The Accidental President Read online

  Contents

  * * *

  Title Page

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Introduction

  Timeline

  April 12, 1945

  1

  2

  3

  4

  The Political Education of Harry S. Truman

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  April–May 1945

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  Photos

  June–July 1945

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  Little Boy, Fat Man and Potsdam

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Index

  About the Author

  Connect with HMH

  Footnotes

  Copyright © 2017 by Albert Baime

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

  hmhco.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

  ISBN 978-0-544-61734-6

  Cover design by ArchieFergusonDesign.com

  Cover photograph © Katherine Young/Getty Images

  Author photograph © Rob Williamson

  eISBN 978-0-544-61848-0

  v1.1017

  For Judge David S. Baime,

  my father,

  who has kept a portrait of

  Harry S. Truman on his office wall

  for more than forty years

  Introduction

  * * *

  FEW AMERICAN PRESIDENTS have left such a polarizing legacy as Harry Truman. Perhaps none have. Historians have ranked him among the greatest and among the worst chief executives. His administration was deeply frowned upon when he left office in January 1953. Less than ten years later, a poll conducted by the prominent historian Arthur Schlesinger ranked Truman ninth among American presidents. As recently as 2014, a Washington Post poll ranked him sixth. At the same time, others have labeled him a war criminal, for it was Truman who gave the go-ahead to drop the atomic bombs on Japan—Little Boy and Fat Man, August 6 and 9, 1945.

  This book poses a new thesis. Regardless of Truman’s legacy, the first four months of his administration should rank as the most challenging and action-packed of any four-month period in any American presidency. Through declassified war documents, personal diaries, international communications of the highest diplomacy, and other primary sources, the figures who appear in this book will tell you that themselves. Arguably, no other four-month period has had so much import in shaping the world we live in today.

  Truman’s presidential odyssey began on April 12, 1945, the day Franklin Roosevelt died. It is impossible to understate the shock to the world FDR’s death caused. “The Romans must have felt this way when word came that Caesar Augustus was dead,” the columnist I. F. Stone wrote at the time. “Perhaps not since the dawn of history,” State Department veteran Joseph Davies wrote in his diary, “has the passing of a great man been mourned contemporaneously by so many different nations, so many different religions and races, spread over the earth.”

  Roosevelt had played the role of chief executive as if history had written it for him. Prestige was his defining characteristic, in an age when Victorian values and class structure still dictated so much of people’s lives. He served as president longer than any other man, and was the first to be widely considered one of the all-time great American presidents during his administration. (Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln all found their places in the canon of greats after their deaths.) In a 1945 Gallup poll, in which Americans were asked to name world history’s greatest figure, the country put Roosevelt first, ahead of Abraham Lincoln and Jesus Christ.

  The man forced to fill his shoes—Truman, the vice president—was the prototypical ordinary man, in contrast. He had no college degree. He had never had enough money to own his own home. He had never governed a state or served as mayor of a city. He became president “by accident” (his words). His ascendancy to the most powerful office in existence was the result of a confluence of almost bizarre events, and his obscurity confounded the world.

  “Here was a man who came into the White House almost as though he had been picked at random off the street,” recalled Robert Nixon, a Truman White House correspondent, “with absolutely no useable background and no useable information.” “Here was a guy like you, or your next door neighbor,” one of Truman’s closest friends, Harry Vaughan, said, “and he got into a job that was too big for him.” When Truman took office, a Chicago Tribune columnist spoke for all of civilized humanity when he wrote: “All the world is asking two questions. ‘What sort of man is Harry S. Truman?’ and ‘What kind of president will he make?’”

  The first four months of Truman’s presidency saw the collapse of Nazi Germany, the founding of the United Nations, firebombings of Japanese cities that killed many thousands of civilians, the liberation of Nazi death camps, the suicide of Adolf Hitler, the execution of Benito Mussolini, and the capture of arch war criminals from Hitler’s number two, Hermann Göring, to the Nazi “chief werewolf” Ernst Kaltenbrunner. There was the fall of Berlin, victory at Okinawa (which the historian Bill Sloan has called “the deadliest campaign of conquest ever undertaken by American arms”), and the Potsdam Conference, during which the new president sat at the negotiating table with Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin in Soviet-occupied Germany, in an attempt to map out a new world. Humanity saw the first atomic explosion, the nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the dawn of the Cold War, and the beginning of the nuclear arms race.

  Never had fate shoehorned so much history into such a short period. “The four months that have elapsed since the death of President Roosevelt on April 12 have been one of the most momentous periods in man’s history,” wrote a New York Times columnist at the time. “They have hardly any parallel throughout the ages.”

