by A. J. Baime
Many of Truman’s friends on Capitol Hill were sure he would bring conservatism to a Democratic presidency, as so many had hoped for so long. Others were convinced he would maintain the path of FDR and embrace Roosevelt’s liberal New Deal policies.
“Whither Harry S. Truman?” asked the columnist Edward T. Folliard in the Washington Post, days after the war ended. “Is he going to the left, the right, or down the middle of the road?”
Politically, Truman had to know: This was not going to go well for him. Roosevelt had held the White House for over 12 years, and there is a natural tendency in democratic societies for periodic change. Churchill was unceremoniously swept from power in London in July 1945. In all of America’s 169-year history, only twice before had a vice president been elected following a two-term presidency. And in those years, the political environment was hardly as fraught as it was now, in the aftermath of World War II and at the dawn of the atomic age. “The President’s task was reminiscent of that in the first chapter of Genesis,” noted Undersecretary of State Dean Acheson, “to help the free world emerge from chaos without blowing the whole world apart in the process.”
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Even before the war ended, Truman had begun to confidentially lay out a political philosophy of his own, what he called “the foundation of my administration.”
In July 1945—the month before the atomic bombings of Japan—he had ventured to the Potsdam Conference in Allied-occupied Germany for a series of talks with Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin. It had been a grueling trip. When the conference was over, Truman flew in one of FDR’s most revered speechwriters, Judge Samuel Rosenman, so the two could begin to sketch out Truman’s postwar plans in language Americans could understand, while the men traveled back to the United States together aboard the navy cruiser USS Augusta.
FDR had nicknamed Rosenman “Sammy the Rose.” The judge had helped fine-tune FDR’s public voice over the years. (According to some, it had been Rosenman who had coined the term “New Deal.”) Now Truman wanted Rosenman to do the same for him.
One evening in the president’s cabin aboard the Augusta, as the two men huddled alone, Truman told Rosenman, “Sam, one of the things I want to do after we get home . . . is to get busy on my domestic program. I would like to submit most of it at the same time instead of on a piecemeal basis. Ordinarily that would be done in a State of the Union message next January, but I cannot wait that long.”
“Fine,” Rosenman said. “What in general are the things you would like to say?”
The judge leaned his bulky frame forward to reach for a pad and pencil, and he began taking notes while Truman spoke off the cuff on a variety of issues. There in the president’s cabin, with the dull drone of the Augusta’s engines in the background, the Truman presidency began to take shape.
Rosenman’s eyes widened as he outlined Truman’s thoughts. “You know, Mr. President,” he said, “this is the most exciting and pleasant surprise I have had in a long time.”
“How is that?”
“Well,” the judge said, “I suppose I have been listening too much to rumors about what you are going to do—rumors which come from some of your conservative friends . . . They say you are going to be quite a shock to those who followed Roosevelt—that the New Deal is as good as dead—that we are all going back to ‘normalcy’ and that a good part of the so-called ‘Roosevelt nonsense’ is now over. In other words, that the conservative wing of the [Democratic] party has now taken charge.”
Roosevelt had launched hugely controversial, expensive, and interventionist policies to steer America out of the Great Depression and through the war. For the most part, they had worked, but in the process they had inspired bitterness and rivalry—between the White House and Congress, and between the Right and the Left. Now Truman was planning to embrace similar left-wing policies in the postwar world. This was a brave move, Rosenman said, and a dangerous one.
“It is one thing to vote for this kind of a program when you are following the head of your party,” the judge said. “It is quite another to be the head of a party and recommend and fight for it.”
Back in the White House, upon Truman’s return from Potsdam, the West Wing resumed its usual pace of frenetic activity. During late nights and early mornings, bookending the long list of appointments that filled the president’s daily calendar, Truman continued to craft a message to Congress. He consulted advisers and all the major officers of the executive branch, and created in the process a buzz that could be felt throughout the halls of the Capitol. He wanted his message to land with all the weight of “a combination of a first inaugural and a first State of the Union message,” as he put it.
On September 6, three weeks after he announced the surrender of Japan, Truman held his regular weekly press conference at 4 p.m. in the Oval Office, where he evaded questions on everything from the proposed Saint Lawrence waterway to his pick for an open seat on the Supreme Court. Afterward, when the door to the Oval Office closed and he was once again alone, he released his domestic plan, titled the “Special Message to Congress Presenting a 21-Point Program for the Reconversion Period,” via his press secretary, Charlie Ross. It was the longest message to Congress since Theodore Roosevelt’s administration, measuring sixteen thousand words.
“The Congress reconvenes at a time of great emergency,” the message read. “It is an emergency about which, however, we need have no undue fear if we exercise the same energy, foresight, and wisdom as we did in carrying the war and winning this victory.”
Truman asked Congress to create new laws to expand Social Security and unemployment and veterans’ benefits. He asked Congress to raise the minimum wage, currently forty cents per hour. He asked for programs to outlaw racial and religious discrimination in hiring, and for federal aid to farmers and small businesses. He wanted government spending on housing, funding for the conservation of natural resources, and financing of public works—highways, federal buildings, three thousand new airports, and a massive program of scientific research.
