Harry Truman (38 page)

At my father’s request, Secretary of State Byrnes tried to set up a special committee to consider the subject. But the Americans and British could not even get the Soviet representative to submit a statement. When Dad brought it up again at the July 31 plenary session, Stalin dodged the subject once more. On August 1, when they began considering the final communiqué on the meeting to be released to the public, my father expressed his regret that no agreement had been reached on the subject of waterways. He asked, however, that the final communiqué include it as a subject that was discussed. Stalin objected. He said the communiqué was already too long.

Earnestly, my father looked across the table at Stalin and spoke to him in a very personal way. “Marshal Stalin, I have accepted a number of compromises during this conference to conform with your views, and I make a personal request now that you yield on this point. My request is that the communiqué mention the fact that the waterways proposal has been referred to the Council of Foreign Ministers which we have established to prepare for peace settlements.” He explained this would give him an opportunity to discuss the subject with the American Congress. However, before the Russian interpreter could finish repeating Dad’s words, Stalin broke in. “Nyet!” he snapped. To make sure Dad knew what he was saying, he added in English, “No. I say no!”

Dad’s face flushed with anger. He turned to the American delegation and exclaimed, “I cannot understand that man!”

“Jimmy,” he said to Byrnes in a low voice, “do you realize that we have been here seventeen whole days? Why, in seventeen days you can decide anything!”

For my father, Potsdam was exhausting as well as exasperating. Prime Minister Churchill and Marshal Stalin preferred late hours, and each of the heads of state were required to give lavish dinners which lasted until almost midnight. There was also a need to entertain lesser dignitaries at small lunches and dinners. In his letter to his mother and sister on July 23, Dad gave a good description of Russia’s hospitality:

At Dad’s dinner Eugene List played Chopin, and Dad stood by the piano and turned the pages for him personally. They had had to scour Europe to find a copy of the score, which List did not have the time to memorize. Churchill was bored by all this classical music, and he retaliated at his dinner by having the Royal Air Force Band play a series of ear-shattering military marches.

At one of these dinners, Dad’s already sinking opinion of Marshal Stalin slipped even lower. They began discussing Poland, and Dad asked him what happened to the thousands of Polish officers who the Germans said were slaughtered by the Russians in Katyn Forest after they had surrendered to the Russian army in 1940. Marshal Stalin shrugged. “They just went away,” he said, and dropped the subject.

In spite of his disillusionment, my father did not lose his sharp eye for details, or his sense of humor, at Potsdam. At one of the dinners, he was amazed to see Stalin join in toast after toast, drinking a clear liquid which Dad assumed was vodka. Finally, he asked the Russian dictator how he did it. Stalin smiled and replied he was really drinking French table wine.

In his entourage to Potsdam, Dad had included an old Missouri follower, Fred Canfil. Fred had been a county courthouse employee when Dad was elected county judge, and he attached himself to Harry Truman with total devotion and loyalty. He was not terribly bright, but he was built like a bull, and he had a voice which could shatter glass at 100 paces. One day, as the plenary session was breaking up, Dad called Fred over and introduced him to Marshal Stalin. “Marshal Stalin, I want you to meet Marshal Canfil.”

Dad did not bother to explain Fred was a federal marshal in the state of Missouri - thanks to a recent presidential appointment. In Russia, a marshal is a formidable character, and after that, the Russian delegation treated Fred with enormous respect.

Dad also found time to entertain his nephew and namesake, Sergeant Harry Truman. Harry was stepping on a troopship to go home when a presidential order whisked him to Potsdam for several days of high-style relaxation. Dad also drove fifty miles to visit with Colonel Louis Truman, son of his cousin Ralph, and in the course of these travels, found himself a doctor. He heard that Wallace Graham, son of his old family doctor of the same name, was stationed near Potsdam and invited him over for a visit. He liked him so much he asked him to become the White House physician. An intensely idealistic young surgeon, Dr. Graham politely told the President he would rather not take the job.

“I want to take care of as many people as possible, not just one man,” he said.

“Even if that one man is the President of your country?” Dad asked.

