II

In contrast to his first years in office, and so much to follow, the first six months of the new term were a breather for Truman. Until midsummer 1949, things went well on the whole, the outlook remained hopeful. No calamitous domestic issues erupted. There were no sudden international crises to contend with. Greece and Turkey did not fall to Communist takeovers, nor would they. Nor would France or Italy. Best of all was a decided easing of tension over Berlin that began just days after the inauguration.

Realizing that the airlift was an established success, and that in fact the blockade had backfired on them, the Russians signaled “a change in attitude.” Stalin was backing down. For the first time since Potsdam, the tide seemed to be turning. Secret negotiations followed—“It can almost be stated as a principle that when the Soviets are serious about something they do it in secret,” Chip Bohlen observed—and on May 12, 1949, the blockade ended: The lights of Berlin came on again. The airlift was over, after a year and two months, 277,804 flights, and the delivery of 2,325,809 tons of food and supplies.

For Truman it was a momentous victory. Firmness and patience had prevailed without resorting to force. War had been averted.

On May 12 also, the Allied powers approved establishment of a new German Federated Republic, whereby the West Germans were to rule themselves with their own government at Bonn.

Things overall looked “fifty percent better” than a year ago, Truman confided to Lilienthal. Not even the advance of Communist forces in China seemed to discourage him. At Potsdam, Stalin had told him the people of North China would never be Communists and Truman thought that was “about right.” The dragon was going to “turn over,” he said, “and after that perhaps some advances can be made of it.” With what Lilienthal described as a “big grin and a large dose of his particular brand of charm, which is not inconsiderable,” Truman talked enthusiastically of what a program like TVA could mean for a country like China, “to put it on its feet.”

By then, too, the North Atlantic Treaty had been signed in Washington on April 4, after much hard, skillful negotiation by Secretary of State Acheson. The United States, Canada, and ten Western European countries joined in a defense pact whereby an attack on any one would be taken as an attack on all: For the United States, it marked a radical departure with tradition—the first peacetime military alliance since the signing of the Constitution—but had such an agreement existed in 1914 and 1939, Truman was convinced, the world would have been spared two terrible wars. He ranked NATO with the Marshall Plan, as one of the proudest achievements of his presidency, and was certain that time would prove him right. And though Acheson and British Foreign Secretary Bevin had done most of the work, it was Truman who provided the commitment, unreservedly, just as he had with the Marshall Plan. His first major act after the election in November had been to instruct the State Department to open negotiations for the new alliance, and he rightly considered it his treaty. “We have really passed a milestone in history,” he said in his toast at the state dinner at the Carlton Hotel, following the signing ceremony.

Objections in the Senate, among conservative Republicans, might be fierce, but he had no doubt the treaty would be approved. As it turned out, opposition in the Senate and the press was unexpectedly mild, approval broad. On July 21, the Senate voted ratification by a vote of 82 to 13.

The establishment of NATO, the success of the Berlin Airlift, the prospect of a prosperous, self-governing West Germany as part of the Western Alliance, all made for a greatly improved atmosphere for Truman. “He looks more relaxed…those drawn lines from his eyes across his cheekbones seemed to be considerably modified,” Lilienthal noted.

In March he had taken off again for Key West, for another “working vacation,” his sixth at Key West since becoming President. The place appealed to him as nowhere else. He loved the warm sea bathing and balmy tropical nights, as perhaps only an inland North American can. His quarters were in what had been the commandant’s residence at the Key West naval base, a modest-sized white frame house in the West Indian, style with jalousied porches, simply but comfortably furnished. Hibiscus and bougainvillaea bloomed in the garden. The cares, the pressures, the formality of the presidency, all began to subside almost from the moment he arrived.

He put on bright patterned sports shirts—“Harry Truman shirts,” as they became known—and set off on his early morning walks through the picturesque old town of Key West, stopping sometimes for a cup of coffee at a local lunch counter. The White House pouch arrived daily; members of the Cabinet, congressional leaders, the Joint Chiefs, flew in and out for meetings, and some days he was on the phone far more than he liked; but he enjoyed a daily swim, or rather churning the turquoise water in his self-styled sidestroke, head up to keep his glasses dry, while one or two Navy boats stood guard, to keep other boats at a distance and to watch for barracudas. He loafed in the sun with members of the staff, joked, swapped stories, read, listened to classical music on the phonograph, took an afternoon nap, played poker on the porch nearly every evening, slept soundly, and started off each new day, before his walk with a shot of bourbon.