“The development of atomic energy is a clear-cut indication of what can be accomplished by our universities, industry, and Government working together,” Truman’s message read. “Vast scientific fields remain to be conquered in the same way.”
Truman asked Congress to maintain a large military “in a world grown acutely sensitive to power,” despite the cost. He even asked Congress to pass a law raising the salaries of its own members. The message ended with the following words:
“The Congress has played its full part in shaping the domestic and foreign policies which have . . . started us on the road to lasting peace. The Congress, I know, will continue to play its patriotic part in the difficult years ahead. We face the future together with confidence—that the job, the full job, can and will be done. Harry S. Truman.”
On September 7, Americans awoke to the realization that their new president was a full-on New Deal Democrat. As the United States’ chief executive, he would safeguard the welfare of the common man. As he once had said, “The President has to look out for the interests of the 150 million people who can’t afford lobbyists in Washington.”
Truman’s 21-Point Program ignited a political firestorm. It was so vast, there was something in it to offend just about everyone, no matter their political sensibility. Most of all, Washington powerbrokers were shocked at the amount of federal spending recommended by the president. “Not even President Roosevelt asked for so much at one sitting,” argued the House minority leader, Republican Joe Martin of Massachusetts. The Washington Post called Truman’s domestic program “the most far-reaching collection of economic policies ever promulgated by a public authority in the United States in peacetime.”
For years under Roosevelt, the political climate in Washington had been growing more hostile, the partisan tension mounting. By 1945, a Democrat had occupied the White House for nearly thirteen years. With the Depression subsided, the war over, and a new president deemed by many to be weak and
inexperienced, Republicans believed that the nation was ripe for a return to conservatism. Truman’s 21-Point Program rallied the cause. Senator Charles Halleck of Indiana summed up Republican reaction, the day after Truman released his domestic agenda.
“This begins the campaign of 1946,” Halleck said, referring to the upcoming midterm election. “The gloves would be off from here on out.”
2
“The Buck Stops Here!”
ON THE MORNING OF SEPTEMBER 21—five weeks after Truman’s announcement of Japan’s surrender—the president arrived in the West Wing in a foul mood. The offices teemed with employees who, like their boss, were fairly new on the job. Here was the handsome thirty-seven-year-old Irish American Matthew Connelly manning the Oval Office door as the president’s appointments secretary. Here was the president’s secretary Roberta Barrows, with two incessantly jingling telephones on her desk, and press secretary Charlie Ross trailing an ever-present cloud of tobacco smoke.
The pressure of the job was getting to Truman. In his morning staff meeting, he erupted in anger. “[Truman] said . . . he was liable to come in some morning with a headful of decisions and tell them all to ‘go to hell,’” assistant press secretary Eben Ayers wrote in his diary of this meeting. “He said he did not want ‘this job’—the presidency—but he’s got it and he’s going to do it.”
In the weeks after the president had announced Japan’s unconditional surrender, every typewriter in every newsroom in America, it seemed, was firing off bad news at machine-gun speed—with Truman’s name in the headline. At megacorporations like Ford Motor Company and Westinghouse Electric, strikes had crippled production. The United States was on the brink of the biggest labor crisis in its modern history. Prices of consumer goods were rapidly rising, and Congress had ignored the president’s anti-inflation policy, which Truman had called “a declaration of war against this new enemy of the United States.”
Rising unemployment.
An acute shortage of meat in grocery stores.
A housing crisis. In Chicago alone, it was reported, one hundred thousand military veterans were homeless, living on the streets.
The nation’s economy was in the grips of unprecedented change. During the war, the entire country—government, free enterprise, military—had joined in what Roosevelt termed “the Arsenal of Democracy,” united in the goal of defeating the Axis powers. It could be expected that a return to normalcy would be rocky, but the government now found itself in gridlock, the president at the intersection of conflicting advice. “Everybody wants something at the expense of everybody else,” he wrote his mother and sister, “and nobody thinks much of the other fellow.”
All the while, the foreign policy of the United States was being challenged as never before. The Soviets were aggressively expanding power and control across Eastern Europe, shamelessly flouting agreements they had made at the Yalta and Potsdam conferences. All over the globe, the war’s destruction created power vacuums, and the United States and the USSR had become rivals in the effort to fill them—with the American brand of freedom and democracy or the Soviet brand of totalitarianism. Many in Washington were already predicting military conflict. One of the State Department’s chief foreign policy experts, Joseph Grew, had come to the conclusion that “a future war with Soviet Russia is as certain as anything in this world.”
What position was the Truman administration going to take?
At 2 p.m. on September 21, hours after Truman blew up at his morning staff meeting, he met with his cabinet to discuss the most explosive issue confronting his administration. The proposed agenda: “The atomic bomb, and the peacetime development of atomic energy.” What was to be done with this revolutionary new science? The US State Department used the term balance of power to describe a recipe for peace between the two emerging superpowers. And yet nothing tipped the balance more than the bomb. The United States had it; the Soviet Union did not. The science behind the weapon was still a closely held secret, but it was only a matter of time before the Soviets developed their own atomic technology.
