Harry Truman

by Margaret Truman

  Two nights later, my father made the following memorandum on his conference with Joseph Davies:

  I told him I was having as much difficulty with Prime Minister Churchill as I was having with Stalin - that it was my opinion that each of them was trying to make me the paw of the cat that pulled the chestnuts out of the fire. . . .

  I told him it seemed to me Churchill should be informed of situation, but I had no messenger I could send to him. I could not possibly send Hopkins to Churchill at the same time I was sending him to see Stalin. Further said I did not want to give impression I was acting for Great Britain in any capacity, although I wanted support of Great Britain in anything we do so far as peace is concerned. . . .

  Behind the scenes, getting rid of Roosevelt’s Cabinet was anything but the simple task my father made it seem in public. Politically it was important for him to avoid public brawls with the Roosevelt men. Yet, as his memorandum on Cabinet changes makes clear, he had a very poor opinion of many members of Roosevelt’s team. Dad’s approach to the presidency was quite different from Roosevelt’s. He believed in delegating much more authority than Roosevelt was inclined to give his Cabinet officers. Roosevelt really ran his administration as a one-man show, confident of his own enormous popularity and his ability to keep track of all the strings. Dad was convinced the government was simply too large for such an approach and was determined to get men with more administrative ability - as well as more loyalty to him - in the Cabinet.

  My father was startled to discover many of Roosevelt’s Cabinet did not take their pro forma resignations seriously and in one or two cases almost refused to resign. Secretary of State Stettinius was enraged when Dad’s emissary, George Allen, informed him in San Francisco that, when the conference was over, the President expected to replace him with Jimmy Byrnes. At first, Stettinius haughtily rejected Dad’s offer to appoint him as head of the American delegation to the UN. George Allen had to do quite a lot of soothing before Stettinius calmed down and accepted the UN job. It took him days to compose a satisfactory letter of resignation. Attorney General Francis Biddle was even more exercised when my father informed him he was replacing him with Tom Clark. After the press conference at which Dad made this announcement, he made the following memorandum: “Mr Biddle took a very unsatisfactory attitude towards his resignation - I told him I was going to accept it. I was very sure if he got an opportunity to get the “crackpots” worked up here they would jump on me. As it was he did not get an opportunity and they did not ask me any questions - apparently from viewpoint of unbiased spectators the [press] conference was a success.”

  Not all of the Cabinet was so difficult, of course. Mrs. Frances Perkins was eager to leave and remained a friend. Dad replaced her with his old friend Lewis Schwellenbach of Washington, one of the original thirteen Senate “Young Turks” of 1934. Claude Wickard gracefully yielded to Clinton Anderson of New Mexico as Secretary of Agriculture; Frank Walker, whose health was very poor, was happy to hand over the Post Office to Bob Hannegan. Forrest Donnell, the Republican who had replaced Dad as senator from Missouri, denounced Bob as a crooked politician for two hours in the Senate, but he was confirmed, sixty to two. It is really amazing how little impact the fiercest invective makes in that Cave of Winds.

  Only a few days after Germany surrendered, my father learned - the hard way - there was a limit to the amount of authority he could delegate to his Cabinet officers. On the day of the surrender, Leo Crowley, the administrator of the Lend-Lease program, and Acting Secretary of State Grew came to Dad’s office and asked him to sign an order which they assured him President Roosevelt had approved before he died. It authorized the Foreign Economic Administration (the official name for Lend-Lease) and the State Department to cut back on Lend-Lease as soon as Germany surrendered. This was a subject which had aroused angry debate in Congress. As you will recall, Dad had cast his only vice-presidential vote in the Senate to block a Republican attempt to eliminate all Lend-Lease aid the moment the war ended, no matter what the wartime contracts for its delivery stipulated.

  My father signed the order without reading it, and Grew and Crowley immediately began executing it. It empowered them to cancel all Lend-Lease shipments to Russia and our other allies, immediately. Even ships at sea were ordered to return and unload their cargoes. Neither Crowley nor Grew gave Dad the slightest intimation they were going to interpret the order so literally. The abrupt cutoff of supplies infuriated the Russians and alarmed the English. Protests and pleas poured into the White House, and Dad was forced to rescind the order. In his memoirs, my father said the experience made him resolve never to sign any document until he had read it.