“I’ve got a hospital full of men who’ve shed their blood for their country,” Dr. Graham said. “I can’t leave them.”

“Do you realize who you’re talking to?” Dad asked.

“Yes, sir, I’ll obey orders, sir,” Dr. Graham said. But he insisted on staying with his hospital until all his wounded men were discharged or moved home. Only then did he report for duty at the White House. There he wangled an agreement from Dad that he could continue his practice of surgery at the army’s Walter Reed Hospital.

While Dad was in Potsdam, he had been importuned by numerous heads of state to visit their countries. At first he had agreed to very brief, informal visits, but the long stay at Potsdam and the imminent use of the atomic bomb changed his mind. He canceled all his prearranged visits, leaving a distraught Charlie Ross to explain it to the press, and headed for home. He paused only long enough to have lunch with King George VI aboard the British battle cruiser
Renown.
“I’d rather fly,” he told his mother. ‘I could be home a week sooner. But they all yell their heads off when I talk of flying.”

By five o’clock on the afternoon of August 3, the
Augusta
was at sea. On August 6, the fourth day at sea, Dad and Secretary of State Byrnes were having lunch with the crew. They sat at separate tables in different sections of the large mess. Dad was chatting with sailors from Connecticut, New York, California, New Jersey, and Minnesota when Captain Frank H. Graham, a map room officer, handed him a message. Here is what he read:

“Captain,” Dad said, “this is the greatest thing in history. Show it to the Secretary of State.”

A few minutes later the map room delivered another message, this one from Secretary Stimson:

My father jumped up and called to Secretary Byrnes, “It’s time for us to get on home.” Then he turned to the crew. “Please keep your seats and listen for a moment. I have an announcement to make. We have just dropped a new bomb on Japan, which has more power than 20,000 tons of TNT. It has been an overwhelming success.”

My father and Byrnes were so excited they abandoned their food and rushed to the officers’ wardroom, where he repeated the announcement. There was tremendous cheering and excitement in both places.

Thanks to the excellent histories of World War II from the Japanese point of view which have been written in the last few years, we now know that even after the first atomic bomb, Japan was not ready to surrender. By prearrangement, my father issued a statement immediately after the news of Hiroshima demanding they give up. More millions of leaflets were dropped over Japan, urging the Japanese people to force their government to stop the war. But the grip of the militarists was still so strong no one dared to come forward as a peace negotiator. It became evident a second bomb would have to be dropped. Three days later this bomb smashed Nagasaki. Some people have wondered why this second bomb was dropped so soon. This was in accordance with my father’s original order, which he signed on July 24.

The second paragraph said: “Additional bombs will be delivered on the above targets as soon as made ready by the Project’s staff.” From the very beginning, Dad’s advisers, particularly Major General Leslie Groves, had been convinced it would take two bombs to convince the Japanese to surrender. The double blow left no doubt the first holocaust in Hiroshima was not some kind of fluke or accident. The Japanese reacted precisely as my father and his advisers had predicted they would. The grim reality that we could produce many of these terrible weapons - although we actually had only one more in reserve at the time - made Emperor Hirohito decide to surrender. The Emperor asked only one guarantee - “that the Potsdam Declaration does not compromise any demand which prejudices the prerogatives of His Majesty as a sovereign ruler.” My father agreed, but in a way that did not compromise
his
position that the people of Japan must remain free to choose their own form of government. His reply stated: “From the moment of surrender, the authority of the Emperor and the Japanese government to rule the state shall be subject to the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers who will take such steps as he deems proper to effectuate the surrender terms. . . . The ultimate form of government of Japan shall, in accordance with the Potsdam Declaration, be established by the freely expressed will of the people.”

By this time, the Russians were in the war, rampaging through Manchuria. Japan’s cause was obviously hopeless. The Emperor summoned the senior military commanders in Japan and asked them to make sure the armed forces obeyed his decision to surrender. In spite of these precautions, there was a last-ditch attempt by military fanatics to stage a coup - this after two atomic bombs.