  This book is not a full-length biography of Truman, nor is it a study of the decision to drop the atomic bomb, for those books have been written. It is rather an intimate biographical portrait of Truman during the first four months of his administration—the climactic months of World War II. It was a time when Americans achieved a sense of unity that seems unimaginable today. It was also a time of massacre, when the U.S. military committed acts it still struggles to justify more than seventy years later. New documents have appeared for research since the wave of Truman biographies was published nearly a quarter century ago. Also, the early days of the Truman administration seem particularly relevant given the global political picture today and all the debate about what the American presidency has or should become.

  Whether or not the reader accepts my thesis is obviously subjective. Each can decide at the end. But first, there must be a beginning: April 12, 1945.

  Timeline

  * * *

  The Rise of Truman

  MAY 8, 1884: Harry S. Truman is born in rural Lamar, Missouri.

  1901: Truman graduates high school. Due
to lack of funds, he does not go to college. He works through a series of jobs, on a railroad and then as a clerk at Kansas City banks.

  1906–1917: Truman returns to the family farm in Grandview, Missouri, where he will toil obscurely for eleven years. Get-rich-quick schemes—from oil wells to mining operations—all end in failure.

  1918: APRIL 13: Truman lands in France as a thirty-three-year-old captain in the U.S. Army during World War I.

  JULY 11: He takes command of Battery D.

  NOVEMBER 11: World War I ends. While more than 5 million Allied soldiers have been killed, including roughly 117,000 Americans, Truman’s Battery D does not lose a single man.

  JUNE 28, 1919: Truman marries Elizabeth “Bess” Wallace and moves into her family home in Independence, Missouri.

  1922: Truman and Jacobson, a Kansas City haberdashery, fails, leaving Truman financially devastated.

  — With virtually no qualifications, Truman wins an election for a judgeship in rural Jackson County, due to the backing of Tom Pendergast—the corrupt “boss” of Kansas City’s Democratic machine.

  1924: Truman fails in his bid for reelection. It is the only election he will ever lose.

  1926: Truman wins election for presiding judge of Jackson County, again due to the patronage of Boss Tom Pendergast.

  OCTOBER 24, 1929: Black Thursday. The Great Depression begins.

  1933: JANUARY 30: Adolf Hitler becomes chancellor of Germany.

  MARCH 4: Franklin Roosevelt is inaugurated the thirty-second president of the United States.

  NOVEMBER 6, 1934: Truman is elected a U.S. senator under dubious circumstances, due to the patronage of the corrupt Kansas City machine. Critics label him “the Senator from Pendergast.”

  1939: APRIL: Boss Tom Pendergast is indicted on tax evasion charges and is later imprisoned at Leavenworth. Dozens of Pendergast machine operatives are jailed on charges of rigging elections.

  SEPTEMBER 1: Nazi Germany invades Poland.

  1940: OCTOBER: Truman’s mother and sister are evicted from their farm in Grandview, due to bank foreclosure.

  NOVEMBER 5: Stained by his Pendergast alliance, Truman is given almost no chance of reelection. But against all odds, he wins a second term in the U.S. Senate.

  1941: MARCH 1: Truman founds the Senate Special Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program—the Truman Committee.

  DECEMBER 7: Japan attacks the United States at Pearl Harbor, forcing America into World War II.

  1941–1944: The Truman Committee’s investigations of waste and corruption in the national defense effort gain the senator from Missouri his first national recognition.

  1944: JULY: Truman stuns the Democratic National Convention in Chicago when he is nominated as the vice presidential candidate on the 1944 ticket with FDR.

  NOVEMBER 7: Roosevelt becomes the first four-term president, with Truman as his VP.

  1945: APRIL 1: U.S. forces land on Okinawa on Easter Sunday.

  APRIL 12: Roosevelt dies. Truman becomes the thirty-third president of the United States. The night he takes the oath, he is told of a secret weapon the U.S. military is working on, an “atomic bomb.”

  The Accidental Presidency and World War II

  1945: Truman’s First Four Months

  APRIL 13: Truman’s first full day in office. He meets with his cabinet for the first time.

  — Major General Curtis LeMay’s Twenty-First Bomber Command firebombs Japan. Thousands of civilians are killed.

  APRIL 14: Roosevelt’s funeral procession winds through Washington, DC. A service is held in the White House East Room.

  APRIL 15: Truman attends Roosevelt’s burial in Hyde Park, New York.

  — Allied troops liberate the Nazi death camp at Bergen-Belsen.

  APRIL 16: Truman addresses Congress for the first time as president, vowing to force Japan to surrender unconditionally.

  APRIL 23: Truman meets with Vyacheslav Molotov, Joseph Stalin’s number two, to discuss deteriorating relations between the United States and the Soviet Union.