His privacy on the base was complete. Nor was security ever a problem, which pleased the Secret Service. The staff all enjoyed themselves, as did the thirty-odd reporters who usually made the trip and who had little else to do but enjoy themselves. And with everyone so obviously pleased with his choice of vacation spot, so pleased to be included, pleased to be with him, Truman enjoyed himself that much more. “He was great down in Key West!” remembered Jim Rowley, by then head of the Secret Service detail.

Soon they were all sporting Harry Truman shirts. To Truman’s great delight, even Sam Rayburn, during a visit in November, had put on one printed with flocks of cranes and swaying palm trees.

Back in Washington on May 8, at a party celebrating his sixty-fifth birthday in the ballroom of the palatial Larz Anderson House on Embassy Row, as toasts were raised, Truman looked better by far than he had since 1945, “like a man who had few qualms about the future,” according to one account. “The President,” said his physician, Wallace Graham, “is as close to being an iron man as anyone I know at his age.”

The one distinct shadow on these “first sunny months” of 1949 was the tragic fate of Secretary of Defense James Forrestal, who as far back as the previous summer had begun looking weary and troubled and who, since the election, had been acting quite strangely. An intense, introverted, extremely dedicated man by nature, Forrestal had worked himself to a state of near collapse, yet wished only to hold on and work harder.

Truman had begun losing confidence in Forrestal even before the fall campaign. Struggling to bring about the reorganization of the military services—an unprecedented, killing task—Forrestal had become increasingly indecisive and absorbed in details. “He won’t take hold,” Truman complained. At one point, exasperated with Forrestal’s handling of a problem, Truman had sent an uncharacteristically curt note saying, “This is your responsibility.” Then, with the campaign under way, there had been suspicions about Forrestal’s loyalty, whether his meetings with Thomas E. Dewey really concerned defense matters, as Forrestal said, or were arranged in the hope of staying on in the Dewey administration. Drew Pearson called it an open secret that Forrestal wanted to hold on to his job regardless of the outcome in November, and several of those closest to Truman grew convinced that politically the Secretary of Defense was no longer to be trusted.

Forrestal had also been one of the few members of the Cabinet since the departure of Henry Wallace to disagree with the President over policy—over Palestine and civilian control of the atomic bomb most notably—and now he was adamantly opposed to Truman’s position on defense spending. To achieve a balanced budget, Truman insisted on a defense ceiling of $15 billion, a sum equal to more than a third of the entire federal budget, but that Forrestal thought dangerously low given the scale of the Soviet menace.

Criticism of Forrestal by the press had grown steadily since his unpopular stand on the Palestine issue, with Drew Pearson and Walter Winchell leading the attack in their columns and radio broadcasts. And for Forrestal who had long courted the press, this was all extremely painful. He was called a tool of Wall Street and the oil companies, an imperialist, an anti-Semite. Pearson and Winchell tried to create doubt about his personal courage, with a trumped-up account of how years before, Forrestal had fled out the back door of his New York City home as jewel thieves accosted his wife. On an NBC Radio broadcast in January, a guest claimed that the I. G. Farben works in Frankfurt had not been bombed during the war because Forrestal owned I. G. Farben stock—a totally false charge that NBC later retracted.

The more amplified the attacks became, the more Truman, who hated to dismiss anyone under almost any circumstances, was inclined to keep Forrestal where he was. Truman would not have him leave “under fire.” In February, Drew Pearson had attacked Harry Vaughan for accepting a decoration from the Argentine dictator Juan Perón, a decoration that several others, including Generals Eisenhower and Bradley, had received earlier, but about which nothing had been said. Pearson had called for Vaughan’s immediate dismissal and Truman publicly responded by calling Pearson an “S.O.B.,” which raised a new storm of adverse comment and gave Truman a great deal of satisfaction. “No commentator or columnist names any members of my Cabinet, or my staff,” he said. “I name them myself And when it is time for them to be moved on, I do the moving—nobody else.” It was a sentiment that had been felt by other presidents before him and would be often again by more who followed in his place, but that none stated so openly in so many words.

