander in Chief by Geoffrey Perret.
Copyright © 2007 by Geoffrey Perret.
Published in 2007 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
All rights reserved. This work is protected under copyright laws and reproduction is strictly prohibited. Permission to reproduce the material in any manner or medium must be secured from the Publisher.
