II

The first test was his address to Congress the afternoon of Monday, April 16, and he passed with flying colors. Indeed, for days, for weeks, he seemed to do nearly everything right. Congress, the press, the public liked what they saw and heard—even a little mix-up at the start of the speech, when Truman began before he was supposed to.

He came down the aisle to a standing ovation, went directly to the rostrum, opened a large black looseleaf notebook, and started in, addressing not just the packed chamber but an enormous radio audience. Speaker Rayburn leaned forward. “Just a minute, Harry, let me introduce you,” he interrupted, his voice coming over clearly on the battery of microphones. In a phone call only that morning, Rayburn had told him, “Mr. President, you are not ‘Harry’ to me any more.” But in his own excitement Rayburn had forgotten and the moment—amusing, poignant—would be recalled for years.

The speech lasted just fifteen minutes. Speaking slowly and carefully, Truman was interrupted by applause again and again, seventeen times before he finished.

“With great humility,” he said, “I call upon all Americans to help me keep our nation united in defense of those ideals which have been so eloquently proclaimed by Franklin Roosevelt.

“I want in turn to assure my fellow Americans and all those who love peace and liberty throughout the world that I will support and defend those ideals with all my strength and all my heart. That is my duty and I shall not shirk it.”

People everywhere felt relief, even hope, as they listened. He seemed a good man, so straightforward, so determined to do his job. The voice and accent would take some getting used to—he pronounced “United States” as “U-nited States,” said “nation” almost as though it rhymed with “session,” at times “I” came close to “Ah”—but he sounded as though he meant every word.

He would prosecute the war without letup, Truman said, work for a lasting peace, work to improve the lot of the common people.

All of us are praying for a speedy victory. Every day peace is delayed costs a terrible toll. The armies of liberation are bringing to an end Hitler’s ghastly threat to dominate the world. Tokyo rocks under the weight of our bombs…. I want the entire world to know that this direction must and will remain—unchanged and unhampered!

“Our demand has been, and it remains—Unconditional Surrender,” he declared, his voice rising suddenly in pitch on the last two words, which brought a storm of applause.

He spoke of the necessity for a “strong and lasting” United Nations organization. Isolationism was a thing of the past. There could be no more safety behind geographical barriers, not ever again.

“The responsibility of a great state is to serve and not to dominate the world.”

The conservative columnist David Lawrence, watching from the press gallery, wrote that between the man on the rostrum and the audience before him there was a “bond of friendship” such as few presidents had ever experienced.

Much of the speech had been written on the train returning from Hyde Park. Jimmy Byrnes and Sam Rosenman, author of innumerable Roosevelt speeches, had played a large part. But the conclusion, delivered to a hushed chamber, was entirely Truman’s own. His face lifted, his hands raised, in a voice of solemn petition, he said:

At this moment I have in my heart a prayer. As I have assumed my duties, I humbly pray Almighty God, in the words of King Solomon: “Give therefore Thy servant an understanding heart to judge Thy people, that I may discern between good and bad: for who is able to judge this Thy so great a people?” I ask only to be a good and faithful servant of my Lord and my people.

The old struggle to determine good from evil—it had been with him for so very long. “[I am] just a common everyday man whose instincts are to be ornery, who’s anxious to be right,” he had once told Bess Wallace in a love letter from the farm.

The applause, sudden and spontaneous, was such as few had ever heard in the chamber. Senators, members of Congress, old friends wanted him to succeed in a way they had not felt before. And because he wasn’t Roosevelt, he would need all the help he could get. Because he wasn’t Roosevelt, it was easier to feel a common bond. The morning after he became President, Republicans in the Senate had filed into their big conference room No. 335 and after passing a resolution of regret over Roosevelt’s death, talked of Harry Truman’s strengths and shortcomings, and decided it was no time to rock the boat. “He’s one of us,” reporters were told afterward. “He’s a grand fellow, he knows us, thinks like us.” Even those inclined to fight him felt obliged to help him get his feet on the ground. “We know how we’d feel thrust into such a job, and we know Harry Truman would be one of the first to help us.”

Messages of approval poured into the White House. “I was tired of Eastern accents,” wrote a woman from Indiana. Midwestern native good sense meant good things for the future, said a letter from Illinois. (“His diction comes out of the wide open spaces and will find an echo out of these same wide-open spaces,” the Washington Post had said.) “Your modesty, your humility, your earnestness, have captivated the hearts of your American people,” a woman in Georgia assured him. “Friend Harry,” another letter began. There was heartfelt sympathy for his “tremendous burden,” his “terrible responsibility.” He was urged to trust in God, keep his health, get enough sleep, eat right. Labor unions, groups of company employees, veterans organizations, local chapters of the Communist Party, fraternal orders, and church groups pledged their cooperation. One correspondent from Port Jervis, New York, said that while he had “never known a man named Harry who really amounted to a damn,” he would lend his support anyway.

From the Time and Life Building in New York, publisher Henry Luce informed Truman that at a meeting of his business friends he had found unanimous confidence in “your ability to discharge successfully the great duties of your office in your own way.” In Topeka, a doctor who was delivering a baby during the broadcast of the speech stopped to shake hands with the newborn citizen—to congratulate him for making his entrance at so auspicious a moment in history. “May I say,” wrote the doctor to Truman, “that in our locality I have never seen such unity of purpose as is manifest toward you and toward the administration you are beginning.” And he was a Republican, the doctor said.

Every new President had his “honeymoon” with Congress and the country, of course, but this, the feeling that Truman was “one of us,” was something more. The day of the speech the Trumans moved from their apartment to Blair House, across Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House, to stay temporarily until Mrs. Roosevelt moved out. For several days, his Secret Service convoy keeping step, Truman walked briskly across the street to work at about eight o’clock every morning. Once a taxi slowed, the driver put his head out the window and called, “Good luck, Harry,” as if speaking for the whole country.

“Well, I have had the most momentous, and the most trying time anyone could possibly have,” his mother and sister in Grandview read in a letter written from Blair House the night of April 16.

