Three days later, the morning of Friday, September 23, with the White House press crammed into his office, Charlie Ross asked first that the door be closed, then passed out a mimeographed statement from the President. In an instant reporters were stampeding for the press telephones, smashing the head of a stuffed deer in their rush.
I believe the American people, to the fullest extent consistent with national security, are entitled to be informed of all developments in the field of atomic energy. That is my reason for making public the following information.
We have evidence that within recent weeks an atomic explosion occurred in the U.S.S.R….
As the statement also said, the eventual development of “this new force by other nations was to be expected.” Nonetheless, the news was three to five years ahead of most predictions and the realization came as an immense shock. The four-year American monopoly on the atomic bomb was over. And though there was no panic in the country, the fears and tensions of the Cold War were greatly amplified. It was a different world now.
A week later, on October 1 in Peking, the People’s Republic of China, the most numerous Communist nation in the world, with more than 500 million people, one fifth of humanity, was officially inaugurated.
Very soon afterward, in October 1949, in a series of highly secret meetings at the offices of the Atomic Energy Commission, discussion began on the subject of a thermonuclear or hydrogen weapon—a superbomb, or “Super”—which would have more than ten times the destructive power of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Russian bomb, it was felt, had changed the situation “drastically.” And if the Russians were capable of producing an atomic bomb, then the Russians too were in a position now to push forward with the more devastating weapon.
The initial proposal for the “Super” had come from Lewis Strauss of the Atomic Energy Commission, with strong support from the physicist Edward Teller.
James B. Conant, who had served on the President’s Interim Committee on the first bomb, was flatly opposed. So was Oppenheimer. Enrico Fermi seemed at first to favor going ahead, then changed his mind. In the end, the scientific advisory committee expressed its opposition to the project on both technical and moral grounds. General Bradley was for it mainly for its “psychological” importance. Clearly, there would have to be a presidential decision.
Lilienthal had privately concluded that he, too, was against the Super. (“We keep saying, ‘We have no other course!’ Lilienthal wrote. “What we should be saying is, ‘We are not bright enough to see any other course.’”) But the morning of Tuesday, November 1, he met with Dean Acheson to explain the “essence of the business,” so Acheson might take it up with the President “soon,” before he, Lilienthal, and others presented it in greater detail.
What a depressing world it was, Acheson remarked after listening to Lilienthal. He didn’t know how Lilienthal had lived with “this grim thing.”
In the evening of that same first day in November 1949, the President sat down to dinner at Blair House alone. Bess Truman, as she had been for most of the summer, was away in Independence, looking after her mother; Margaret was in New York, pursuing her singing career, and as always, their absence left him feeling downcast, if not occupied with work or people around him. Several times over the long, difficult summer, in letters home, he had grown more reflective than usual, recounting events that had brought him to where he was. “We can never tell what is in store for us,” he had said to Bess. “Never in my wildest dreams did I ever think or wish for such a position,” he told Nellie and Ethel Noland. He had “succeeded in getting myself into more trouble than Pandora ever let loose in the world.”
If he felt Bess’s absences more than usual, it was because their life together now, in Blair House, seemed such an improvement over what it had been across the avenue. The house itself, even with the quick cosmetics applied the year before, was not only nothing very grand, but a bit dowdy. It creaked and groaned, trembled noticeably whenever streetcars passed by outside. Its dark, old cellar was full of rats, as was well known by the Secret Service men, who hated ever having to go down there. And with Washington’s Emergency Hospital located just around the corner on F Street, ambulance sirens screamed by in the street below the President’s bedroom window often several times a night. Of all the presidents they had known, some of the Secret Service men would later say, only Harry Truman would have been willing to live in the place.
But with Margaret no longer at home, and without the burden of White House entertaining, the President and the First Lady had more time alone together, sitting in the small back garden reading, having lunch, or resting. Indeed, it was the first time in their married life that they had ever had a house to themselves. “Very discreet, very polite, they spent a lot of time behind closed doors in Blair House,” remembered J. B. West. Maids joked about the “lovebirds” upstairs, and in recounting his memories of the Truman years, West would later provide the one known suggestion of the sexual attraction between these two very private, essentially Victorian people.
Sometime earlier that fall, when Bess had returned from a long stay with her mother in Independence, both she and the President had been so “jubilant,” so obviously happy to be with each other again, that the whole domestic staff felt a lift of spirits. Everybody kept grinning, West remembered.
The next morning, when West reported to the First Lady’s study at nine as usual, to go over the day’s menu, she told him “in a rather small, uncomfortable voice” that there was a little problem with the President’s antique bed. Two of the slats had broken during the night, she said, blushing.
He would attend to it immediately, said West, who had concluded, as he later wrote, that the Trumans were definitely not “antiques.”