On August 12, in the midst of these frantic days, Dad wrote this interesting letter to his mother: “Since I wrote to you last Tuesday there hasn’t been a minute. The speech, the Russian entry into the war, the Japs’ surrender offer and the usual business of the President’s office have kept me busy night and day. It seems that things are going all right. Nearly every crisis seems to be the worst one but after it’s over it isn’t so bad.”

The final testimony for the rightness of Dad’s decision on the atomic bomb comes from the Japanese themselves. Cabinet Secretary Sakomizu said the atomic bomb “provided an excuse to surrender.” Hirohito’s chief civilian adviser, Marquis Kido, said, “The presence of the atomic bomb made it easier for us, the politicians, to negotiate peace.”

So the great moment came. After an all-day wait on August 14, the message was flashed from our embassy in Berne, Switzerland, where the surrender was negotiated, informing Dad the Emperor had accepted his terms. Dad immediately summoned White House correspondents and all the available members of his Cabinet to his office. In a typically thoughtful gesture, he also invited Cordell Hull, the former Secretary of State, who had been seriously ill. Standing behind his desk, Dad announced Japan had surrendered unconditionally. A huge crowd soon assembled outside the White House, as the news was flashed throughout the city of Washington and the nation. Dad and Mother went out to the fountain on the north lawn, and he greeted them with a V-for-victory sign. Then he went back in the house and called his mother. Three days later, he finally found time to write her a letter:

Already he was confronting the problems of peace.

EVEN BEFORE HE got home from Potsdam, my father began thinking about the tremendous domestic problems that confronted him and the nation. He summoned John Snyder to meet him at the dock, and all the way up on the train from Norfolk to Washington they discussed domestic problems. In Potsdam, Dad had realized the Russians were basing their aggressive plans on the assumption the United States would plunge into another economic depression as soon as the war was over. Dad was determined not to let this happen. “He had seen how much depended on keeping America strong,” Snyder says.

Aboard the
Augusta
,
Dad had begun work on a domestic policy statement. On September 6, 1945, only four days after the official V-J Day, Congress reconvened at his request and received a special message from him that - temporarily - took their legislative breaths away. It was 16,000 words long, the longest message any President had sent Congress since Theodore Roosevelt. Its twenty-one points ranged from a comprehensive unemployment compensation program to a full employment law which would assert the right to work for everyone able and willing to work and the responsibility of the government to assure that right, to a permanent Fair Employment Practices Committee to eliminate job bias of every sort. It included a call for more regional river valley developments like the TVA, a wide-ranging veterans program, generous aid to small business, and a housing program aimed at 1,500,000 homes a year for the next ten years.

For my father, this sweeping twenty-one-point message symbolized “the assumption of the office of President in my own right. . . . It was my opportunity as President to advocate the political principles and economic philosophy which I had expressed in the Senate and which I had followed all my political life.”

It is amusing, in the light of later claims that my father sabotaged Roosevelt’s New Deal, to recall the squawks of rage this program evoked. Republican House Minority Leader Joseph Martin of Massachusetts said, “Not even President Roosevelt ever asked for as much in one sitting. The scenery is new and there is a little better decoration and he [Truman] does dish it out a little easier. But it is just a plain case of out New Dealing the New Deal.” Representative Charles Halleck of Indiana moaned that it was a call for “more billions and more bureaus.” Others took a more cynical view. They thought Truman didn’t mean it. The magazine
Nation’s Business
assured its readers “progressive democracy, liberalism and one-worldism” were on the loose in the “oratorical sense” but there was really nothing to worry about since “not in twenty-five years has understanding and cooperation between the White House and Capitol Hill been so cordial, so informal.” Behind these smooth words lay the smug assurance the President was a captive of a conservative Congress.