This afternoon we moved to this house, diagonally across the street (Penn. Ave.) from the White House, until the Roosevelts have had time to move out of the White House. We tried staying at the apartment, but it wouldn’t work. I can’t move without at least ten Secret Service men and twenty policemen. People who lived in our apartment couldn’t get in and out without a pass. So—we moved out with suitcases. Our furniture is still there and will be for some time…. But I’ve paid the rent for this month and will pay for another month if they don’t get the old White House redecorated by that time.

My greatest trial was today when I addressed the Congress. It seemed to go over all right, from the ovation I received. Things have gone so well I’m almost as scared as I was when Mrs. R. told me what had happened. Maybe it will come out all right.

That same day the Russians had begun their final drive on Berlin, Marshal Georgi Zhukov concentrating twenty thousand guns to clear a path.

The first press conference, the next morning, April 17, was the largest that had ever been held in the White House, with more than three hundred reporters packed shoulder to shoulder in the President’s office, those in front pressed against his desk. “The new President made an excellent impression. He stood behind his desk and greeted the correspondents smilingly. He answered their questions directly and avoided none of the queries put to him,” recorded another of the Roosevelt staff, a press aide named Eben Ayers.

Truman began with a reading of the same wartime ground rules as established by Roosevelt. All off-the-record comments were to be kept in confidence. Background material must remain that only and not be attributed to the President, who was to be quoted directly only when he gave his express permission. With so much to do, Truman said, he expected to be able to hold only one press conference a week.

Would he go personally to the San Francisco Conference? No. Had he taken any steps to meet with Churchill and Stalin? Not as yet. What about David Lilienthal, whose term as head of TVA was about to expire? He was not ready to discuss appointments. How did he stand on race relations? His record in the Senate spoke for itself.

“Do you expect to see Mr. Molotov before he goes to San Francisco?”

“Yes. He is going to stop and pay his respects to the President of the United States. He should.”

Admiral Leahy, who had witnessed so many Roosevelt press conferences, was delighted with the President’s “direct” performance. Truman had already asked Leahy to stay on as Chief of Staff, with the understanding that he, Leahy, would always speak his mind. The old sailor, now past seventy, was also known for his “direct” performance.

The applause at the end of the session was unprecedented. To reporters long accustomed to Roosevelt, who had made every press conference a kind of circuitous game and charm show, the change was startling and to most, extremely welcome. Privately, Truman felt he had lived five lifetimes in five days.

Three days later, when he called them in again to say his old boyhood friend Charlie Ross was to be the new press secretary, replacing Steve Early, who had retired after twelve years in the White House, the announcement received unqualified approval. Ross had first come to the capital as a young reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 1918, and in 1931 won a Pulitzer Prize for a study on the effects of the Depression. He was widely liked and respected. Steve Early had been hard-boiled. Many reporters were afraid of him. Ross was more professorial and patient, gentle-mannered, soft-spoken. “There is no more beloved or more highly regarded newspaperman in this city than Charlie Ross,” said the Washington Post.

Hiring Ross had been Bess’s idea. Truman had invited him to Blair House, where they talked for two consecutive evenings before Ross agreed. He was nearly sixty and understood perfectly how demanding the job would be. It also meant a severe cut in salary, from $35,000 a year at thePost-Dispatch to $10,000. “But Charlie,” Truman told him, “you aren’t the kind of man who can say ’no’ to the President of the United States.” Later they had put through a call to Independence to their old teacher, Tillie Brown, to tell her the news.

The reporters wanted to be sure they had her name right.

“Miss Tillie Brown,” Truman said. “Matilda Brown. We always called her Tillie…”

Was that in grade school?

“High school. She taught Charlie and me English.”

(In her own interview with reporters, Tillie Brown would remember Charlie as a “naturally smart boy,” while Harry was “a bright boy who had to dig.”)

On a first tour of the West Wing offices, Truman was annoyed to find that the half-dozen press photographers who covered the White House were allowed none of the comforts of the press room, but confined to a cramped, windowless space of their own. This was how it had always been, he was told. It was not the way it would be any longer, he said. Photographers were to have the same privileges as reporters, beginning immediately. “He made first-class citizens of us,” remembered photographer George Tames of The New York Times, whose first presidential assignment, the year before, had been to photograph Roosevelt and Truman at lunch under the Jackson magnolia.

Reporters found they now had to be on duty at 8:00 in the morning, rather than 10:00 or 10:30 when Roosevelt’s day had begun. They complained jokingly to Truman of having to get up in the middle of the night to be on time for work. “Stick with me and I’ll make men of you yet,” he assured them with a grin.

Among staff holdovers attitudes were changing appreciably, almost by the day, the more they saw of him. He was friendly, considerate, interested in them individually. His physical energy seemed phenomenal and the most startling difference of all from what had been. Lieutenant George M. Elsey, a young Naval Intelligence officer assigned to the top-secret Map Room, remembered being astonished by the simple realization that here was a President who walked, and quickly. “He was alert, sharp…he looked good, very vigorous, very strong,” Elsey recalled. The Secret Service, long accustomed to a President who could move only when they moved him, found themselves suddenly on the go, with a man who could pick up and leave for lunch on the Hill, or anything else he wished, at any moment. With his braces and wheelchair, Roosevelt had been virtually their prisoner.

“See, with President Roosevelt, he was a man you had under control,” remembered Floyd M. Boring of the White House Secret Service detail. “He couldn’t move without you…. Now, here’s a guy, you had to move when he moved. And he moved fast! He was a whiz, just like that! He’d go—and went! And you had to go with him. So, we had to revise our thinking, and the whole strategy of the place changed because of his ability to be in movement and motion.”

One day at noon Truman decided to make an impromptu visit to the Hamilton National Bank a few blocks from the White House at 14th and G. He simply put on his hat and went out the door, with the result that he created a half-hour traffic jam. The lesson learned was that the bank would have to come to the President, not the President to the bank.

Jonathan Daniels, who at first had considered Truman “tragically inadequate,” began to see him in new light. Here, Daniels decided, was no ordinary man. “The cliché of the ordinary American in the White House was a snob phrase,” Daniels would write, “invented by those who, after Roosevelt’s death, hoped to minimize the Presidency.” Further, Truman was not poorly prepared for the presidency, as commonly said. Because he knew so much of American life, because he had experienced himself so many of the “vicissitudes of all the people,” he was really exceptionally well prepared. (In time to come the historian Samuel Eliot Morison would take the same view, calling Truman as well prepared for the presidency as any of his immediate predecessors.) It was Truman’s “too evident modesty” that was so misleading, Daniels decided. Asked by the President to stay on a while longer, he gladly agreed.