Now, the evening of November 1, with Bess back again in Independence, and after “another hell of a day,” Truman penned one of the most delightful of all his diary sketches of himself—part melancholy, part amusing, entirely human and in character:
Had dinner by myself tonight. Worked in the Lee House office until dinner time. A butler came in very formally and said, “Mr. President, dinner is served.” I walked into the dining room in the Blair House. Barnett in tails and white tie pulls out my chair, pushes me up to the table. John in tails and white tie brings me a fruit cup. Barnett takes away the empty cup. John brings me a plate, Barnett brings me a tenderloin, John brings me asparagus, John brings me carrots and beets. I have to eat alone and in silence in a candle lit room. I ring—Barnett takes the plate and butter plates. John comes in with a napkin and a silver crumb tray—there are no crumbs but John has to brush them off the table anyway. Barnett brings me a plate with a finger bowl and doily on it—I remove finger bowl and doily and John puts a glass saucer and a little bowl on the plate. Barnett brings me some chocolate custard. John brings me a demitasse (at home a little cup of coffee—about two good gulps) and my dinner is over. I take a hand bath in the finger bowl and go back to work.
What a life!
III
Of the nine members of his Cabinet, none was so conspicuous or had more influence on Truman than the elegant, polished Dean Acheson, Secretary of State. His place was unrivaled. Unlike Woodrow Wilson, whose portrait over the mantel in the Cabinet Room still kept watch over gatherings of the Cabinet each Friday morning at ten, Truman had no inside adviser like Colonel Edward House. Nor was there anyone serving as international troubleshooter the way Harry Hopkins had for Roosevelt. The relationship between Truman and Acheson was clear and unimpeded, as Truman wished. Acheson ran the vast operations of State, With its twenty-two thousand employees, but he was also the President’s continuous contact with the world, his reporter and interpreter of world events, as well as his chief negotiator and spokesman on foreign policy. Apart from Cabinet meetings, where Acheson sat on Truman’s immediate right, they saw each other regularly twice a week—Mondays and Thursdays at 12:30—and talked by phone almost daily.
Truman considered the importa
nce of the office of Secretary of State second only to his own, and had filled the job three times now with men of proven ability and strong personality. Of Edward Stettinius, the Secretary he had inherited from Roosevelt and quickly replaced, Truman wrote, “a fine man, good looking, amiable, cooperative, but never an idea old or new.” No figurehead Secretary, no mere dispenser of White House policy would answer. But in Acheson he had found his most exceptional Secretary, and one who, unlike either of his two predecessors, Byrnes and Marshall, had assumed the responsibilities of the office after years of experience in the department and after having already played a decisive part in the two landmark achievements of Truman’s first term, the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan.
There was no one in the administration, or in the Cabinet, or on the White House staff, whose views overall, whose sense of proportion, timing, sense of history, whose personal code and convictions concerning America’s role in the world carried such weight with the President as Acheson, or whose trust and friendship were to mean as much in the long run.
“It was a great thing between Mr. Truman and me,” Acheson would recall.
Each one understood his role and the other’s. We never got tangled up in it. I never thought I was the President, and he never thought he was the Secretary…. It is important that the relations between the President and his Secretary be quite frank, sometimes to the point of being blunt. And you just have to be deferential. He is the President of the United States, and you don’t say rude things to him—you say blunt things to him. Sometimes he doesn’t like it. That’s natural, but he comes back, and you argue the thing out. But that’s your duty. You don’t tell him only what he wants to hear. That would be bad for him and for everyone else.
Truman often referred to Acheson as his “top brain man” in the Cabinet.
That Harry Truman of Missouri, product of the Pendergast machine, “bosom pal” of Harry Vaughan, could possibly have anything in common with Dean Gooderham Acheson, Groton ’11, Yale ’15, Harvard Law ’19, or feel at ease in such a partnership, struck many as almost ludicrous. Acheson was still another surprise in the presidency of this continuously surprising President.
He seemed to be everything Truman would find objectionable, the ultimate “striped pants boy,” were one to judge by appearance—and in Acheson’s case it was nearly impossible not to judge by appearance, since that, at first glance, was much the most impressive thing about him.
With his beautiful, chalk-stripe English flannel suits, his striking carriage, his bristling guardsman’s mustache and luxuriant eyebrows, Acheson looked not quite real, more like an actor cast for the part of Secretary of State, a tall, slim, imperious, emphatically English-looking Secretary of State. Everything was in order—expensive English shoes rubbed to a fine gloss, the correct quantity of cuff showing spotlessly, hair brushed back from a noble brow. He was just over six feet tall, but the perfect tailoring and perfect posture, the lift of the head, made him seem taller still. He could not go unnoticed. Among the fond memories of Washington in these years would be the sight of the Secretary of State on his way to work in the morning, leather dispatch case in hand, walking the mile and a half from his home in Georgetown accompanied by Justice Felix Frankfurter, who, nearly a head shorter, seemed to take two steps for every one of the Secretary's. Two celebrated conversationalists, they talked the whole way, and reportedly never about government, while Frankfurter’s car followed behind to drive him to the Court, once he and Acheson parted company at the steps of the State Department.
