Harry Truman

by Margaret Truman

  The atomic bomb was not mentioned in this conference. It continued to be a question mark. No one really knew whether it would work. At Los Alamos, during these same weeks, scientists were still trying to perfect a detonator that would be completely reliable for triggering the bomb. Later statements by some scientists connected with the project that they were 90 percent certain of success were certainly not reflected in the reports that reached the White House. Admiral Leahy still kept insisting the bomb would be a dud. Jimmy Byrnes was more optimistic, but he still felt we needed the Russians in the war to help us bring it to a speedy conclusion. Behind these problems loomed another specter, mentioned again and again in cables from Prime Minister Churchill: the possibility that with the Allies heavily involved in the Pacific, there would be nothing to prevent Russia from taking over most of war-ravaged, prostrate Europe.

  Not until June 27, 1945, did new detonators arrive at Los Alamos from the Du Pont Company, reducing the chances of misfire from one in 300 to one in 30,000. On July 1, while my father was returning to Washington from his four-day stopover in Independence, the climactic test was set for July 16. The official estimate of the power of the bomb was 5,000 tons. Actually, this was a guess. During the first week in July, the top scientists at Los Alamos set up an informal betting pool, to see who would come closest to the actual explosive yield. These insiders’ guesses ranged from 45,000 tons to zero, with the majority betting on very low figures. Robert Oppenheimer, for instance, bet the explosion would yield no more than 300 tons.

  Meanwhile, the Interim Committee had handed my father a report on the use of the bomb - if it worked. This report, submitted on June 1, recommended the bomb should be used against Japan as soon as possible. Even after this report was made, the scientific panel that was advising the Interim Committee continued to debate the possibility of other alternatives. What about demonstrating the weapon to representatives of the United Nations on a barren island, or in the desert? This was the recommendation of a team of scientists in Chicago who had developed the first controlled nuclear chain reaction in 1942. The scientific panel, pondering this suggestion, and balancing it against their conservative estimates of the bomb’s power, rejected this idea as unlikely to convince the fanatical Japanese, who would naturally be inclined to be extremely suspicious of our claims to possess such a superweapon in the first place.

  What about dropping the bomb on some relatively uninhabited area of Japan? There were large drawbacks to this idea. In the first place, we did not have very many bombs. The giant plants constructed in secrecy at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, had only created enough plutonium to build three bombs, and even this small number had been possible only with a day-and-night crash program. Dropping one bomb on an uninhabited area, where it would do relatively little damage, might not impress the Japanese. If we gave them forewarning of the area, they were very likely to move Allied prisoners into the locality and dare us to go ahead. Above all, such advance warning might destroy what my father and his advisers saw as the chief virtue of the bomb - its shock value.

  If we wasted two out of the three bombs we possessed in ineffective demonstrations, and the third failed to bring the Japanese to terms, the invasion of Kyushu would probably begin as scheduled, Russia would come into the war on August 8 - Stalin had already assured Harry Hopkins of this - thousands of Americans would die, and the Russians would demand a share in the occupation of Japan, with the same nightmarish results that were already beginning to haunt the Allies in Germany.

  At the June 18 meeting, my father also discussed with his chief advisers the possibility of blockading and bombarding Japan into defeat with conventional weapons. General Marshall, surely the most authoritative military figure in the meeting, dismissed this possibility. He pointed out that no nation had been bombed as intensively as Nazi Germany. But the Germans remained in the war until their home territory was invaded and occupied by Allied troops. The army air force spokesman at the meeting, General Ira Eaker, concurred. He pointed out that it would be more difficult to knock out Japan’s scattered industry from the air than Germany’s relatively more concentrated factories. Moreover, once the Japanese realized we were trying to knock them out by air power alone, they would intensify their air defenses, and we could expect very heavy losses among our attacking fliers. Admiral Leahy continued to insist he preferred the blockade and bombardment solution, but no other military man in the room agreed with him. While accepting this expert advice, my father ordered redoubled efforts by the army and the navy to bring Japan to her knees with conventional weapons.