Forrestal, as he told a friend, felt that Truman had always been very fair with him. Truman was “the best boss I have ever known.” To another friend he wrote that the American people were fortunate to have in the highest office “a man who, while he reflects the liberal forces both in this country and throughout the world, is nevertheless conservative in the real sense of that word—a conserver of the things we hope to keep.”

Forrestal was still greatly admired by several of those whose judgment Truman particularly valued. Eisenhower, whom Truman had recently asked to serve as an informal “presiding officer” of the Joint Chiefs, considered Forrestal one of the best men in public life and, as Eisenhower recorded privately, more perceptive than Truman concerning “the mess we are in due to neglect of our armed forces.”

Except for my liking, admiration, and respect for his [Forrestal’s] great qualities I’d not go near Washington, even if I had to resign my commission completely [Eisenhower wrote in his diary in January 1949]. To a certain extent these same feelings apply to H.S.T., but he does not see the problems so clearly as does Jim, and does not suffer so much due to the failure to solve the problems. I like them both.

But Forrestal, as Eisenhower also noted, was “looking badly…. He gives his mind no recess, and he works hours that would kill a horse.”

(Eisenhower would himself soon find the bickering between the services all but intolerable. He was smoking four packs of cigarettes a day and worrying about his blood pressure. By mid-March he was suffering from severe stomach cramps, and Truman sent him off to recuperate for three weeks at the Little White House in Key West.)

A reporter seeing Forrestal on inauguration day was shocked by his “baffled” look. Afflicted with insomnia and loss of appetite, Forrestal appeared strangely drawn and aged, his shirt collars too large for him. Some days he would telephone the President several times on the same subject, which left Truman mystified. Privately, Forrestal told a few close friends his phone was being tapped. At meetings he would unconsciously scratch at a particular part of his scalp until it turned raw.

When, in early February, Forrestal told Truman he was resigning and would leave by June 1, Truman saw it would have to be sooner than that.

As Forrestal knew, Truman, for some time, had been considering Louis Johnson as his replacement—Johnson the headstrong financial wonder-worker of the Whistle-stop Campaign, who had once served as Roosevelt’s Assistant Secretary of War—and Forrestal agreed with the choice, or so he said. Johnson, on meeting Forrestal to discuss the transition, concluded after an hour, as he later told Drew Pearson, that Forrestal was insane, or possibly taking drugs.

“Forrestal wanted to resign long before he did,” Truman would write, “and I kept him from it, although I realized later that I should have let him quit when he wanted. He left because of failing health, and that’s all there was to it.”

On Tuesday, March 1, Truman summoned Forrestal to the White House to ask for his resignation. Truman also urged him to take a vacation, though he said nothing about seeking medical attention.

Forrestal maintained the necessary composure for public appearances in the following weeks, but only barely. He was present at the Pentagon on March 28 when Louis Johnson was formally installed as Secretary of Defense, and later in the day he stood mute at another ceremony at the White House, when Truman presented him with the Distinguished Service Medal. But the next day, Forrestal, “a very sick man,” was flown to Florida, to Robert Lovett’s home at Hobe Sound, where he told Lovett, “They’re after me.” In the days following he made at least one attempt at suicide.

Unaware of what was happening in Florida, but having now heard reports that Forrestal thought he was being followed by foreign agents, Truman asked the head of the Secret Service, U. E. Baughman, to look into the matter at once. The report, marked “Secret” and dated March 31, said Forrestal’s suspicions were unfounded, that he had become of late “exceedingly nervous and emotional,” and so distraught by the time of his last day as Secretary of Defense that he had not even known his own servants.

