Harry Truman (29 page)

After visiting Mrs. Roosevelt to express our sympathy, Mother and I went to the Cabinet Room, where all the members of the Cabinet except Postmaster General Frank Walker were assembled, along with the political leaders of Congress whom my father had summoned. Only Alben Barkley was absent. He had elected to stay with Mrs. Roosevelt. The White House staff was searching frantically for a Bible. Dad would have preferred to use his family Bible, which was in his office bookcase. But there was no time to send someone to get it. Finally, in William Hassett’s office, the searchers found a small, inexpensive Bible with red-edged pages, which had been sent to the correspondence secretary as a gift. William D. Simmons, the burly chief White House receptionist, apologized to my father for its rather garish style. But that was the least of Dad’s worries at that moment. He assured Simmons it was fine.

My father was now ready to take the oath. He was standing beneath the portrait of Woodrow Wilson, one of his presidential heroes. Chief Justice Harlan F. Stone stepped to the end of the long Cabinet table. My father picked up the Bible in his left hand. Beneath his thumb, he held a small piece of paper, on which the presidential oath of office was typed. After the ceremony, he gave it to me. It is a very interesting historic souvenir.

Chief Justice Stone began, “I, Harry Shippe Truman . . .”

Dad raised his right hand and responded, “I, Harry S. Truman, do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of the President of the United States, and will, to the best of my ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

“So help you God,” added Chief Justice Stone, indicating his own deep emotion. These words are not part of the official oath, but they were used spontaneously by George Washington when he took his first oath of office.

“So help me God,” said Dad and solemnly raised the Bible to his lips.

This, too, was something George Washington had done. The time on the clock beneath Woodrow Wilson’s picture was 7:09.

MOTHER AND I left the White House immediately after my father took the oath. He stayed to conduct a brief meeting of the Cabinet. Dad sat down in the raised chair at the head of the table for the first time. Before he could speak, Steve Early, the press secretary, came in and said the reporters wanted to know if the San Francisco Conference on the United Nations would begin as scheduled on April 25. Tom Connally, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, had issued a wholly unnecessary statement predicting a postponement. Without hesitation, my father told Early he considered the conference crucial to winning the peace. The press secretary departed to give this message to the newsmen.

My father then spoke briefly and solemnly to the Cabinet members. He assured them he intended to carry out President Roosevelt’s foreign and domestic policies. But he also told them he was going to be “President in my own right.” He told them he wanted their advice and they should not hesitate to differ with him, whenever they felt it was necessary. But he was going to make the final decisions. Again, in this brief scene, there is the unmistakable note of a man taking charge, a man who knew what it meant to be President and was determined to do his utmost to live up to the responsibilities of the job Dad always called “the greatest in the world.”

After the Cabinet meeting, Secretary of War Henry Stimson stayed behind. In a low, tense voice he told my father he had an extremely urgent matter to discuss with him. Briefly, with a minimum of details, he described a weapon of enormous explosive power on which the United States had been working for years. He did not use the term “atomic bomb,” which left Dad more puzzled than informed. The main impact of the conversation was to add a lot more weight to the already enormous responsibility on Dad’s shoulders.

For another few minutes, my father discussed with Secretary of State Stettinius and White House press secretary Steve Early and Jonathan Daniels the need to reassure our Allies and the world that our support of the San Francisco Conference was unchanged. Dad directed Steve Early to issue a formal statement, making this clear. But he wisely declined to hold a press conference, although the White House correspondents were clamoring for one. Escorted by a small army of Secret Service men, he went out to his car and drove home to our apartment.

Mother and I were still in a state of shock. If he had depended upon us for food and drink, he would have starved to death - and the poor man was starving. It was now almost 9:30 p.m. and he had had nothing to eat since noon. Fortunately, the parents of my friend Annette Davis, who was having the birthday party, had canceled their celebration. They fed Mother and me, and when Dad arrived home, we were sitting in their apartment talking. He joined us, and Mrs. Davis gave him a man-sized turkey and ham sandwich and a glass of milk.

With that astonishing equilibrium which he never loses in moments of crisis, my father ate this impromptu supper and then calmly announced he was going to bed. From his bedroom, he called his mother in Grandview. Mamma Truman had, of course, heard the news by now. With the help of Dad’s brother Vivian, she had been fending off a cascade of phone calls from reporters. My father assured her he was all right, but for the next several days he was going to be very busy. It would be a while before she had a letter from him. Actually, it would only be four days. Then, what is most phenomenal to an insomniac like me, Dad turned out the light, slipped under the covers and was asleep within five minutes.