  The stage was now set for the Big Three meeting. At Winston Churchill’s suggestion, the code name for the conference became “Terminal.” Churchill’s code name was “Colonel Warden,” Marshal Stalin’s was “Uncle Joe,” and Dad was “The Other Admiral.” Coded cablese is a language all its own, and it is fascinating to read when you know the reality behind the curious nicknames.

  One thing is evident from my talks with my father and from reading the memoranda and letters he wrote at that time: He did not want to go to this conference. There were several reasons for this. High on the list was his political instinct that the American people did not like to see their Presidents cavorting abroad, at state dinners in royal palaces. The dreadful political consequences of President Wilson’s journey to Europe in 1919 were never far from his mind. His close association with Congress also made him aware of how deeply they suspected and resented President Roosevelt’s habit of making agreements at secret conferences that were revealed to the Congress only piecemeal, if at all.

  Finally, there was the problem of how to tell the Russian dictator about the atomic bomb, if the July 16 test should prove successful. It would be almost insulting to Stalin not to tell him about it. This in turn raised the sticky question of what to do if he began asking questions. Prime Minister Churchill had a veto over any decision Dad might make, because in 1943 at Hyde Park, the prime minister and President Roosevelt had entered into a secret agreement which stated “the suggestion that the world should be informed about Tube Alloys [British code name for the bomb] with a view to international agreement regarding its control and use is not accepted. The matter should continue to be regarded as of the utmost secrecy; but when a bomb is finally available, it might perhaps, after mature consideration, be used against the Japanese who should be warned that the bombardment will be repeated until they surrender.” The Interim Committee, incidentally, had no knowledge of this agreement when they discussed the problem of whether or not to use the bomb against Japan. Once more we see the tremendous complexity of presidential decision-making.

  My father’s reluctance was visible in a letter he wrote to his mother on July 3: “I am getting ready to go see Stalin and Churchill and it is a chore. I have to take my tuxedo, tails . . . high hat, top hat, and hard hat as well as sundry other things. I have a brief case all filled up with information on past conferences and suggestions on what I’m to do and say. Wish I didn’t have to go but I do and it can’t be stopped now.”

  On the eve of his departure, he had to deal with another Cabinet crisis caused by the strange presumption of another of Roosevelt’s appointees. Henry Morgenthau had been Secretary of the Treasury throughout almost all of Roosevelt’s administrations. He was married to a close friend of Mrs. Roosevelt’s and was used to having ready access to the White House. At the Quebec Conference between Roosevelt and Churchill, Morgenthau had proposed a plan to turn Germany into an agricultural nation by demolishing its vast industrial plants in the Ruhr and elsewhere. The so-called Morgenthau Plan was a fanciful scheme at best; it would have reduced 60,000,000 Germans to the status of beggars, and left a heritage of hatred the Communists would have been happy to reap. To my father, it was the politics of revenge which had failed so tragically after World War I. He had no intention of implementing the plan, and Morgenthau was not among the list of presidential advisers invited to the Potsdam Conference. Morgenthau demanded an appointment with Dad and insisted he
join the conference. Dad told him he thought the Secretary of the Treasury was “badly needed” in the United States - which he was, as postwar inflation was already beginning to soar.

  Morgenthau grandly declared either he went to Potsdam, or he quit.

  “All right,” Dad replied, “if that is the way you feel, I’ll accept your resignation right now.”

  In Morgenthau’s place, my father appointed Fred Vinson. He had planned to give the job to him eventually, but he very much regretted having to leave him behind on the trip to Potsdam. On Sunday, July 7, Dad left Norfolk aboard the cruiser Augusta. He would have preferred to fly, but with no vice president, and the whole question of presidential succession so muddled, it was too risky.