As a result of his apparent lack of ability to make a positive decision and carry it out, he was assisted and escorted to the plane [to Florida] by two friends and former associates. When Mr. F. exhibited a last minute reluctance to make his departure, one of the friends reportedly said to the other: “We have to do something—we can’t keep him around here.”

Forrestal, the report concluded, was suffering from a “slight nervous breakdown,” which apparently was as much as Truman had been told up to that point.

In Florida, a Navy psychiatrist and the renowned Dr. William C, Menninger had been sent for, and on April 2, Forrestal was flown back to Washington to be admitted to the Bethesda Naval Hospital for treatment of “nervous exhaustion.”

Drew Pearson reported that Forrestal was “out of his mind” and claimed incorrectly that in Florida Forrestal had rushed out into the street screaming, “The Russians are coming.”

Truman called on Forrestal at Bethesda the first week in May and thought Forrestal seemed “his old self.”

Two weeks later, on Sunday, May 22, at two in the morning, Forrestal sat in his room on the sixteenth floor of the hospital copying lines from Sophocles’ “Chorus from Ajax”:

Worn by the waste of time—

Comfortless, nameless, hopeless save

In the dark prospect of the yawning grave…

About three o'clock he walked across the hall to a small kitchen. After tying one end of the sash from his bathrobe to a radiator and the other end around his neck, he jumped from the unbarred window. His body was found on the roof of the third floor, the sash still around his neck.

The news rocked Washington. Suicide among high-ranking government figures was unknown. Other Cabinet members had resigned over the years, or been fired under a cloud, but none had ever taken his own life. Truman, in his words, was “inexpressibly shocked and grieved.” The First Lady, haunted by memories of her father, was, as Margaret later revealed, “terribly shaken.” At Easter, only the week before, Bess had sent Forrestal a bouquet of roses and in a note of appreciation he had said how much they had “helped brighten a bleak day.”

I am moved that you should trouble to send me a token but it’s typical of your thoughtfulness. A Happy Easter to you and the President and Miss Truman. You all deserve it.

The President and Vice President, former President Hoover, the Cabinet, much of Congress, members of the Supreme Court, the Joint Chiefs, General Marshall, an estimated six thousand people were present for Forrestal’s burial with full military honors at Arlington.

Truman, angry, troubled, doubtless remorseful that he hadn’t acted sooner to relieve Forrestal from duty, accused Drew Pearson of “hounding” him to death. Pearson wrote that it was Truman’s call for Forrestal’s resignation that “undoubtedly worsened the illness.” David Lawrence, in his column in the Washington Star, said it was not work that killed Forrestal, but the President’s loss of confidence in him.

Questions about the tragedy persisted. Why had Forrestal, in his condition, with suicidal tendencies, been placed in a sixteenth-floor room? Had his priest been denied the chance to see him? As time went on, and fear of Communist conspiracy spread in Washington, it would be rumored that pages from Forrestal’s diary had been secretly removed on orders from the White House—that Forrestal, the most ardent anti-Soviet voice in the administration, had in fact been driven to his death as part of a Communist plot and the evidence destroyed by “secret Communists” on Truman’s staff.

But as ever in Washington, it was who was in power that mattered most and so the focus of attention swiftly shifted to the new Secretary of Defense, who, with his previous experience in the department, his reputation for getting things done, had seemed well equipped for the job. Louis Johnson was tough, hardheaded, and, importantly, committed to the President’s policy of holding the line on spending. On the Hill, Democrats and Republicans liked what they saw. The Senate approved the appointment unanimously. But in little time Johnson’s personal style and mode of operation made him a figure of extreme controversy. He hit the Pentagon like a cyclone.

Johnson’s first move was to evict several high-ranking officers from the largest office in the building and make it his own. He resurrected General Pershing’s old desk and installed Roosevelt’s press secretary, Steve Early, as a deputy. Half of all Pentagon employees, some twenty-five thousand people, were shuffled about in a gigantic game of musical chairs. He did away with outdated service boards, cut back the use of official cars.