Sam Rosenman, a dedicated Roosevelt adviser, press aide Eben Ayers, David Niles, who had handled minority issues and patronage for Roosevelt, and Bill Hassett, Roosevelt’s correspondence secretary, had all, like Daniels, talked of quitting at first chance. Now, when asked to stay by Truman, they too accepted.

Bill Hassett, who had been with Roosevelt at the time of his death at Warm Springs, wrote in his diary on Monday, April 16:

To the White House this morning at the usual time, but with a strange feeling—impossible to realize that F.D.R’s day was done and another had taken over…. The President sent for me. He was very gracious; invited me to remain on the job; frank and forthright in manner. Said that unexpectedly he had been called upon to shoulder the greatest responsibilities, in the discharge of which he would need all the help and cooperation he could get and added, “I need you too.” His attitude toward his duties and obligations magnificent.

None of the staff, however, thought much of the people Truman was installing. “Missourians are most in evidence,” wrote Ayers privately, “and there is a feeling of an attempt by the ‘gang’ to move in.” After a visit to the White House, the journalist Joseph Alsop wrote to his cousin, Eleanor Roosevelt, in dismay. In Franklin’s time, it had been a great seat of world power. Now the place was like “the lounge of the Lion’s Club of Independence, Missouri, where one is conscious chiefly of the odor of ten-cent cigars and the easy laughter evoked by the new smoking room story.”

Eddie McKim, clearly out of his depth, made much of his own importance and on occasion drank too much. Jonathan Daniels thought McKim was “weird.” Harry Vaughan, loud and jolly, seemed to serve no purpose beyond comic relief. A strange figure named Johnny Maragon, a former Kansas City bootblack who was in and out of Vaughan’s office, claiming to be the new head of White House transportation, looked to Eben Ayers exactly like a Prohibition gangster. Hugh Fulton, meantime, bragged of his closeness to the President and the lead part he would be playing in policy matters as the President’s speechwriter, once things settled down.

“We were all a strange lot to them and vice versa,” remembered Sam Rosenman. “I had never heard of any of them before they moved in.”

Only two of Truman’s own people appear to have made a favorable impression—Matt Connelly, who would be the President’s appointments secretary, and Rose Conway from Kansas City, a shy, industrious “little bird of a woman” in her late forties who had joined Vice President Truman’s staff only weeks before and who would serve as the President’s secretary.

But McKim would soon be gone. With great regret Truman told him it would be best if he went home to Omaha. (“Well, he was a sergeant in my battery once, I busted him and I can bust him again,” Matt Connelly would remember Truman saying.) Nor was Hugh Fulton to have a place. As Truman had rid himself of the devoted Vic Messall after his first term in the Senate, so he now sent Fulton packing. Messall’s downfall appears to have been some form of financial scheming that Truman found unacceptable. Fulton, it appears, was guilty primarily of sounding his own horn. To everyone’s surprise, the long-serving, unquestionably astute Fulton was offered no official post, nothing whatever, and apparently because he had boasted too often and too conspicuously of his own importance, Truman, for all his reluctance ever to fire anyone, could not tolerate what he called “Potomac Fever,” which he described as a prevalent, ludicrous Washington disease characterized by a swelling of the head to abnormal proportions.

Harry Vaughan, who struck many as the most miscast figure of the lot, remained, as the President’s military aide. When Truman made him brigadier general, it seemed to many a bigger joke than the stories Vaughan told. Vaughan would become to the official family a figure not unlike Truman’s Uncle Harry, a big, voluble, easygoing pal, which gave Vaughan singular importance. Truman seemed to need him around and would tolerate no criticism of him. “I’m still with ya, Chief,” Vaughan would boom with a grin. Vaughan’s stories, contrary to what was said, were not filthy, but more of the barnyard kind. Truman liked earthy humor but never told stories that had to do with sex, nor did he care to hear them. Also contrary to the popular impression, Vaughan never took a drink. Nobody disliked him, though some worried he could mean trouble down the line. “The fact is,” wrote Ayers, “Vaughan, while likeable, seems to lack balance and tact and a sense of proportion.”

In later years, it would be said by some who knew Truman well that for him Harry Vaughan was the fool in the Shakespearean sense, the fool who spoke wisdom, who could cut through the obfuscation and insincerity of so much that a President had to listen to day in, day out, who was incapable of posturing or pretense, and whose occasional uncouth moments, the very lack of “balance and tact and a sense of proportion” that upset people like Eben Ayers, provided not only laughter for Truman but a way of bringing everyone else back down to earth a little.

Truman liked a variety of people around him. He wanted contrasts in style and outlook. It was essential, he thought. The country, after all, was composed of all kinds and he understood how many Harry Vaughans there were. Importantly, Truman also knew from experience how extremely loyal Vaughan was, and for now he needed all the loyalty possible.

When Vaughan brought him some phone taps made by the FBI—a common practice under Roosevelt—and asked if he was interested, Truman glanced at a few pages that concerned the activities of the wife of a White House aide and said he had no time for such foolishness. “Tell them I don’t authorize any such thing,” he said.

Truman had little use for the FBI and its director, J. Edgar Hoover, in contrast to Franklin Roosevelt, who had liked the way Hoover got results and greatly enjoyed the spicy secrets Hoover passed on to him about the private lives of important people. It had been Roosevelt, in 1936, who had quietly ordered Hoover to begin gathering political information, a policy Truman strongly disliked. Truman considered Hoover and the FBI a direct threat to civil liberties, and he made no effort now, as Roosevelt had, to ingratiate himself with Hoover—as Hoover saw at once and found infuriating.