Before many more weeks passed, a lot of people - particularly members of Congress - learned that my father meant every word of that twenty-one-point message and he had no intention of allowing Congress to smother or ignore it. He did try to restore some of the balance between the President and the Congress, which had swung heavily to the White House side during the war, by refraining from sending completely drafted bills to implement these twenty-one points. President Roosevelt had been in the habit of doing this for legislation he wanted. My father felt strongly that Congress, as the legislative branch, should write the laws. But he was equally convinced the President was responsible for seeing they got written. When the Senate passed a very unsatisfactory unemployment compensation bill and the House Ways and Means Committee, thanks to the usual coalition of Southern conservatives and Republican reactionaries, refused even to bring it to the floor, much less repair it, Dad summoned the Democratic members of the committee to the White House. On his appointment sheet beside their names on September 27, he wrote: “The works and twenty-five dollars. I told ‘em either I am the leader of the Dem. Party or I’m not. That the Senate had let me down. They had no right to follow the Senate.”

In a letter to his mother and Mary on September 19, Dad made it clear that this was no isolated incident. “I’ve been raising hell since Monday,” he wrote. “From now on that will have to happen, I guess. I hate to do it. But it’s my job.”

He did not spend all his time raising hell with recalcitrant congressmen. He also tried to approach them as a friend and fellow Democrat, without the prerogatives of his office. On September 22, 1945, he wrote to his mother, “I’m going down to Jefferson Island today to spend the weekend, and talk to a lot of Congress-men and Senators. It won’t be a very pleasant time but it may be helpful.”

Jefferson Island was in Chesapeake Bay. Dad spent an exhausting Saturday and Sunday there pitching horseshoes, playing cards, eating raw oysters, and trying to do some politicking with the 200 Democratic congressmen who attended the annual affair.

Simultaneously, Dad tried to build up support for his program by making public appearances in various parts of the country. He still could not resign himself to being a prisoner in the White House. But his experience on these brief junkets soon convinced him moving the President was like “moving a circus” and such trips, if the President was going to survive, had better be made sparingly. On September 15, he flew home to Independence to spend a weekend with his mother, and bring me back to George Washington University. His attempt to be “just plain Harry Truman” in his hometown soon threatened Independence and Kansas City with chaos. He dropped into the barber shop of his old friend Frank Spina, who had been a member of his battery. “None of that fancy stuff, I don’t want anything that smells,” he reminded him as Frank started to cut his hair. The rest of the story Dad tells in a letter to his mother: “I . . . hadn’t been in the chair five minutes until Tenth Street was blocked and the crowd was so thick trying to look into the front window that the police and Secret Service had to push them back. The hall by the elevator was jammed full of starers also. But Frank finally got the job done. The police made a path for me to the car and we went on to the office. At the Federal Bldg. the steps out in front were full and so was the hallway. It took all the Secret Service men and police to get me to the elevator.”

Early in October, he flew to Caruthersville, Missouri, to appear at their annual fair. He spent two days there, shaking hands with thousands of people, breakfasting with the ladies of the Baptist Church and lunching with the ladies of the Presbyterian Church, riding a “40 & 8” mock locomotive with a crowd of Legionnaires, presenting a silver loving cup to the winning jockey of the President Truman Derby. One newsman, exhausted from trying to keep up with him, remarked he had done everything but have himself shot from a cannon. Dad was not enjoying himself very much either, as is evident from this comment to his mother and sister: “We had a nice time at the Fair if you can call it a nice time to be followed around by thirty newsmen and photographers everywhere and to be mobbed every time an appearance is made . . . I had to ride in an open car and give ‘em a Cheshire Cat grin and almost freeze stiff but the onlookers seemed to enjoy it.”

From the fair Dad drove to Reelfoot Lake in Tennessee for a day of rest. In a letter written from the White House, he told his mother what happened: “We were lodged in a beautiful house - but I may as well have been in the center of Chicago so far as rest was concerned. They brought in school children from every school in forty miles, the Legion, the State Police force, and all the state and county officials for ten counties around to see whether a President walked and talked and ate and slept as other folks do - but it was a change of scenery anyway. They were all good people.