  But the real lesson was one he hesitated to state in his memoirs - the extreme hostility which certain men in the government, such as Crowley, felt toward Russia. It did not make my father’s task any easier, to find a middle path between these men and the Henry Wallace types, who could not believe the Russians were capable of any wrongdoing. By and large, the Wallace group was more numerous in 1945. Averell Harriman recalls being in San Francisco during the UN Conference and giving an off-the-record talk to the press on his view of Russian-American relations, based on his insider’s knowledge as ambassador to Moscow. His tough-minded realism was greeted with dismay by his audience. Two reporters became so enraged by his criticism of Russia they walked out of the room.

  At San Francisco, the Russians and the Americans fought the first of many verbal battles in the UN. A total deadlock developed over two major questions. Molotov and his delegation wanted to give the great powers on the Security Council a complete veto over any question raised in either the Security Council or the Assembly. We insisted complaints could be brought to the Security Council by a member country and considered if seven out of the eleven members of the Council agreed, and we flatly refused to give the Security Council the right to veto the Assembly’s freedom of discussion. The American delegation, with my father’s firm backing, rejected this attempt to inflict totalitarianism on the United Nations. Dad knew the Senate would never accept American participation in an organization in which the small states would enjoy the right of free speech only when the big states approved of what they were saying.

  Fortunately, Harry Hopkins was in Moscow, and he was able to thrash out with Stalin personally the first of these difficulties, the blanket veto in the Security Council. The Russian dictator overruled Molotov’s rigid all-or-nothing demands and, with this breakthrough, it was easier to persuade Stalin to make a similar concession on freedom of debate in the Assembly. The UN was rescued from potential disaster, and the conference ended on a note of high optimism. Late in June, my father flew to San Francisco to give a speech at the official signing. Mother and I had already gone home to Independence, so he made the trip without us.

  Dad’s reception in San Francisco was wild. He rode in an open car at the head of a seventy-five-car entourage while ticker tape and torn paper poured down, and a million people jammed the sidewalks. Political pundits were astonished by the enthusiasm he generated, and even Dad was a little amazed. “That cheering,” he said, “was not for the man, it was for the office. It was for the President of the United States.” Later that evening, Dad sat around his hotel suite with some old friends. Referring to the remark he made earlier in the day, he said, “As long as I remember that, I’ll be all right. When a man forgets such things in public life, that is when the country begins to realize it does not want him anymore.”

  On the way home, Dad made an unscheduled stop in Salt Lake City, Utah. There was a sentimental reason for it. In these first months of his presidency, he often seemed to act out of a desire to put himself in touch with men and places from his past. Salt Lake City was a place that had deep meaning for him, because it was associated intimately in his memory with Grandfather Young.

  The next day, Dad flew on to Kansas City to visit with us in Independence for a few days. He turned out the biggest crowd in the history of Jackson County when he landed. The
following night, he received a degree from the University of Kansas City. In an off-the-cuff talk he gave that day, he summed up his thinking at this point in his presidency, in very personal terms:

  The night before last, I arrived in Salt Lake City, Utah, at 10 p.m. from San Francisco, which I had left on the same time schedule at 8 p.m. I left Salt Lake City the next morning after breakfast . . . and arrived in Kansas City, Missouri, in exactly three hours and a half.

  My grandfather made that trip time and time again from 1846 to 1854, and again from 1864 to 1870, and when he made that trip it took him exactly three months to go, and three months to come back.

  That is the age in which we live. . . .

  We must become adjusted to that situation. No farther from here to Salt Lake City, or Salt Lake City to San Francisco, than it was from here to Lonejack in eastern Jackson County, when we used to go to the picnics there on the sixteenth of August to celebrate the beginning of the Democratic campaign in the fall.

  I am anxious to bring home to you that the world is no longer county-size, no longer state-size, no longer nation-size. It is one world, as Willkie said. It is a world in which we must all get along.

  En route to this degree-granting ceremony, Dad stopped at his old friend Eddie Jacobson’s haberdashery store to get some white shirts, size 15½-33. To Eddie’s embarrassment, he did not have the size in stock. White shirts were one of the many items in short supply in those closing days of World War II. Naturally, the newsmen reported Eddie’s shortage and within forty-eight hours, Dad was practically buried in white shirts from all sections of the country.