  APRIL 25: The United Nations Conference begins in San Francisco. Delegates from nearly fifty nations begin to map out the new peace organization.

  — Truman meets with General Leslie Groves and Secretary of War Henry Stimson. The president learns in-depth details of the atomic bomb for the first time.

  — “Elbe Day.” American and Soviet forces meet at the Elbe River, joining the eastern and western fronts and severing Nazi Germany in half.

  APRIL 28: Partisans execute Italian Fascist leader Benito Mussolini, along with his mistress, by gunfire. Mussolini’s last words are reportedly, “No! No!”

  APRIL 29: American forces liberate more than thirty thousand prisoners at the Dachau concentration camp.

  — Nazi forces in Italy surrender.

  APRIL 30: As Russia’s Red Army closes in on Hitler’s Berlin bunker, Hitler and his newlywed bride, Eva Braun, commit suicide.

  MAY 2: The Soviet Union announces the fall of Berlin to the Red Army.

  MAY 4: German forces in the Netherlands and Denmark agree to surrender.

  MAY 5: American troops liberate the Mauthausen death camp.

  MAY 7: The Trumans move into the White House.

  MAY 8: VE-day. Following the surrender of Nazi forces to General Eisenhower in Reims, France, World War II in Europe ends. Harry Truman celebrates his sixty-first birthday.

  MAY 11: As the battle for Okinawa rages, a Japanese suicide plane crashes into the USS Bunker Hill, killing nearly four hundred American sailors.

  MAY 24–26: Under orders from Major General Curtis LeMay, the Twenty-First Bomber Command firebombs Tokyo again, this time striking the emperor’s palace. Scores of civilians are killed.

  MAY 28: Truman hosts his first White House state dinner, for the regent of Iraq, Prince Abd al-Ilah.

  JUNE 1: The top advisory committee on the Manhattan Project advises Truman to employ the bomb against Japan “as soon as possible . . . without prior warning.”

  JUNE 5: Military leaders from the United States, the USSR, Britain, and France meet in Berlin to begin the process of occupying Germany, which is to be sliced into occupation zones, one for each of those four nations.

  JUNE 18: Truman meets with his top military advisors to strategize the end of the war with Japan. The leaders agree on plans to invade Japan with nearly 800,000 ground troops. General George C. Marshall sets D-day at November 1.

  — General Eisenhower makes his triumphant return to Washington. Truman fetes him at a White House “stag party.”

  JUNE 22: Allied victory is declared in Okinawa. Before the final bullets are fired, Japanese soldiers hand out grenades to civilians on the island, ordering them to kill themselves. Many do.

  JUNE 26: Fifty delegations sign the UN Charter in San Francisco. President Truman addresses the delegations at the city’s War Memorial Veterans Building.

  JUNE 27: Truman returns to his hometown of Independence, Missouri, as president for the first time. The biggest crowds in the history of Jackson County turn out to welcome him.

  JULY 3: James F. Byrnes is sworn in as the new secretary of state, becoming Truman’s most important advisor.

  JULY 6: Truman leaves the White House by car at night, bound for ship passage to the Potsdam Conference in Soviet-occupied Germany. His approval rating in the United States is 87 percent—higher than Roosevelt’s ever was.

  JULY 16: The Trinity shot is successfully fired in the New Mexico desert—the first test of an atomic bomb.

  — In Babelsberg, Germany, Truman meets Winston Churchill face-to-face for the first time.

  JULY 17: Truman meets Joseph Stalin for the first time. They discuss the startling deterioration of American-Soviet relations.

  — The Potsdam Conference officially begins. Truman is named the historic conference’s chairman.

  JULY 24: At Potsdam, Truman tells Stali
n that the Americans have an atomic bomb.

  JULY 26: The United States, Britain, and China issue the Potsdam Declaration, demanding unconditional surrender of Japan. “The alternative for Japan is prompt and utter destruction.”

  JULY 28: The U.S. Senate ratifies the United Nations Charter.

  AUGUST 2: The Potsdam Conference ends.

  — Truman meets with Britain’s King George VI. Much of their conversation is devoted to the secret atomic weapon.

  AUGUST 6: While Truman is aboard the USS Augusta bound for Newport News, Virginia, the Enola Gay delivers the “Little Boy” bomb over Hiroshima—mankind’s first atomic attack.

  AUGUST 8: Back in the White House, Truman signs the United Nations Charter.

  — The Soviet Union declares war on Japan.

  AUGUST 9: The “Fat Man” atomic bomb explodes over Nagasaki.

  AUGUST 14: Truman announces the surrender of Japan. World War II ends.

  Part I

  * * *

  April 12, 1945

  If ever I felt the awesome dimensions of history, it was in that room, that night.

  —Truman’s only child, Margaret, on her father’s swearing in