Another reason Dad decided against leaving the White House was the crisis atmosphere which prevailed in the country, as America struggled to adjust to the abrupt arrival of peace. On October 13, he wrote his mother, “The pressure here is becoming so great I can hardly get my meals in, let alone do what I want to do.” In another letter, he summed up part of the problem: “Everybody wants something at the expense of everybody else and nobody thinks much of the other fellow.” He also ruefully admitted he was having trouble with his staff:

By now, my father had enough experience to take a pretty dim view of many of the ultra liberals who had tended to cluster around President Roosevelt. After attending a meeting of the Roosevelt National Memorial Committee in the East Room, he wrote on his appointment sheet: “Same bunch of Prima Donnas who helped drive the Boss to his grave are still riding his ghost.”

One of the Truman prima donnas who eventually got the ax was Jake Vardaman. A former St. Louis banker who had served in the army in World War I, he had done some work for Dad in his Senate campaigns and gone into the navy in World War II. Dad made him his naval aide, and Vardaman immediately acquired an acute case of Potomac fever. Aboard the presidential yacht, he became the sailor par excellence, hurling nautical terms right and left. Before lunch one day, he announced he was going to “break out the silver.” This aroused guffaws and hoots from ex-army artillerymen Truman, Vaughan, and Snyder. In the White House, Vardaman proceeded to stick his nose into almost every office and tell them how it should be run. Then he made the blunder of all blunders. He descended upon Mother’s side of the White House and started telling
them
how to do the job. That was the end of Vardaman as naval aide. Dad elevated him to the Federal Reserve Board, and he repaid him for this kindness by voting against every Truman policy for the next seven years. He also went around Washington spreading the nasty story that he was kicked out of the White House because he did not drink or play cards.

A Roosevelt prima donna who was also on his way out at this time was Harold Ickes. A complex man with many good qualities - my father admired him because he had administered the Interior Department with great integrity and complete disregard for special interest pressures - Ickes had an exaggerated opinion of his own importance. He had brawled repeatedly with President Roosevelt, and at one point, had been barred from the White House for six months. He loved a quarrel - the more spectacular, the better - which put him and Dad at opposite poles. Worse, Ickes also loved to gossip. It did not take Dad long to notice that almost everything discussed at a Cabinet meeting was paraphrased, after having been dipped in acid, by Drew Pearson on the following day. Dad suspected Ickes and finally proved it. At Eddie McKim’s suggestion, the staff planted a story on “Honest Harold” that they told to no one else. Dad recalls with a grim smile that it too showed up in Pearson’s column. Thereafter, Ickes’s days in the Truman Administration were numbered.

Early in 1946, Ickes practically handed my father the reason for his resignation. Dad had appointed Ed Pauley Under Secretary of the Navy. He was very impressed by the firmness and negotiating skill Pauley had displayed in dealing with the Russians on the tricky matter of reparations. James Forrestal, Secretary of the Navy, was already saying he wanted to resign, and Dad thought Pauley would make an excellent successor - and eventually a very good Secretary of Defense in the unification of the armed forces which was another Truman Administration goal. Ickes, summoned to testify before the Senate committee considering Pauley, proceeded to accuse him of playing politics with offshore oil reserves. He made this accusation without a shred of evidence to support him, and without even a hint of warning to Dad that he was opposed to Pauley.

Very angry but controlling it, my father said grimly at his next press conference that he backed Pauley, no matter what Ickes said. Honest Harold immediately sent Dad his resignation, claiming Dad had publicly displayed his lack of confidence in him - which was the truth. The letter, as my father put it later, was “the sort of resignation a man sent in, knowing it would not be accepted. Honest Harold was more than a little astonished when he got a phone call from the White House informing him his letter was accepted - immediately. He asked permission to stay on the job another six weeks. Dad gave him two days to clean out his desk.

In spite of all my father’s efforts, things did not improve in the country, or in Washington, D.C. A wave of strikes threatened to cripple the economy. Management lobbied fiercely for the removal of wartime price controls. Mournfully, Dad informed his mother and sister he had canceled plans to come to Kansas City on November 15 and fly on to Oklahoma for another personal appearance on the 18th: “I am going to have to cancel all my dates for every place until I get things going here. The Congress are balking, labor has gone crazy, and management isn’t far from insane in selfishness. My Cabinet, that is some of them, have Potomac fever. There are more Prima Donnas per square foot in public life here in Washington than in all the opera companies ever to exist.”