In the Cabinet Room, just down the hall from the Oval Office, Truman sat in the president’s customary chair, with windows behind him offering a view of the White House Rose Garden. He turned first to his secretary of war, Henry Stimson. It was Stimson’s seventy-eighth birthday and a bittersweet day. He was the only Republican in Truman’s cabinet, and a holdover from FDR’s administration. His career in high-level federal government went back thirty-five years (he had been secretary of war under William H. Taft), and it was his final day of work before retirement. Stimson had headed up the Manhattan Project in the executive branch since the early days of its existence. Now he was called upon to recommend policy for atomic energy going forward.
Stimson had come to a controversial conclusion: He wanted the United States to partner with the Soviets, to share the secret of atomic energy—now, before it was too late. “We do not have a secret to give away,” Stimson said, according to the meeting minutes. “The secret will give itself away. The problem is how to treat the secret with respect to the safety of the world.” The bomb had made the Soviets deeply suspicious of America’s aims. “If we fail to approach them now,” Stimson argued in a separate memo to Truman dated days earlier, “and merely continue to negotiate with them, having this weapon rather ostentatiously on our hip, their suspicions and their distrust of our purposes and motives will increase.”
Grave risk accompanied either option—to include the Soviets in US nuclear research, or to exclude them. But Stimson believed that sharing the technology involved less risk. The difference meant “some chance” of “saving civilization not for five or twenty years, but forever.”
The bombs used on Japan—code-named Fat Man and Little Boy—shocked the world with their destructive capacity, Stimson said, but the bombs soon to be born would be infinitely more powerful. Scientists were concerned, Stimson explained, that future bombs would have the potential to ignite the earth’s atmosphere and “put an end to the world.”
Truman ruminated. He alone had ordered the atomic bombings of Japan; now, six weeks after the annihilation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the fallout continued to poison relations with the Soviets. Truman’s advisers were sharply divided. Attorney General Tom Clark believed the bomb was the best leverage the Americans had in terms of negotiating with the Soviets. Clark thought the United States “should continue to carry a big stick,” according to the meeting minutes.
Another participant at the table—Henry Wallace of Iowa, the secretary of commerce—was dubious, and it was Wallace who would soon voice the loudest dissent. Wallace agreed with Stimson. The Soviets would soon have the bomb. “Science,” the commerce secretary said, “cannot be restrained.” Why not share the secret now, and make the Soviets partners in the quest for future peace?
Wallace’s words carried significant weight. The fifty-six-year-old former vice president was a hero among liberal Democrats. In the Cabinet Room, he was unnerved. Truman was not inclined to share nuclear secrets with the Soviets. For the time being, Wallace would keep his thoughts to himself. He believed Truman and his closest advisers were on the wrong path. As he wrote in his diary, “Their attitude will make for war eventually.”
* * *
“The pressure here is becoming so great I hardly get my meals in,” Truman wrote his mother on October 13, 1945. Three weeks after the bomb debate, he faced increasing hostility in Washington and a disintegrating approval rating. A new sign appeared on his desk—painted glass on a walnut base, measuring thirteen inches long and two and a half inches tall. On the side facing the president, it said, I’M FROM MISSOURI. On the side facing whomever walked into the Oval Office, it said, THE BUCK STOPS HERE!
Truman doubled down on increasingly controversial policies. He knew his ideas would spark fury from the Republicans and even conservative Democrats, but he felt that he was right. On October 23, he made what the popular columnist Roscoe Drummond called at the time his “bol
dest, most vigorous, most uncompromising speech” yet to demand that Congress enact a “Universal Military Training” plan, in which every American male between age eighteen and twenty-two would serve the nation for a year in some capacity. It was the only way, he declared, “to maintain the power with which to assist other peace-loving nations to enforce its authority.”
America was sick of war and tired of service; millions of voters were repulsed by the idea. It was all but ignored by Congress.
On November 19, 1945, Truman called on Congress to pass a national compulsory health insurance program for all Americans “who work for a living,” regardless of their ability to pay for health care. “Under the plan I suggest,” Truman argued, “our people would continue to get medical and hospital services just as they do now—on the basis of their own voluntary decisions and choices. Our doctors and hospitals would continue to deal with disease with the same professional freedom as now. There would, however, be this all-important difference: whether or not patients get the services they need would not depend on how much they can afford to pay at the time.”
Republicans pounced. Truman’s plan was “socialized medicine,” said Senator Robert Taft of Ohio—“Mr. Republican.” The American Medical Association opposed the plan. So too did many Democrats. The initiative went nowhere.
Truman began to lose the confidence of those advisers he depended on most. In Moscow, Secretary of State James Byrnes was conducting meetings with the Soviets, and he released to news agencies a communiqué on the proceedings without first informing the president. Truman learned of the outcome of the negotiations by reading the newspaper. He was livid.