  Dad had a lot of fun on this visit home. He declared that henceforth Kansas City would be part of “Greater Independence.” At a luncheon given him by the Jesters, a Masonic organization, he chatted with his old friends about how it felt to be President. “It seems everybody is anxious that I do the best I can and keep from going high hat or stuffed shirt. Well, the only thing I have to do is remember Luke 6:26 (‘Woe unto you when all men shall speak well of you! For so did their fathers to the false prophets’).” With a smile, he added: “When I hear the Republicans say I’m doing all right, then I know damn well I’m doing wrong.”

  After four hectic days in Missouri, my father flew back to Washington and submitted the United Nations Charter to the Senate, with a strong recommendation it be ratified. “The choice is not between this charter and something else. It is between this charter and no charter at all,” he said. “It can be improved - and as the years go by it will be - just as our own Constitution has been improved. . . .” He was relaxed and personal with the senators he knew so well, remarking that it was a pleasure to get one more chance to give a speech to them. “You remember how I was tied down during the last three months I was here. I could not speak except to rule on parliamentary questions and two or three times I was ruled out of order because I tended to make a speech on such a question.” In regard to the “comparatively few” points of disagreement at the UN Conference, he made an even more senatorially wise remark. “As you know, if you want to get a headline all you need to do is fall out with some of your friends, and you will always get it.”

  To everyone’s amazement, all opposition to the UN practically melted away. Everyone had expected Senator Burton K. Wheeler to lead the assault on the Charter. He was the man who had killed the Supreme Court revision bill in 1937. He was the Senate’s best parliamentarian - and an outspoken isolationist. Everyone waited anxiously for the anti-UN maneuvers they were sure he had up his sleeve. But they forgot Burt Wheeler was also one of Harry Truman’s closest friends. As Dad left the Senate chamber, he made a point of shaking hands with him.

  There is no better example of my father’s inside knowledge of the Senate at this point in his presidency than the amazingly accurate prediction he made to his mother of how the senators would vote on the UN Charter. On July 3, the day after he made his speech, he wrote: “Went to the Senate yesterday and you should have seen the carrying on they did. I could hardly shut ‘em up so I could speak. And they did the same thing after I finished. Some said the Senate never did carry on so over a President or anybody else. Well anyway, I believe we’ll carry the Charter with all but two votes.”

  Scarcely a word of opposition was heard from Senator Wheeler and from more than a few other senators who were expected to rampage against the idea of America joining the UN. The charter, of course, profited from FDR’s foresight in creating a genuinely bipartisan American delegation to the San Francisco Conference. From the Democratic side of the aisle, Tom Connally voiced his support, and Arthur Vandenberg echoed him on the Republican side. After less than a month of debate, the Senate approved American membership in the UN by an astonishing eighty-nine to two - exactly as my father had predicted.

  WITH THE UN off his mind, my father was free to concentrate on three far more complex, intertwined problems - the atomic bomb, the invasion of Japan, and the Big Three Conference with Prime Minister Churchill and Marshal Stalin, scheduled to begin on July 15 in Germany.

  For over a month, Churchill had been pressing my father for an early conference between him and Marshal Stalin. On June 4, 1945, the prime minister sent Dad a telegram containing a phrase that would grow very familiar in years to come:

  I AM SURE YOU UNDERSTAND WHY I AM ANXIOUS FOR AN EARLIER DATE (SAY THE 3RD OR 4TH OF JULY). I VIEW WITH PROFOUND MISGIVINGS THE RETREAT OF THE AMERICAN ARMY TO OUR LINE OF OCCUPATION IN THE CENTRAL SECTOR, THUS BRINGING SOVIET POWER INTO THE HEART OF WESTERN EUROPE AND THE DESCENT OF AN IRON CURTAIN BETWEEN US AND EVERYTHING TO THE EASTWARD. I HOPE THAT THIS RETREAT, IF IT HAS TO BE MADE, WOULD BE ACCOMPLISHED BY THE SETTLEMENT OF MANY GREAT THINGS WHICH WOULD BE THE TRUE FOUNDATION OF WORLD PEACE. NOTHING REALLY IMPORTANT HAS BEEN SETTLED YET, AND YOU AND I WILL HAVE TO BEAR GREAT RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE FUTURE. I STILL HOPE THEREFORE THAT THE DATE WILL BE ADVANCED.