Hoover had chosen an FBI agent with a hometown, Truman connection, Morton Chiles, Jr., one of the big Chiles family of Independence, to call at the White House as Hoover’s emissary—to explain to the President that if there was anything the FBI could do for him, he had only to say the word. But having courteously thanked the young man, Truman told him to inform Mr. Hoover that any time the President of the United States wished the services of the FBI, he would make his request through the Attorney General. From that point on, according to a later account by one of Hoover’s assistants, “Hoover’s hatred of Truman knew no bounds.”

“We want no Gestapo or Secret Police,” Truman would write in his diary after only a month as President. “FBI is tending in that direction. They are dabbling in sex-life scandals and plain blackmail…. This must stop….”

Very likely, Truman’s dislike of Hoover had something to do also with the part Hoover and his agents had played in bringing down Tom Pendergast, though he is not known ever to have said so.

Vaughan, nonetheless, appears to have thought well of Hoover, or at least to have liked dealing with Hoover behind the scenes. In time Vaughan would request an FBI phone tap on Thomas Corcoran, the celebrated “Tommy the Cork,” a former Roosevelt aide and Washington attorney, who was said to know everyone of importance in town and was thought to be working against Truman by leaking denigrating material to influential liberals and the press. Truman disliked and distrusted Corcoran, as Vaughan knew. The justification for the tap was White House security, but it was political surveillance pure and simple, and as much as Truman disapproved of such practices—and his contempt for Hoover notwithstanding—he gave his consent. The tap, as it turned out, produced nothing of consequence. Still, Hoover would continue to regard Vaughan as his friend at the White House.

In his first week as President, Truman signed a bill authorizing payment of $135.67 that for sixty-seven years the government had owed to one Charles Dougherty, Sr., for overtime work performed at the Brooklyn Navy Yard in the year 1879. He signed the Mexican Water Treaty that had been before the Senate his last day presiding there. He received his first foreign dignitary, the very elegant British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, who later telegraphed Churchill that the new President seemed “honest and friendly,” and a delegation of Republican senators who had seldom ever set foot in the Executive Office in the Roosevelt years. Robert A. Taft, who led the group, had not been to the White House since 1932. George Aiken of Vermont, glad to see so much all-around good feeling for Truman, was sure it wouldn’t last. “He’ll make enemies sooner or later,” Aiken told Allen Drury later. “If he doesn’t make enemies he just won’t be a very good President, that’s all.”

He saw Sam Rayburn, Bob Hannegan; Huseyin Ragip Baydur, the Turkish ambassador; Sergio Osmeña, president of the Philippines; T. V. Soong, foreign minister of China; Georges Bidault, the French ambassador; his own brother Vivian and Fred Canfil, who took turns sitting in his chair. He was photographed with three survivors of the Iwo Jima flag raising—Pfc. René Gagnon, Pharmacist Mate John H. Bradley, and Pfc. Ira Hayes—and with five-year-old Margaret Ann Forde, the child of a disabled serviceman, as she pinned a poppy on his lapel to launch a fund drive for the Veterans of Foreign Wars.

Between times, he decided to make Jimmy Byrnes his Secretary of State, and though the announcement would not be made until weeks later, word spread quickly. On Capitol Hill the feeling was he could have made no better choice. Byrnes knew the ropes in Washington as few men did; he understood the Senate and the workings of the White House from experience; he knew Churchill; he had met Stalin. Roosevelt had thought him the man best equipped to be President, and as Secretary of State, he, not Stettinius, would be next in line for the presidency, a consideration that weighed heavily in Truman’s decision.

Sam Rosenman warned Truman that he was making a mistake. Rosenman had become highly cynical about Byrnes, considered him a man primarily interested in himself. “I don’t think you know Jimmy Byrnes, Mr. President,” Rosenman said. “You think you do. In the bonhomie of the Senate, he’s one kind of fellow. But I think you will regret this and if I were you I wouldn’t do it.”

“It was a wonderful relief to preceding conferences with our former Chief to see the promptness and snappiness with which Truman took up each matter and decided it,” Secretary of War Henry Stimson wrote after a Cabinet meeting. “There were no long drawn out ‘soliloquies’ from the President, and the whole conference was thoroughly businesslike so that we actually covered two or three more matters than we had expected to discuss.”

Accompanied by Admiral Leahy, Truman went frequently to the Map Room, which had been established by Roosevelt on the ground floor of the main house as a means for him to follow the course of the war, an idea Roosevelt had borrowed from Churchill, who had a similar arrangement at 10 Downing Street. The low-ceilinged room was under tight security. There were blackout curtains at its single window and large maps covering the walls, these filled with colored pins indicating the latest disposition of ships and armies. To Truman, who had been trying to follow the war on his old World War I maps tacked to the wall of his Senate office, the place was a wonder. “Changes in the battle situation were immediately marked…as messages came in from commanders in the field,” he wrote. “Messages came constantly throughout the day and night so that our military picture was always accurate up to the moment.” Leahy was struck by how much world geography and military history Truman knew, and how quickly he absorbed new information. An assistant to the naval aide, Lieutenant William Rigdon, who had been on duty at the White House since 1942, said later of Truman that he never knew anyone to work so hard “to get on the inside of all that had taken place.”

He saw the Director of the Bureau of the Budget, Harold D. Smith, who said he would always be bringing him problems, and on Friday, April 20, he saw Rabbi Stephen Wise, chairman of the American Zionist Emergency Council, to discuss the question of resettlement for Jewish refugees in Palestine. Buchenwald, largest of the Nazi death camps, had been liberated. “I pray you believe what I have said about Buchenwald,” Edward R. Murrow had broadcast from the scene. However, a warning from the State Department that the problem of Palestine was “highly complex” had already crossed Truman’s desk. Rabbi Wise, whose appointment was at 11:45, was given fifteen minutes only. At noon Ambassador Harriman arrived.

W. Averell Harriman was the son of E. H. Harriman, the “Little Giant” of Wall Street who ran the Union Pacific Railroad and was said to have feared neither God nor J. P. Morgan. The son looked nothing like his father. He Was tall slim, handsome as the man in the Arrow Collar, as was said, though somewhat cheerless in manner. His low, cultured voice could also lapse into a monotone that some who didn’t know him mistakenly took as a sign of low vitality.

