by Oliver Stone
It was precisely because most of the world did not agree with Dahl’s assessment that Wallace posed such a threat. In March 1943, Wallace embarked on a forty-day, seven-nation goodwill tour of Latin America. Speaking in Spanish, he electrified his audiences. He stopped first in Costa Rica, where 65,000 people, 15 percent of that nation’s population, turned out to greet him. “The reception accorded Mr. Wallace was the greatest in the history of Costa Rica,” the New York Times reported. But that was just the beginning. Three hundred thousand greeted his plane in Chile. More than a million cheered him as he walked through the streets of Santiago arm in arm with President Juan Antonio Rios. One hundred thousand people, 20,000 over capacity, packed the stadium to hear him speak. Ambassador Claude Bowers reported to Washington: “Never in Chilean history has any foreigner been received with such extravagance and evidently sincere enthusiasm. . . . His simplicity of manner, his mingling with all sorts of people, his visit to the workers’ quarters without notice . . . and his inspection of the housing projects absolutely amazed the masses who responded almost hysterically.”
In Ecuador, he spoke movingly of the postwar future at the University of Guayaquil. “If the liberation of the people for which the fight is going on today with the blood of youth and the sweat of workers results in imperialism and oppression tomorrow, this terrible war will have been in vain,” he declared. “If this sacrifice of blood and strength again brings a concentration of riches in the hands of a few—great fortunes for the privileged and poverty for the people in general—then democracy will have failed and all this sacrifice will have been in vain.” Two hundred thousand welcomed him to Lima. The trip was not only a personal triumph; it was a diplomatic tour de force. When it was over, a dozen Latin American countries had declared war on Germany and twenty had broken diplomatic relations.16
Wallace was equally popular back home. While he was away, Gallup asked Democratic voters whether they viewed favorably or unfavorably each of the four leading contenders to replace Roosevelt if he decided not to run again. Wallace’s 57 percent favorability rating more than doubled that of his nearest competitor.17
Wallace’s acclaim made it even more urgent for his detractors to make their move. Knowing that Roosevelt’s failing health meant he would not survive a fourth term, the party bosses decided to oust Wallace from the ticket and replace him with someone more amenable to the party’s conservative factions. In 1944, they staged what was known among insiders as “Pauley’s coup,” named after Democratic Party Treasurer and oil millionaire Edwin Pauley.18 Pauley had once quipped that he went into politics when he realized that it was cheaper to elect a new Congress than to buy up the old one. Pauley’s co-conspirators included Edward Flynn of the Bronx, Mayor Edward Kelly of Chicago, Mayor Frank Hague of Jersey City, Postmaster General and former Party Chairman Frank Walker, Party Secretary George Allen, and national Democratic Party Chairman Robert Hannegan.
Harry Truman (pictured here at age thirteen) overcame a very difficult childhood, one that took a great toll on his psyche. He struggled to win the approval of his roughneck father. And he was forced to wear Coke-bottle-thick glasses, so he couldn’t play sports or roughhouse with the other boys, who picked on and bullied him. “To tell the truth, I was kind of a sissy,” Truman remembered.
After going through the list of potential candidates, the party bosses chose undistinguished Missouri Senator Harry Truman to replace Wallace. They picked Truman not because he had any substantial qualifications for the position but because he had been sufficiently innocuous as a senator that he had made few enemies and he could be counted on not to rock the boat. They gave little, if any, thought to the attributes that would be necessary to lead the United States and the world in the challenging times ahead, when decisions would be made that would shape the course of history. Thus Truman’s ascent to the presidency, like much of his career, was a product of backroom deal-making by corrupt party bosses.
Although Harry Truman left office with approval ratings so low that only George W. Bush has come close, he is now widely viewed as a nearly great president and routinely showered with praise by Republicans and Democrats alike. Former National Security Advisor and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, whom George W. Bush credited with telling “me everything I know about the Soviet Union,” named Truman her man of the century to Time.19 Some historians have fallen into the same trap, none more than David McCullough, whose hagiographic biography of Truman won him a Pulitzer Prize.