  My father had stalled on a date for the conference because he wanted to put it off until the atomic bomb was tested. If the bomb was a success, there would probably be no need for Russia to enter the war against Japan - and no need to make any more concessions to the Soviets in Europe for their promise to help in the Far East. Dad had been wrestling with the atom bomb and the plans to end the Japanese war almost continuously since his April conference with Secretary of War Stimson. On Sunday, June 17, he made the following memorandum:

  Went down the River today on the Potomac to discuss plans, issues and decisions. Took Charlie Ross, straight thinker, honest man, who tells me the truth so I understand what he means; Matt Connelly, shrewd Irishman, who raises up the chips and shows me the bugs, honest, fair, “diplomatic” with me; Judge Fred Vinson, straight shooter, knows Congress and how they think, a man to trust; Judge Rosenman, one of the ablest in Washington, keen mind, a lucid pen, a loyal Roosevelt man and an equally loyal Truman man; Steve Early, a keen observer, political and otherwise, has acted as my hatchet man, absolutely loyal and trustworthy, same can be said about Rosenman.

  We discussed public relations in Germany, Italy, France, Holland, Belgium, England and Russia. Food, Fuel, Transportation and what to do about it. Japanese War and the relations with China, Russia, and Britain with regard to it; Supreme Commander and what to do with Mr. Prima Donna, Brass Hat, Five Star MacArthur. He’s worse than the Cabots and the Lodges - they at least talked with one another before they told God what to do. Mac tells God right off. It is a very great pity we have to have stuffed shirts like that in key positions. I don’t see why in Hell Roosevelt didn’t order Wainwright home and let MacArthur be a martyr.

  Don’t see how a country can produce such men as Robt. E. Lee, John J. Pershing, Eisenhower, and Bradley and at the same time produce Custers, Pattons and MacArthurs.

  I have to decide Japanese strategy - shall we invade Japan proper or shall we bomb and blockade? That is my hardest decision to date. But I’ll make it and when I have all the facts. . . .

  The only one of these advisers whom I have not mentioned
is Fred Vinson. “Papa Vin,” as I always called him, was a congressman from Kentucky for several terms, then a federal judge, and after that a wartime administrator for President Roosevelt. He was a very solid, thoroughly shrewd politician from Kentucky, and a very likable man in the bargain. In the first twelve months of Dad’s presidency, “Papa Vin” was one of his most important advisers. Then he was elevated to the Supreme Court and passed out of the inner circle.

  The day after he wrote this memorandum, Dad had a climactic conference with the Joint Chiefs of Staff to decide the final strategy against Japan. They handed him plans for a November 1 assault on the Japanese home island of Kyushu with a total force of 766,700 men. Some of the chiefs predicted light casualties - but Admiral Leahy strongly disagreed. He pointed out that in the bloody Okinawa campaign just ending, American losses (41,700) had been 35 percent of the attacking force. The Japanese still had an estimated 5,000 planes ready for kamikaze assaults. There were an estimated 2,000,000 troops in the Japanese home islands. Facing the Americans on Kyushu would be seventeen well-equipped battle-ready divisions.

  If the capture of Kyushu, the westernmost Japanese island, did not persuade Japan to surrender, in the spring of 1946 there were plans for a landing on Honshu, the main Japanese island, where a climactic battle would be fought on the Tokyo Plain. On both Kyushu and Honshu, Japan’s soldiers would, if their performance on Okinawa was any indication, fight with total fanaticism to defend their sacred home soil. Based on this assumption, General George C. Marshall predicted total American dead on land and sea might reach 500,000 men.

  Moreover - and this was a very big moreover - the entire American battle plan was based on the assumption Russia would enter the war before the American invasion. This would pin down Japan’s crack 1-million-man Manchurian army, as well as the additional 1 million troops on the Asian mainland fighting the Chinese. If substantial portions of these troops could be shuttled back to Japan - by no means an impossibility, in spite of our air and sea superiority - American losses might be many times that already appalling figure. More than anything else, these facts explain Dad’s policy toward the Russians during these crucial months.