As heir to one of the great American fortunes, Harriman had grown up in luxury surpassing anything known by his friend Franklin Roosevelt. The Harriman estate on the Hudson comprised 20 square miles, included forty miles of bridlepaths and a stone château of one hundred rooms. Young Averell had been to Groton, them Yale, and after his father’s death was virtually handed the Union Pacific, eventually becoming its chairman of the board. He was an art collector—Cézanne, Picasso—and at one point, the country’s fourth-ranking polo player. But he was also a tenacious worker, who had built his own shipping empire and, at age forty, helped found the immensely successful and respected Wall street banking firm of Brown Brothers, Harriman. Until joining the New Deal, he might have been the model for the kind of man that Harry Truman, with his Jacksonian Populist faith, believed to be the root cause of most of the country’s troubles, and that Truman had earlier, in the heat of his railroad investigations, castigated unmercifully on the floor of the Senate. Harriman had what his number two man in Moscow, George Kennan, called “a keen appreciation of great personal power.”

As ambassador to Russia since October 1943, he was known to work eighteen to twenty hours a day. His long, detailed reports were famous at the State Department. In all he had spent more time with Stalin than had any American, or any other diplomat. At the moment he appeared extremely tired and worried. There was a slight tick, a sort of wink, in his right eye.

Truman had never met Harriman until now, nor had he ever really worked with anyone of such background. Harriman was another new experience, and the first of several men of comparable education and eastern polish—Charles Bohlen, John J. McCloy, James Forrestal, Dean Acheson, Robert A. Lovett—who were to play vital roles in Truman’s administration. Even the redoubtable Henry stimson was as yet to Truman a remote presence.

Accompanying Harriman now were Stettinius, Under Secretary of State Joseph C. Grew, and Charles (“Chip”) Bohlen, the department’s Russian expert. Stettinius made the introductions, but in the half hour following, he, Grew, and Bohlen said very little.

Truman asked for a rundown of the most urgent problems concerning the Soviet Union.

The Russians had two contradictory policies, Harriman began. They wanted to cooperate with the United States and Great Britain, and they wanted to extend control over their neighboring states in Eastern Europe. Unfortunately, some within Stalin’s circle mistook American generosity, and readiness to cooperate as a sign of “softness” and this had led Stalin to think he could do largely as he pleased. Nonetheless, it was Harriman’s view that the Soviets would risk no break with the United States. Their need of financial help after the war would be too great, and for this reason the United States could and should stand firm on vital issues.

Truman said he was not afraid of the Russians and intended to be firm. And fair, of course. “And anyway the Russians need us more than we need them.”

Harriman had wondered how much Truman knew of recent correspondence between Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin, as well as his own dispatches, and was pleased to find it was quite a lot. Truman had been reading steadily from the Map Room files, night after night, so much that he feared he might be seriously straining his eyes.

Concerns about the Soviet Union had prevailed all through the war but had taken a more serious cast by the winter of 1944–45, even before Yalta. “I can testify,” wrote one State Department official, “that there was no time when the danger from the Soviet Union was not a topic of anxious conversation among officers of the State Department; and by the winter of 1944–45, as the day of victory approached, it became the predominant theme in Washington.”

In March, Churchill warned that the Yalta agreements on Poland were breaking down, that Poland was losing its frontier, its freedom. Harriman reported that American prisoners of war who had been liberated by the Russians were being kept in Russian camps in “unbelievable” conditions. (At lunch one day with Anna Rosenberg, Roosevelt had banged his hand down on the arm of his wheelchair, saying, “Averell is right. We can’t do business with Stalin.”) In April an American-British effort to negotiate a surrender of the German armies in Italy brought a stinging cable from Stalin, who accused Roosevelt and Churchill of trying to bring off their own separate peace with the Nazis. Roosevelt, infuriated, had kept his response moderate:

It would be one of the great tragedies of history if at the very moment of the victory, now within our grasp, such distrust, such lack of faith should prejudice the entire undertaking after the colossal losses of life material and treasure.

Churchill cabled Roosevelt urging a “blunt stand” against the Russians, and Roosevelt responded, “We must not permit anybody to entertain a false impression that we are afraid.”

A secret OSS report for the President dated April 2, ten days prior to Roosevelt’s death—a report since made available to Truman—warned that once the war was over, the United States could be faced with a situation more perilous even than the rise of Japan and Nazi Germany:

Russia will emerge from the present conflict as by far the strongest nation in Europe and Asia—strong enough, if the United States should stand aside, to dominate Europe and at the same time to establish her hegemony over Asia. Russia’s natural resources and manpower are so great that within relatively few years she can be much more powerful than either Germany or Japan has ever been. In the easily foreseeable future Russia may well outrank even the United States in military potential.

Russia might revert to the predatory tradition of the czars and “pursue a policy of expansion aimed at bringing all Europe and perhaps Asia under her control,” the report warned. “If she should succeed in such a policy she would become a menace more formidable to the United States than any yet known….”

Harriman had become so exercised over the state of Soviet-American relations that he had wanted to fly home to Washington even before word came of Roosevelt’s death. On April 6, in a lengthy cable to the State Department, he had said the time had come when “we must…make it plain to the Soviet Government that they cannot expect our cooperation on terms laid down by them.”

“We now have ample proof that the Soviet government views all matters from the standpoint of their own selfish interest,” he declared in another strongly worded report.

The Soviet Union and the minority governments that the Soviets are forcing on the people of Eastern Europe have an entirely different objective. We must clearly recognize that the Soviet program is the establishment of totalitarianism, ending personal liberty and democracy as we know and respect it.

Roosevelt had undergone a profound change in outlook. Stalin was not a man of his word, he confided to Anne O’Hare McCormick of The New York Times before leaving for Warm Springs.

Still, he had refused to give up trying to work with the Russians. In a last message to Stalin sent the day of his death, Roosevelt said that in the future there must be no more mistrust between them, no more such “minor misunderstandings” as over the German surrender issue. (Before passing the message along to Stalin, Harriman had urged the deletion of the word “minor,” but Roosevelt refused.) To Churchill that same day he wrote: “I would minimize the general Soviet problem as much as possible, because these problems, in one form or another, seem to arise every day, and most of them straighten out….” He added only: “We must be firm, however, and our course thus far is correct.”