The next morning, Friday, April 13, he began his first full day as President. Thank goodness he is not a superstitious man. He was up at 6:30, had his usual light breakfast, and then chatted for a half hour or so with Hugh Fulton, the former chief counsel of the Truman Committee. Poor Fulton was suffering from what Dad calls “Potomac fever.” Basically, this very common Washington disease involves delusions of grandeur and an itch for power and publicity. The news that my father had become President had aroused the virus in Fulton, in its most acute form. Dad soon learned from friends that Fulton was telling everyone in Washington he was going to be the acting President - the implication being that Harry S. Truman did not have the talent to do the job. Although they parted amicably enough that morning, Fulton was never offered an official post in the White House.

As my father got into his car, surrounded by the inevitable swarms of Secret Service men, he saw one of his old friends, Associated Press reporter Tony Vacarro, standing nearby. He invited him to hop in, and they rode down to the White House together. He got there a little after 8:30 a.m. At nine sharp, Eddie McKim and Matt Connelly arrived. Dad had called them the night before, from the White House, and told them to be there at this time.

My father apologized profusely for forgetting to invite Eddie to the ceremony the previous night. Eddie stood in front of Dad’s desk, completely at a loss for words for the first time in his life.

“Well, Mr. President,” he said, shifting from one foot to another, “it doesn’t count what’s gone before. What counts is what happens now.” Then he just stood there, while Dad stared at him in astonishment.

“Do you have to stand there?” Dad asked.

“Well, Mr. President, I suddenly find myself in the presence of the President of the United States and I don’t know how to act!”

It was Dad’s first glimpse of the tremendous awe with which so many people regarded the presidency. “Come on over here and sit down,” he said.

Eddie obeyed, and Dad asked, “Do you have to go home?”

“Well - I was leaving this afternoon for Omaha.”

“Well,” Dad said, “I need you. Stick around a while. I need some help.”

From the very first moment of the first day, my father understood the importance of having men around him who were personally loyal to him. He had no illusions that the deep devotion Roosevelt’s staff felt for him could be transferred to a new President. Dad had the same attitude toward the Cabinet, but there he knew it would be necessary to make the transition more gradually because Cabinet appointments involved Congress and the President’s political relationship to the nation.

Matt Connelly brought with him the letters my father never had gotten around to signing the previous day. One of them was a letter to Olive Truman, the wife of his cousin Ralph. After signing it, Dad scribbled the following postscript: “I’ve really had a blow since this was dictated. But I’ll have to meet it. Hope it won’t cause the family too much trouble.”

That morning my father saw Secretary of State Stettinius and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Secretaries of War and the Navy, and Admiral William D. Leahy, who functioned as President Roosevelt’s Chief of Staff in the White House. Dad immediately asked the Secretary of State for a thorough report on the major foreign policy problems of the United States, particularly in Europe. By that afternoon, it was in his hands, and it made grim reading. Relations with Russia had deteriorated disastrously since the Yalta Conference. The Joint Chiefs of Staff expected the war with Germany to last another six months, and the war with Japan another eighteen months. Both predictions were, of course, wrong. In little more than four months, the President and the nation would be catapulted into the postwar era.

After the Joint Chiefs left, Admiral Leahy stayed behind to ask my father if he wanted him to remain on the job. The Admiral was as crusty an old sea dog as they come. He had graduated from Annapolis in 1897 and rounded Cape Horn in a sailing ship in 1898. He had no illusions about the saltiness of his own character and was not at all sure Dad could take him, ungarnished, as it were. He was the first but by no means the last public official to misjudge President Harry S. Truman.

“Are you sure you want me, Mr. President? I always say what’s on my mind.”

“I want the truth,” Dad told him. “I want the facts at all times. I want you to stay with me and always to tell me what’s on your mind. You may not always agree with my decisions, but I know you will carry them out faithfully.”

The Admiral was surprised - pleasantly surprised. “You have my pledge,” he told Dad. “You can count on me.”

At noon that day, my father went up to the Capitol and lunched with thirteen key senators and four representatives. In some personal memoranda he made at the end of the day, he noted that by the time the luncheon was over, and he went back to the White House he had seen “
all
the senators.” He added he was “most overcome” by the affection and encouragement they had showered on him.