The real Harry Truman is more interesting than McCullough’s fanciful one. Truman overcame a very difficult childhood, one that took a great toll on his psyche. Growing up on his family’s Missouri farm, he struggled to win the affection of his father, John “Peanuts” Truman. The elder Truman, though only five foot four, relished beating up much taller men to show how tough he was. He wanted that same toughness in his sons. He found it in Harry’s younger brother Vivian. Harry, however, was diagnosed with hypermetropia, or “flat eyeballs,” and forced to wear Coke-bottle-thick glasses, so he couldn’t play sports or roughhouse with the other boys. “I was afraid my eyes would get knocked out if there was too much of a rough and tumble play,” he explained. “To tell the truth, I was kind of a sissy.”20 He was picked on and bullied by the other boys, who called him “four-eyes” and “sissy” and chased him home after school. To make matters worse, when he arrived home trembling and out of breath, his mother would comfort him by telling him not to worry because he was meant to be a girl anyway. He wrote about one incident in a 1912 letter, “That sounds rather feminine, doesn’t it. Mamma says I was intended for a girl anyway. It makes me pretty mad to be told so but I guess it’s partly so.” He later reflected that being regarded as a “sissy” was “hard on a boy. It makes him lonely, and it gives him an inferiority complex, and he has a hard time overcoming it.”21 Not surprisingly, gender issues plagued him for years. He often referred to his feminine features and attributes. He would later prove that not only was he not a sissy, he could stand up to Stalin and show him who was boss.
Economic hardship also plagued him. Although he was a good student, with a serious interest in history, his family’s economic circumstances made it impossible for him to attend college. After graduating from high school, he bounced around for a while before returning to work on his father’s farm. He also got involved in three failed business ventures and didn’t experience real success until his service in the First World War, when he served bravely and honorably in France.
His final business venture, a haberdashery that went belly up in 1922, left the thirty-eight-year-old Truman with a wife to support and limited prospects. It was at that low point that party boss Tom Pendergast offered to get Truman elected judge in Jackson County. During the campaign, Truman, who was always bigoted and anti-Semitic, sent a $10 check to the Ku Klux Klan but was denied membership because he would not promise to stop hiring Catholics.22
Truman remained a loyal member of the notorious Pendergast machine throughout the 1920s and early 1930s but felt as if he were getting nowhere in life. On the eve of his forty-ninth birthday in 1933, he mused, “Tomorrow I’ll be forty-nine, but for all the good I have done the forty might as well be left off.”23 The following year, just when Truman had wearied of machine politics and was contemplating a return to the farm, Boss Pendergast picked him to run for the Senate— his first four choices had turned him down—and engineered his election. When asked why he had chosen someone as unqualified as Truman to run, Pendergast replied, “I wanted to demonstrate that a well oiled machine could send an office boy to the senate.”24 Known derisively among his new Senate colleagues as “the Senator from Pendergast” and shunned by most of them, Truman worked hard to gain respectability in Washington, a stature he finally achieved during his second term in the Senate.
Failing to garner President Roosevelt’s endorsement in 1940, Truman barely won reelection to the Senate with the help of the St. Louis Hannegan-Dickmann Democratic machine, while his old party b
oss Tom Pendergast languished in prison. Truman now owed favors to two corrupt urban machines.
He almost didn’t get that second term. Failing to win Roosevelt’s endorsement, Truman eked out reelection to the Senate in 1940 by a razor-thin margin with the help of the St. Louis Hannegan-Dickmann machine while Pendergast languished in federal prison. Truman now owed favors to two corrupt urban machines. Roosevelt, meanwhile, was staking his own political future on the choice of the high-minded Wallace as his vice presidential running mate, taking comfort in the knowledge that Wallace’s progressive ideals would help steer the country through the rocky times ahead.
The American people showed much better judgment than the party bosses. When Gallup asked likely Democratic voters in a Gallup Poll released on July 20, 1944, during the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, who they wanted on the ticket as vice president, 65 percent selected Henry Wallace. Jimmy Byrnes of South Carolina, who would later exert so much influence over Truman’s Cold War thinking and atomic bomb decision, received 3 percent of the vote, with Wallace even trouncing him by a six-to-one margin in the South. Truman came in eighth out of eight candidates, with the support of 2 percent of those polled. But Roosevelt, tired, ailing, and dependent on the bosses for reelection, was not willing or able to fight for Wallace as he had in 1940. He simply announced that were he a delegate, he would vote for Wallace.