Harriman told Truman that Russian control in Poland or Romania meant not just influence over foreign policy, but use of secret police and an end to freedom of speech. What they were faced with, Harriman said, using a phrase Truman would not forget, was a “barbarian invasion” of Europe.

American policy must be reconsidered. Any illusion that the Soviet Union was likely to act in accordance with the accepted principles in international affairs should be abandoned. He was not pessimistic, Harriman insisted. He believed workable relations with Russia were possible, with concessions on both sides.

Truman said he understood that 100 percent cooperation from Stalin was unattainable. He would be happy with 85 percent.

Molotov was due in Washington in two days. Truman said that if the Polish issue were not settled as agreed at Yalta, then the Senate would very likely reject American participation in the United Nations, and that he would tell this to Molotov “in words of one syllable.”

Harriman told the President how relieved he was “that we see eye to eye.”

On a first inspection tour of the private quarters at the White House, their future home, Bess and Margaret were crestfallen. “The White House upstairs is a mess…I was so depressed,” wrote Margaret. The Roosevelts had lived comfortably among possessions shabby and fine, old, new, ordinary, and sentimental, with little concern for color harmony or ever any attempt at show. They had lived as they had at home, like an old-fashioned country gentleman’s family of “comfortable circumstances.” Mrs. Roosevelt had left untouched the $50,000 allocated by Congress for upkeep and repair on the house. Her focus was on other concerns.

Carpets were threadbare. Walls looked as if they hadn’t been cleaned in years and were covered with lighter patches where pictures had hung. The scant remaining furniture was in sad disrepair. Some of the draperies had actually rotted. It looked like a ghost house, remembered the assistant head usher, J. B. West, who led the tour. Mrs. Roosevelt had told Bess she could expect to see rats.

The group that filed into the Oval Office for what was to be a landmark meeting at two o’clock the afternoon of Monday, April 23, was the same as Franklin Roosevelt would have assembled for the same purpose. There was no one from Truman’s old Senate staff, no new foreign policy adviser or Russian expert of Truman’s own choice, no Missouri “gang,” no one at all from Missouri but Truman. They were all Roosevelt’s people: Stettinius, Stimson, Forrestal, Marshall, King, Leahy, Harriman, Bohlen, Assistant Secretary of State James Dunn, and General John R. Deane, who was head of the Moscow military mission.

Molotov was expected shortly. He had arrived in Washington the day before, and he and Truman had already met briefly and quite amicably after dinner at Blair House, where Molotov, too, was staying. Truman had spoken of his admiration for the part Russia played in the war and told the Soviet minister he “stood squarely behind all commitments and agreements taken by our late President” and would do everything he could to follow that path. It had been Truman’s first encounter with a Russian and it had gone smoothly. But now Stettinius reported the Russians were insisting on their puppet government in Poland regardless of American opinion. Truman remarked that so far agreements with the Russians seemed always a one-way street. If the Russians did not want to cooperate, they could “go to hell.”

Asking for opinions, he turned first to the elderly Henry Stimson, who thought it extremely unfortunate the Polish issue had ever come to such a head. It seemed unnecessary, too hurried, too dangerous. Stimson was greatly alarmed, “for fear we are rushing into a situation where we would find ourselves breaking our relations with Russia….” The United States must be very careful, try to resolve things without a “headlong collision.”

Forrestal strongly disagreed. The situation in Poland was not an isolated example. The Russians were moving in on Bulgaria, Romania. Better to have a showdown now than later, he said. The real issue, added Harriman, was whether the United States would be party to a program of Soviet domination in Poland.

Admiral Leahy, from his experience at Yalta, was sure the Russians would never allow free elections in Poland, and warned that a break with the Soviet Union over Poland could be a “serious matter.”

Truman broke in to say he had no intention of issuing an ultimatum to Molotov. He wanted only to be firm and clear.

Stimson interjected that in their concern about Eastern Europe, the Russians “perhaps were being more realistic than we in regard to their own security.”

From his experience in Moscow, said General Deane, any sign of fear on the part of the United States would lead nowhere with the Russians.

Agreeing with Stimson, General Marshall urged caution. His great concern, Marshall said, was that Russia might delay participation in the war against Japan “until we have done all the dirty work.”

Stimson found himself feeling pity for Truman, as he wrote later in his diary:

I am very sorry for the President because he is new on his job and he has been brought into a situation which ought not to have been allowed to come this way. I think the meeting at Yalta was primarily responsible for it because it dealt a good deal in altruism and idealism instead of stark realities on which Russia is strong….

As the meeting ended, it was clear the tone of American dealings with Russia would now take a different turn. Truman remarked that he would follow the advice of the majority.

“Indeed, he did,” remembered Bohlen.

A survivor of revolutions, Siberia, purges, and war, Vyacheslav Molotov was one of the few original Bolsheviks still in power in the Soviet Union, his importance second only to that of Stalin. Molotov was tough and extremely deliberate in manner, with never a sign of emotion, not a hint of human frailty except for a stutter. In his customary dark blue European suit, with his pince-nez and small mustache, he looked like a rather smug English schoolmaster.

Molotov arrived at the President’s office promptly at 5:30, accompanied by his interpreter, V. N. Pavlov, and the Russian ambassador, Andrei Gromyko. With Bohlen serving as his interpreter, Truman came directly to the point. He wanted progress on the Polish question, he said. The United States would recognize no government in Poland that failed to provide free elections. He intended to go ahead with the United Nations, irrespective of differences over “other matters,” and he hoped that Moscow would bear in mind how greatly American foreign policy depended on public support, and that American economic assistance programs after the war would require the vote of Congress.

Molotov said the only acceptable basis for Allied cooperation was for the three governments to treat one another as equals. The Poles had been working against the Red Army, he insisted. Truman cut him short. He was not interested in propaganda, Truman said. He wished Molotov to inform Stalin of his concern over the failure of the Soviet government to live up to its agreements.

According to Bohlen’s later account, Molotov turned “ashy” and tried to divert the conversation. Truman said he wanted friendship with Russia, but Poland was the sore point. The United States was prepared to carry out all agreements reached at Yalta. He asked only that the Soviet government do the same.