“If Harry Truman were a painter,” said a Republican congressman, “and had never laid eyes on Acheson, and sat down to paint a picture of a foreign minister, he would come up with a life-size oil of Dean.” For years Senator Lyndon Johnson entertained friends with his imitation of Acheson entering a committee room, nose in the air. Averell Harriman, who had known Acheson since they were undergraduates at Yale and who worried that Acheson’s appearance might prove a handicap, urged him to at least get rid of the mustache, saying, “You owe it to Truman.” But the mustache would stay, and if anything about Acheson’s appearance or manner or background ever bothered Truman, he did not say so.
To Truman the State Department was “a peculiar organization, made up principally of extremely bright people who made tremendous college marks but who have had very little association with actual people down to the ground.” They were “clannish and snooty,” he thought, and he often felt like firing “the whole bunch.” Yet no such feelings applied to the Secretary. Acheson was doing a “whale of a job.” Truman hoped he would never leave the government.
Acheson, who was fifty-six years old in 1949, had been raised in the small-town America of other times, in Middletown, Connecticut, at the turn of the century, a setting not unlike Independence, Missouri. His mother was the heir to a Canadian whiskey fortune. His father, English by birth and a veteran of the Queen’s Own Rifles, was an Episcopal minister, and later bishop of Connecticut, whose frequent admonition to his son was, “Brace up!” Like Truman, Acheson had had his first youthful brush with the “real world” working with a railroad crew. Like Truman, he relished history and biography. He, too, adored Mark Twain. If Acheson was a fashion plate, so, of course, was Truman in his way.
They had their morning walks in common. Both were men of exceptional physical vitality. Both were amateur architects. Truman spoke often of the influence Justice Brandeis had on him in his first years in Washington; Acheson had first come to the city, after law school in 1919, to clerk for Brandeis, from whom, he often said, he learned more than from anyone. Politically, like Truman, Acheson considered himself a little left of center.
His stiff appearance to the contrary, Acheson was also a warmhearted man with a wit of a kind that greatly appealed to Truman. Acheson enjoyed a convivial drink, a good story. (With his father a minister and his mother a distiller’s daughter, he liked to say, he knew both good and evil at an early age.) And like Truman, he was devoted to his family. When his oldest daughter, Mary, was stricken with tuberculosis in 1944 and had to be sent to a sanatorium at Saranac, New York, for an extended cure, Acheson wrote to her every night, often revealing how much more of life he savored than was commonly understood.
At lunch at the Capitol I was asked to sit at a table with Jessie Sumner of Illinois, the worst of the rabble rousing isolationists…. We got along famously. She is a grand old girl and reminded me of the madam in John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row, sort of low, humorous and human. We became great friends and are going to lunch again. I often wonder whether I have any principles at all. It’s a confusing world.
Writing once to Ethel Noland, Truman had said, “You know all of us have a very deep sentimental streak in us, but most of the time we are too timid or too contrary to show it.” Acheson, when asked years later by Eric Sevareid how so much trust and affection could have developed between two such seemingly different men as he and the President, said the answer was complicated, but that much of it had to do with what he called Truman’s “deeply loving and tender nature,” adding, “This isn’t the general impression of him at all.” When Acheson’s daughter had to undergo a serious operation while Acheson was out of the country, and it was not certain she would pull through, Truman personally called the hospital every day for a report, which he himself then transmitted to Acheson by overseas phone.
“Well, this is the kind of person that one can adore,” Acheson later said. “You can have an affection for that man that nothing can touch.”
Truman, Acheson knew, was far more sentimental than generally known, or than he wished people to know, far more touched by gestures that to many might seem routine. On board his plane later in the year, bound again for Key West, he would write Acheson a brief longhand note marked and underscored “Personal.”
It was good of you to see us off. You always do the right thing. I’m still a farm boy and when the Secretary of State of the greatest Republic comes to the airport to see me off on a vacation, I can�
��t help but swell up a little.
“And then he was so fair,” Acheson would say. “He didn’t make different decisions with different people. He called everyone together. You were all heard and you all got the answer together. He was a square dealer all the way through.”
Moreover, Truman welcomed other people’s ideas. “He was not afraid of the competition of other ideas…. Free of the greatest vice in a leader, his ego never came between him and his job.”
Felix Frankfurter, in listing the elements of Acheson’s personal code, would put loyalty first, followed by truthfulness, and “not pretending to be better than you are.” Truman had not forgotten that it was Acheson alone who was at Union Station to greet him, after the humiliation of the off-year elections in 1946. Acheson, Truman told David Lilienthal, was a fine man, “loyal, sensible, not like some men who are brilliant.”
That Acheson had an exceptional capacity for hard work, that he also subscribed to the philosophy that civilization depended largely on a relatively small number of people who were willing to shoulder the hard work necessary, contributed greatly to Truman’s regard for him. Acheson believed in clear, orderly thinking. He knew there were no easy answers, no quick remedies. With the world as it was, he said, Americans would have to get over the idea that the problems facing the country could be solved with a little ingenuity or without inconvenience.
He did not see the Cold War as an inevitable clash between good and evil. To say that good and evil could not exist in the world was absurd, he told an audience of military officers at the National War College in December 1949:
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