  One can now see clearly the reasons why the high hopes so many held for this conference ended in disappointment and frustration. But it is important to remember how hard Dad tried, at that time, to create a peaceful postwar world. From this viewpoint, the judgment of some of the best newspapermen is worthwhile. Arthur Krock, writing in The New York Times on June 14, 1945, commented: “The just criticism has often been made, especially of our government, that plenary conferences are called and entered upon without the preparation required for effective discussion and solution of the issues. But if the next Big Three meeting is unsuccessful, no such criticism can be made of President Truman. . . . If any chief of the Big Three states, when the meeting is held, encounters unexpected obstacles on unforeseeable issues, it will not be the fault of President Truman or his envoys.”

  My father had sent Davies and Hopkins to London and Moscow to lay the groundwork for the meeting. On the Augusta, he took from his briefcase long memoranda prepared by the State Department on all of the problems we were facing in Europe and the Far East. He prepared an agenda for the conference and carefully outlined his major goals. Even Jimmy Byrnes, whose later comments on my father are not especially kind, wrote that the American party arrived in Germany with “objectives thoroughly in mind . . . and the background papers in support of them fully prepared.” Admiral Leahy said the President “squeezed facts and opinions out of us all day long.”

  In between squeezings, Dad managed to tour the Augusta from “the bridge to the bilges,” to quote Admiral Leahy again. On one of these inspection tours, he found a young man named Lawrence Truman from Owensboro, Kentucky, who was the great-grandson of Grandfather Truman’s brother. “He’s a nice boy and has green eyes just like Margaret’s. Looks about her age,” Dad told his mother and sister. As a good politician, he ate meals in each of the ship’s messes - the officers’, the warrant officers’, the petty officers’, and the crew’s. He went down the chow line, aluminum tray in hand, with the crew.

  Landing at Antwerp on July 15, Dad and his party flew to Gatow Airfield, ten miles from the Berlin suburb of Babelsberg, where he was to stay. The conference had long been called the “Berlin meeting,” but too much of the German capital had been destroyed to permit any sizable gathering there. So the Russians selected Potsdam, about twenty-five miles from Berlin, as a less damaged site, and chose a number of palatial houses in nearby Babelsberg for residences. By nightfall, Dad was settled in a three-story yellow stucco house, which formerly belonged to the head of the German movie industry. It was on a lake swarming with mosquitoes. Prime Minister Churchill had another large house only a few blocks away, and Stalin was also nearby.

  Thanks to the hard work of the communications specialists who preceded him, Dad was able to pick up a telephone and call us in Independence. It was a “scrambler” phone, which automatically garbled what was being said for anyone who tried to tap the line. But for us on the receiving end, it was amazingly clear. Overseas phone calls in those days were usually pretty garbled, but Dad sounded as if he were calling from around the corner. He spoke to us almost every day while he was in Potsdam. He never mentioned affairs of state. It was just family chit-chat. Even when he was trying to settle the problems of the world, he kept in touch with his family world in Missouri.

  The next morning, my father learned Stalin would be a day late - he had suffered a slight heart attack. Dad took advantage of this delay to spend several hours with Winston Churchill. This delighted the prime minister, who had wanted to meet Dad in London before they met Stalin. But my father had turned down this idea, because he felt it would only feed the Russian dictator’s paranoia by giving him another chance to claim, as he had frequently done in his cables, that the British and the Americans were “ganging up” on him.

  Friendship was instant between Churchill and Dad. Their talk ranged over a wide variety of topics, from the Pacific war to their tastes in music. They found themselves in hearty agreement on everything but music. Churchill loved martial music and just about nothing else in that department. He was startled to find Dad’s taste running to Chopin, Liszt and Mozart.

  Later the prime minister’s physician, Lord Moran, asked Churchill: “Has he real ability?”

  “I should think he has,” replied Churchill. “At any rate, he is a man of immense determination.”

  The following day, after spending more time with Dad, the “P.M.” told Lord Moran: “He seems a man of exceptional charm and ability. . . . He has direct methods of speech and a great deal of self confidence and resolution.” Several days later Lord Moran noted in his diary: “Winston has fallen for the President.”