In Truman’s recollection of the scene, Molotov responded, “I have never been talked to like that in my life.”

“Carry out your agreements,” Truman told him, “and you won’t get talked to like that.”

By Bohlen’s account, however, this last exchange never happened. Truman just cut the conversation off, saying curtly, “That will be all, Mr. Molotov. I would appreciate it if you would transmit my views to Marshal Stalin.” Thus dismissed, Molotov turned and left the room.

But whichever way the meeting ended, there had been no mistaking Truman’s tone. Even Harriman admitted to being “a little taken aback…when the President attacked Molotov so vigorously.” In retrospect, Harriman would regret that Truman “went at it” quite so hard. “I think it was a mistake….”

Bohlen, for his part, thought Truman had said only about what Roosevelt would have in the same situation, except that of course Roosevelt would have been “smoother.” The difference was in style.

When word of what happened reached Capitol Hill, Arthur Vandenberg called it the best news he had heard in a long time.

Stimson was gravely worried. There was more the President needed to know. “I think it is very important that I should have a talk with you as soon as possible on a highly secret matter,” he wrote in a hurried letter to Truman.

I mentioned it to you shortly after you took office but have not urged it since on account of the pressure you have been under. It, however, has a bearing on our present foreign relations and has such an important effect upon all my thinking in this field that I think you ought to know about it without much further delay.

At noon, Wednesday, April 25, Truman’s twelfth day in office, the day after Molotov’s visit and the same day as the opening of the United Nations Conference in San Francisco, Stimson again went to the White House, but this time alone. General Leslie R. Groves, head of the Manhattan Project, or S-1 as Stimson preferred to call it, was brought in a little later through a side door and by way of the ground floor, to avoid being seen, and asked to wait in a room adjoining the President’s office. General Marshall stayed away entirely, so great was their concern over rousing curiosity among the press.

The war and a lifetime of service to his country had taken a toll on Stimson. On doctor’s advice he was now going home for an afternoon nap whenever possible. The first President he had known was Theodore Roosevelt, who made him an assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York in 1905, at the time Truman was clerking in the Union National Bank. When Truman was learning about life on the farm, Stimson had become Secretary of War under William Howard Taft. Coolidge appointed him governor-general of the Philippines. Hoover made him Secretary of State. By the time Franklin Roosevelt made him Secretary of War again in 1940, Stimson was an elder statesman of seventy-two.

A graduate of Yale and the Harvard Law School, a lifelong Republican, Stimson was widely and correctly seen as a figure of thorough rectitude, if a bit old-fashioned and austere. He spoke with a faintly scratchy old man’s voice, wore a heavy gold watch chain across his vest, and parted his hair in the middle, the bangs combed forward over the forehead, a style that had disappeared with wing collars. He was also one of the few men ever to admonish Franklin Roosevelt to his face. “Mr. President, I don’t like you to dissemble to me,” Stimson had once lectured, shaking a crooked, arthritic finger.

Reflecting on Stimson a few years later, Truman would describe him as “a real man—honest, straightforward and a statesman sure enough.” Like Truman he had no patience with hypocrisy or circumlocution. Like Truman he was extremely proud of his service in the field artillery in France in 1918 and preferred still to be called “Colonel Stimson.”

He had first learned of S-1 in November of 1941, when named by Roosevelt to a committee to advise the President on all questions relating to nuclear fission. Since then, he had overseen every stage of development.

He and Truman were alone in Truman’s office. Stimson took from his briefcase a typewritten memorandum of several pages and waited while Truman read it. The words were Stimson’s own and the first sentence especially was intended to shock. Stimson had finished writing it only that morning.

Within four months we shall in all probability have completed the most terrible weapon ever known in human history, one bomb of which could destroy a whole city.

Although the United States and Great Britain had shared in the development of this “most terrible weapon,” at present only the United States had the capability of producing it. Such a monopoly could not last, however, and “probably the only nation which could enter production within the next few years is Russia.”

Stimson was anything but sanguine. Considering the state of “moral advancement” in the world, “modern civilization might be completely destroyed.”

When Truman finished reading, General Groves was shown in to present another report of some twenty-five pages on the status of the Manhattan Project, which Truman was again asked to read.

The President took one copy [Stimson wrote] and we took the other and we went over it and answered his questions and told him all about the process and about the problems that are coming up and in fact I think it very much interested him…. He remembered the time when I refused to let him go into this project when he was the chairman of the Truman Committee…and he said that he understood now perfectly why it was inadvisable for me to have taken any other course than I had….

Stimson, said Truman later, seemed as concerned with the role of the atomic bomb in shaping history as in its capacity to shorten the war. Stimson asked for authorization to establish a special select committee to study the implications of “this new force” and to advise Truman—to help him in his decision. Truman told him to go ahead.

What questions Truman had asked, neither Stimson nor Groves later said, but in a memorandum for his files, Groves noted: “The President did not show any concern over the amount of the funds being spent but made it very definite that he was in entire agreement with the necessity for the project.” Also, according to Groves, Truman had bogged down several times while reading the longer report, saying he didn’t like to tackle so much all at once. Groves and Stimson replied there was no way they could be more concise. “This is a big project,” Groves told the President.

In fact, S-1 was the largest scientific-industrial undertaking in history, and the most important and best-kept secret of the war. Overall responsibility had been given to the Army Corps of Engineers, with Groves, who had overseen the building of the Pentagon, in charge. It had been launched out of fear that the Nazis were at work on the same thing, which they were, though with nothing like the seriousness or success that were imagined. In less than three years the United States had spent $2 billion, which was not the least of the hidden truths, and, one way or other, 200,000 people had been involved, only a few having more than a vague idea of what it was about. That the diligent chairman of the Truman Committee had known so little was a clear measure of how extremely effective security had been. But then neither did General MacArthur or Admiral Chester A. Nimitz or a host of others in high command know what was going on.

While the United States and Great Britain shared in the secret and technical-scientific details, it was in all practicality an American project—initiated, supervised, financed, and commanded from Washington. Ultimately it was Franklin Roosevelt’s project, his decision, his venture. Without his personal interest and backing it would never have been given such priority. For Truman it was thus another part of the Roosevelt legacy to contend with and again Roosevelt was of little help to him. Roosevelt had left behind no policy in writing other than a brief agreement signed with Churchill at Hyde Park the previous autumn saying only that once the new weapon was ready, “It might perhaps, after mature consideration, be used against the Japanese, who should be warned that this bombardment will be repeated until they surrender.”