At the time, many people regarded this as simply a sentimental gesture. But my father knew exactly what he was doing. He was trying to bridge the chasm which had opened between the White House and the Senate. Later that day, Senator Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan, the leading Republican internationalist and a key figure in the American delegation to the San Francisco UN Conference, wrote in his diary: “Truman came back to the Senate this noon for lunch with a few of us. It shattered all tradition. But it was both wise and smart. It means that the days of executive contempt for Congress are ended; that we are returning to a government in which Congress will take its rightful place.” With obvious pleasure, Senator Vandenberg added that at Dad’s request General Vaughan had sent him the last box of cigars they had in the old vice presidential office, with Dad’s card. On the card General Vaughan had written, “Our swan song.”

The main purpose of the luncheon, aside from healing political wounds, was to discuss with the Senate and House leaders my father’s desire to address a joint session of Congress on the following Monday. Surprisingly, several of the senators thought this was a bad idea. They seemed to feel Dad should not expose himself so soon to a comparison with President Roosevelt’s undoubtedly superior oratorical gifts. My father listened politely to these and other objections and then quietly informed them he was coming, and they had better prepare themselves for his visit.

Later that afternoon, my father conferred with Jimmy Byrnes. He had resigned as assistant president five days before Roosevelt’s death and returned to South Carolina. James Forrestal, the Secretary of the Navy, had telephoned Byrnes from the White House on the night of President Roosevelt’s death and sent a government plane to South Carolina to fly him to Washington - two rather startling gestures, wholly unauthorized by Dad.

Nevertheless, my father was glad to see Byrnes for several reasons. Perhaps most important, Byrnes had accompanied Roosevelt to Yalta and had taken extensive shorthand notes of the conference. Dad desperately needed to know, as soon as possible, all the agreements and the nuances of the agreements Roosevelt had made at this crucial meeting. For more than a half hour, my father queried Byrnes intensively on Yalta, Teheran, and other conferences between Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin. As they talked, my father decided to make Byrnes his Secretary of State.

Dad’s chief reason was his concern over presidential succession. According to the Constitution at that time, the Secretary of State was next in line to succeed the vice president. But my father was convinced that any successor to the President should be an elected official, not an appointed one. The fact that Edward Stettinius was Secretary of State made Dad’s concern on this point even more acute. Stettinius had never even been a candidate for elective office. Byrnes had been a senator from South Carolina, had served briefly as a Supreme Court Justice, and then had gone to the White House as Roosevelt’s chief assistant on the home front. He was eminently qualified to serve as President. Finally, my father felt this appointment - the highest he had in his power to dispose - might mitigate the bitter disappointment Byrnes obviously felt over FDR’s failure to back him for the vice presidency in Chicago.

Here my father made his first miscalculation as President. Although Byrnes, as Dad put it later, “practically jumped down my throat to accept” when he offered him the job, their relationship was flawed almost from the beginning by Byrnes’s low opinion of Harry Truman and his extravagantly high opinion of himself.

My father spent the rest of the afternoon conferring with Secretary of State Stettinius and Charles E. Bohlen of the Department of State, who had acted as interpreter at the Yalta meetings with Stalin. The subject was Russia’s gross violation of the Yalta agreements, particularly in Poland. The Russians were totally ignoring the solemn agreement to create a representative Polish government and were installing their Communist lackeys, known as the Lublin government, in Warsaw. My father decided there was no time to waste, and he immediately cabled Prime Minister Churchill, who seemed inclined to denounce the Russians publicly for their conduct. Dad felt this might cause a major breach among the three Allied leaders at the worst possible moment, and he urged instead that we “have another go” at Stalin.

With some reluctance, the British prime minister agreed and a diplomatic crisis, which might have prolonged the war, was averted.

In this same afternoon meeting, my father was able to use the melancholy fact of President Roosevelt’s death to score a diplomatic breakthrough, with the help of our ambassador in Moscow, W. Averell Harriman. Harriman had been summoned to see Stalin when the news of Roosevelt’s death arrived in the Russian capital. He immediately urged the Russian leader to make a gesture which might repair the strong impression that Russia was no longer interested in cooperating with the United States to create a peaceful postwar world. Stalin offered to send Molotov to the San Francisco Conference, if the new American President would back up Harriman’s request for him. My father immediately cabled the American Embassy his strong approval of this request, and one of the major stumbling blocks in the path of the San Francisco meeting was removed.