Party leaders made sure they had an iron grip on the convention. Yet the rank-and-file Democrats would not go quietly, staging a rebellion on the convention floor. The groundswell of support for Wallace among the delegates and attendees was so great that despite the bosses’ stranglehold over the proceedings and strong-arm tactics, Wallace’s supporters almost carried the day as an uproarious demonstration for Wallace broke out on the convention floor. In the midst of the demonstration, Florida Senator Claude Pepper realized that if he got Wallace’s name into nomination that night, Wallace would sweep the convention. Pepper fought his way through the crowd to get within five feet of the microphone when the nearly hysterical Mayor Kelly, purporting that there was a fire hazard, got the chairman, Senator Samuel Jackson, to adjourn the proceedings. Had Pepper made it five more feet and nominated Wallace before the bosses forced adjournment against the will of the delegates, Wallace would have become president in 1945 and the course of history would have been dramatically altered. In fact, had that happened, there might have been no atomic bombings, no nuclear arms race, and no Cold War. Wallace was far ahead in the initial balloting. But the bosses further restricted admission and made the requisite backroom deals. Truman finally prevailed on the third ballot. Ambassadorships, postmaster jobs, and other positions were offered. Cash payoffs were made. Bosses called every state chairman, telling them that the fix was in and Roosevelt wanted the Missouri senator as his running mate. On Roosevelt’s urging, Wallace agreed to remain in the cabinet as secretary of commerce.
Jackson apologized to Pepper the next day. “I knew if you made the motion,” he explained, “the convention would nominate Henry Wallace. I had strict instructions from Hannegan not to let the convention nominate the vice president last night. So I had to adjourn the convention in your face. I hope you understand.” “What I understood,” Pepper wrote in his autobiography, “was that, for better or worse, history was turned topsy-turvey that night in Chicago.”25
Meanwhile, the bomb project was progressing rapidly. Scientists, still worried that they might trail the Germans, worked feverishly on two types of atom bombs—one using uranium, the other plutonium. It was not until late 1944 that the Allies discovered that Germany had abandoned its bomb research in 1942. Although the original rationale for the bomb project—as a deterrent to a German bomb—no longer applied, only one scientist, Polish-born Joseph Rotblat, left the Manhattan Project at that point. The rest, fascinated by the research and believing they could speed the end of the war, pushed even harder to finish what they had started.
If Wallace’s ouster from the ticket represented the first major setback to hopes for a peaceful postwar world, fate would soon deliver a second devastating blow. On April 12, 1945, with German surrender imminent, the United States’ beloved wartime leader—President Franklin Delano Roosevelt—passed away after more than twelve years in office. The longest-serving president in U.S. history, he had seen the country through its hardest times: the Great Depression and World War II. The nation mourned and wondered about Roosevelt’s successor.
Events unfolded at a dizzying pace over the next four months, forcing the new president to make some of the most momentous decisions in the nation’s history. After an emergency cabinet meeting on April 12, Secretary of War Henry Stimson finally let Truman in on the bomb secret. Truman received a fuller briefing the following day from Byrnes, his old Senate mentor, whom Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal had flown up from South Carolina in his private plane. A former Supreme Court Justice, Byrnes had expected the vice presidential nomination in 1944, but party leaders considered his staunch segregationist views too great a liability. At that meeting, Byrnes told Truman that the United States was building an explosive “great enough to destroy the whole world.”26
Polish-born physicist Joseph Rotblat was the only scientist to leave the Manhattan Project when it was discovered in late 1944 that Germany had abandoned atomic bomb research in 1942. Although the original rationale for the bomb—as a deterrent against a German bomb—no longer applied, other scientists, fascinated by the research and believing they could speed the end of the war, pushed even harder to finish what they had started.