Whether the bomb would work, no one could say for certain. According to Groves, a first test would not be ready until early July.

The Washington Star needed to know what the President ate for breakfast (orange juice, cereal—usually oatmeal—toast, and milk, no coffee). Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum in London wrote for the President’s exact measurements, requesting that the information be transmitted as soon as possible, and his office obliged: Height—5′9″, chest measurement—42½, waist measurement—35½, size of shoes—9B, size of collar—15½, size of gloves—8, size of hat—7 3/8;.

He addressed the United Nations conference by radio hookup. A poor speech, it was full of windy, mostly meaningless pronouncements of exactly the kind Truman disliked and would never normally use. “None of us doubt,” he said, “that with Divine guidance, friendly cooperation, and hard work, we shall find an adequate answer to the problem history has put before us.” As I. F. Stone observed in The Nation, what Truman would normally have said was, “It’s a tough job. I’m not sure we can do it. But we’re going to try our best.”

On the afternoon of April 25, he went to the Pentagon to talk to Churchill by the transatlantic “secret phone.” There had been a secret German offer to negotiate, a peace feeler from Heinrich Himmler, received through Count Folke Bernadotte, head of the Swedish Red Cross. Himmler wanted to capitulate, but only to the Western Allies, not to the Russians. Obviously the Nazis would have to surrender to all the Allies simultaneously, Churchill said. “That is right. That is exactly the way I feel…. I agree to that fully,” Truman responded. He would cable his news to Stalin at once.

Taking time out for his own first look at the White House living quarters, Truman moved through room after room “at a brisk trot,” according to the assistant head usher J. B. West, for whom this was a first chance for a close-up look at the President. West was struck by how large Truman’s glasses made his eyes appear. “I had the feeling he was looking at me, all around me, straight through me.”

On April 27, fifty miles south of Berlin, American and Russian troops met at the Elbe. A day later came word that Mussolini had been killed by partisans, his body strung up by the feet like a slaughtered pig. On Tuesday, May 1, Hamburg Radio broke the sensational news that Hitler, too, was dead, by his own hand in the command bunker in Berlin. On May 2, the day Berlin fell to the Red Army, the President had to call a press conference to say there was no truth to the rumor of a final German surrender, though Churchill kept hinting at peace within the week.

The Postmaster General and the Secretary of Labor wished to retire. The Attorney General did not, but Truman wished he would. The Director of the Bureau of the Budget needed more of the President’s time. The Secretary of War returned to go over a list of names for the special committee on S-1.

It would be hard to imagine a President with more on his mind.

From Grandview, Missouri, all the while, came a series of memorable letters from Mary Jane Truman—to keep Harry abreast of the trials she was enduring.

April 24, 1945

Dear Harry,

We have received so much mail I cannot remember all the details…. We try to read all about what you are doing and have kept up pretty well so far. I’ve lost seven pounds the last week, but no wonder, breakfast is the only meal we have had on time since you went into office…. someone called for pictures yesterday of Mamma, said he was an artist from Washington. I told him I was sorry but Mamma had had all the pictures she could pose for at present….

Mary Jane’s recurring theme through much of what she wrote was the considerable disservice he had done to them by becoming President. Of immediate concern was whether he could get home for Mother’s Day or whether she and Mamma would have to come to Washington, as he had suggested.

May 1, 1945

Dear Harry,

I do hope that you can come, but if not I feel sure we can persuade Mamma to make the trip. And please tell me if you have any suggestion to make about what you would like me to bring in the way of clothes, for I want to look my best and also get Mamma fixed up all right too and it’s a pretty large order on such short notice….

May 7, 1945

Dear Harry,

I arrived home yesterday and found Mamma well and very much inclined to go Friday if possible. I had planned to go in [to Kansas City] today to get whatever is necessary, but it’s pouring down rain and I have lost my voice, so Dr. Graham said I should stay in. Why do such things have to happen when I have so much to do? I am hoping and hoping that I can get everything ready to go Friday. However, you call me Wednesday instead of me putting the call through. If you can, call early as you can, for if I cannot go shopping tomorrow and Wednesday I don’t see how I can get it all done….

Understandingly, he wrote, “You both have done fine under this terrible blow.”

The five-year-long war in Europe, the most costly, murderous conflict in history, ended on May 7, when the German High Command surrendered to the Allied armies. The terms were signed at 2:40 A.M., in a brick school-house at Reims, Eisenhower’s headquarters. The surrender was unconditional.

Churchill had wanted to make the announcement at once, but Stalin, with the situation on the Russian front still uncertain, insisted they wait. Truman agreed that the announcement would be made by all three Allies at the same time the following morning, May 8, V-E Day.

He broke the news to reporters in his office at 8:30. At 9:00, from the Diplomatic Reception Room where Roosevelt had so often broadcast to the country, he spoke to the largest radio audience yet recorded.

This is a solemn but glorious hour. I only wish that Franklin D. Roosevelt had lived to witness this day…. We must work to finish the war. Our victory is but half-won….

In a separate statement he called on Japan to surrender, warning that “the striking power and intensity of our blows will steadily increase,” and that the longer the war lasted the greater would be the suffering of the Japanese people, and “all in vain.” Unconditional surrender, further, did “not mean the extermination or enslavement of the Japanese people.”

New York, London, Paris, Moscow, cities around the world, had erupted in wild celebration, but not Washington, where it was raining and thousands of government workers, having listened to the broadcast, remained at their desks. “I call upon every American to stick to his post until the last battle is won,” Truman had said.

May 8 was his sixty-first birthday. He had been President for three weeks and four days. The day before, Mrs. Roosevelt had moved out of the White House and the Trumans moved in, “with very little commotion,” as he later wrote, “except that Margaret’s piano had to be hoisted through a window of the second-floor living room.” To move Mrs. Roosevelt out had required twenty Army trucks. To move the Trumans from Blair House across the street had required only one.