  That afternoon my father drove into Berlin and saw the desolation and tragedy Hitler’s madness had wreaked on that once impressive city. When he returned, he found an extremely excited Secretary of War Stimson waiting for him. He handed Dad a message which read:

  TOP SECRET

  URGENT

  WAR 32887

  FOR COLONEL KYLES EYES ONLY. FROM HARRISON FOR MR. STIMSON. OPERATED ON THIS MORNING. DIAGNOSIS NOT YET COMPLETE BUT RESULTS SEEM SATISFACTORY AND ALREADY EXCEED EXPECTATIONS. LOCAL PRESS RELEASE NECESSARY AS INTEREST EXTENDS GREAT DISTANCE. DR. GROVES PLEASED. HE RETURNS TOMORROW. I WILL KEEP YOU POSTED.

  This was the first word received from General Leslie Groves’s Washington office, reporting the successful test of the atomic bomb in New Mexico. It was flashed from Washington by George Harrison, who was acting as chairman of the Interim Committee while Stimson was in Germany. The local press release meant the explosion had attracted enough attention to require a public statement by the army that an ammunition dump had accidentally exploded.

  The following morning, Premier Stalin visited my father at his residence, which was already being called the “little White House” although it was yellow (little or summer White Houses were seldom white). My father persuaded him to stay for lunch, and they talked “straight from the shoulder.” Dad found he liked the way Stalin looked him in the eye when he spoke, and the meeting ended with Dad in a very optimistic mood. Although he sized up Stalin as a very determined, forceful man, he found him personally quite likable in this first encounter.

  That afternoon, the Big Three met for the first time at ten minutes past five in the ornate, 300-year-old Cecilienhof Palace. Two huge wrought iron chandeliers hung above a big circular table, at which the leaders and their delegations took their places.

  Marshal Stalin proposed that my father become the presiding officer. Although he thanked them for the “courtesy,” he did not relish the task. In a hitherto unpublished letter he wrote the following day to his mother, he described some of his problems:

  Stalin made a motion at the conference that I act as chairman and Churchill seconded it. So I preside. It is hard as presiding over the Senate. Churchill talks all the time and Stalin just grunts but you know what he means.

  We are meeting in one of the Kaiser’s palaces. I have a private suite in it that is very palatial. The conference room is 50 x 60 with a big round table in the center at which we sit. I have the Secretary of State, Davies, Admiral Leahy, and Bohlen, the interpreter, and each of the others have the same number. Then I have the Russian Ambassador of our country and a half dozen experts behind me.

  They
all say I took ‘em for a ride when I got down to presiding. It was a nerve-wracking experience but it had to be done. The worst is yet to come; but I’m hoping. I have several aces in the hole I hope which will help on results. . . .

  The following morning Secretary of War Stimson received another flash from Washington, which he rushed to the “little White House” in Babelsberg.

  TOP SECRET

  PRIORITY

  WAR 33556

  TO SECRETARY OF WAR FROM HARRISON. DOCTOR HAS JUST RETURNED MOST ENTHUSIASTIC AND CONFIDENT THAT THE LITTLE BOY IS AS HUSKY AS HIS BIG BROTHER. THE LIGHT IN HIS EYES DISCERNIBLE FROM HERE TO HIGHHOLD AND I COULD HAVE HEARD HIS SCREAMS FROM HERE TO MY FARM.

  Big Brother was the atom bomb that had been exploded at Alamogordo Air Base in New Mexico. The Little Boy was atom bomb number two, ready to be used against Japan. “From here to Highhold” meant from Washington to Secretary Stimson’s estate, Highhold, on Long Island, 250 miles away. “From here to my farm” meant from Washington to George Harrison’s farm at Upperville, Virginia, forty miles away. The medical terminology baffled the young officers who were manning the American communications center at Postdam. They thought seventy-seven-year-old Stimson had just become a father.

  While this was a sensational indication of the bomb’s power, it was not factual enough for my father. He wanted a complete report from General Groves before he made any decision connected with the new weapon. While he waited for this report, he had to continue negotiating with Prime Minister Churchill and Marshal Stalin.