Truman received a fuller briefing on the atom bomb on April 25 from Stimson and Groves. They explained that they expected, within four months, to have “completed the most terrible weapon ever known in human history, one bomb of which could destroy a whole city.” Soon other nations would develop their own bombs. “The world in its present state of moral advancement compared with its technical development would be eventually at the mercy of such a weapon. In other words, modern civilization might be completely destroyed.”27 They warned that the fate of humanity would depend upon if and how such bombs were used and what was subsequently done to control them. In an account of the meeting published posthumously by his daughter, Truman wrote, “Stimson said gravely that he didn’t know whether we could or should use the bomb, because he was afraid that it was so powerful that it could end up destroying the whole world. I felt the same fear.”28
Caught between the advancing Soviet troops, who had entered Berlin from the east, and the Allied forces approaching from the west, Germany surrendered on May 7. That meant that the Soviet Union, as agreed at Yalta, would enter the Pacific war around August 7, almost three months before the November 1 start date for the invasion of Japan.
Japanese soldiers fought fiercely and valiantly. Few ever surrendered. They believed that death on the battlefield would bring the highest honor: eternal repose at Yasakuni Shrine. At Tarawa, of 2,500 Japanese defenders, only 8 were taken alive. In just five weeks of combat at Iwo Jima, 6,281 U.S. sailors and marines were killed and almost 19,000 wounded. At Okinawa, the biggest battle of the Pacific War, 13,000 Americans were killed or missing and 36,000 wounded. As many as 70,000 Japanese soldiers and more than 100,000 Okinawan civilians died, many of them taking their own lives.29 Americans were also shocked to watch wave after wave of kamikaze pilots suicidally crash their planes in a last-ditch effort to sink or damage U.S. ships.
As prospects worsened in 1945, some Japanese leaders began calling loudly for “100 million deaths with honor,” preferring that the nation fight to the death rather than surrender. But U.S. top leaders, including Marshall and Stimson, dismissed such rantings, remaining convinced that when defeated, Japan would surrender. The “Proposed Program for Japan” that Stimson presented to Truman in early July stated that despite Japan’s capacity for “fanatical resistance to repel an invasion,” he believed that “Japan is susceptible to reason in such a crisis to a much greater extent than is indicated by our curr
ent press and other current comment. Japan is not a nation composed wholly of mad fanatics of an entirely different mentality from ours.”30
The debate over just how costly an invasion would have been has raged for decades. The Joint Staff Planners prepared a paper for the Joint Chiefs’ June 18 meeting with the president, estimating 193,500 dead and wounded in taking Japan. Some estimates were higher, some lower. Truman initially said that thousands would have died but then steadily raised the number. He later claimed that Marshall had told him that a half-million men could be lost in an invasion. But the basis for this assertion has never been found. Marshall’s own estimates were much lower as were those of General MacArthur, who was in charge of planning for the invasion.
But as the war dragged on month after bloody month, the prospects for an invasion dimmed. By the end of 1944, the Japanese navy was decimated, having lost 7 of 12 battleships, 19 of 25 aircraft carriers, 103 of 160 submarines, 31 of 47 cruisers, and 118 of 158 destroyers. The air force was also badly weakened. With the rail system in tatters, food supplies shrank and public morale plummeted. Some Japanese leaders feared a popular uprising. Prince Fumimaro Konoe, who had served three times as prime minister between 1937 and 1941, sent a memo to Emperor Hirohito in February 1945: “I regret to say that Japan’s defeat is inevitable.” He warned, “What we must worry about is a Communist revolution that might accompany defeat.”31 Since at least the previous August, in the aftermath of the U.S. victory at Saipan, Japan had quietly commenced studies on how to end the war. Japanese desperation was growing by the day, as was apparent to publishing magnate Henry Luce, who visited the Pacific for a firsthand look in spring 1945. He wrote, “A few months before Hiroshima, I was with Admiral Halsey’s Navy as it assaulted the coast of Japan. Two things seemed clear to me—as they did to many of the top fighting men I talked to: first, that Japan was beaten; second, that the Japanese knew it and were every day showing signs of increasing willingness to quit.”32 Even Richard Frank, whose book Downfall presents the most authoritative defense of the atomic bombings, observed, “It is reasonable to assume that even without atomic bombs, the destruction of the rail-transportation system, coupled to the cumulative effects of the blockade-and-bombardment strategy, would have posed a severe threat to internal order and subsequently thus impelled the Emperor to seek to end the war.”33