Johnson was doing what Truman had asked for. From his experience on the Truman Committee, Truman was convinced that huge sums were being wasted in defense spending. He had a basic distrust of generals and admirals when it came to spending money. In late April, with no advance warning to the President or the Secretary of the Navy, Johnson suddenly canceled construction of a new $186 million supercarrier, United States, a major component in the Navy’s whole program—with the result that the Secretary of the Navy, John Sullivan, resigned in a rage. Truman, who liked Sullivan and did not blame him for resigning, nonetheless approved the cancelation. Still, Johnson’s manner troubled him greatly.

In May, to the disbelief of the Joint Chiefs, Johnson ordered another $1.4 billion slashed from the military budget. To those who charged he was weakening the country’s defense, Johnson boasted that the United States could “lick Russia with one hand tied behind our back.”

Where Forrestal had been small, introverted, and apolitical almost to a fault, Johnson was a great boisterous bear of a man who shouted to make his point to an admiral or general, and exuded such overt political ambition, stirred such speculation as to his true motives, that he felt obliged after only a few months on the job to state publicly several times that he was not running for President. The press quoted an unnamed high official who said Johnson was making two enemies for every dollar he saved.

As was becoming rapidly apparent, Louis Johnson was possibly the worst appointment Truman ever made. In a little more than a year, many who worked with him, including Truman and Dean Acheson, would conclude that Johnson was mentally unbalanced. “Unwittingly,” wrote General Bradley later, “Truman had replaced one mental case with another.”

The President, the country read, was “in high good humor,” “cheerful and chipper.” And busy. He named Attorney General Tom Clark to the Supreme Court, made Howard McGrath the new Attorney General, put Bill Boyle, his old Kansas City protégé and whistle-stop mastermind, in McGrath’s place at the head of the Democratic Party. He also picked Perle Mesta to be the new minister to Luxembourg, an appointment of no great importance but remembered fondly because it inspired a hit Broadway musical, Call Me Madam, with music by Irving Berlin, and Ethel Merman in the title role.

But even before spring vanished in the furnace heat of June and another long summer settled on the city, Truman’s good cheer and optimism were being put to the test. The wave of anti-communism that had been gathering force since the charges against Alger Hiss erupted the previous summer now grew more serious, with Cardinal Spellman of New York, among others, saying America was in imminent danger of a Communist takeover. In December 1948, Hiss was indicted for perjury, but the real issue, everyone knew, remained the same: Was he or was he not a Communist spy? And how many more like him were there in government?

The country, Truman assured reporters, was not going to hell. They ought to read some history. America had been through such times before. “Hysteria finally died down, and things straightened out, and the country didn’t go to hell, and it isn’t now.” When the Hiss trial ended in a hung jury in July, another trial was scheduled for the fall. As Truman failed to foresee, the issue was not going to go away.

Then at midsummer the outlook became dramatically worse. Indeed, by August 1949 Truman had entered a time of severe trial. Events beyond his control—in China and the Soviet Union—rocked the Western world as nothing had since the war, while on Capitol Hill, as if to provide a kind of perverse comic relief, Harry Vaughan was summoned before a Senate investigating committee.

The news from China had been grim all year, Truman’s oddly sanguine remarks on the subject to David Lilienthal notwithstanding. The Chinese Nationalist regime of Chiang Kai-shek had been crumbling fast before the onrush of the Communists. The American military adviser to Chiang, General David Barr, reported that

the military situation has deteriorated to the point where only the active participation of United States troops could effect a remedy…. No battle has been lost since my arrival due to lack of ammunition or equipment…. [The Nationalist] debacles, in my opinion, can all be attributed to the world’s worst leadership…the widespread corruption and dishonesty through the [Nationalist] armed forces….

In April a Communist army of a million men crossed the Yangtze River, south into the last provinces still loyal to Chiang. The outcome, the complete fall of China to the forces of Mao Tse-tung—an outcome implicit as early as 1946 in what George Marshall reported after his fruitless year in China—had by spring become a foregone conclusion.

Vehement alarm was sounded. Angry, vindictive charges were made against the administration by what had become known as the “China Lobby,” whose numbers included religious and patriotic groups across the country, prominent Republicans in Congress, and Time and Lifepublisher Henry R. Luce, who was the son of missionaries to China. Life had carried an article by General MacArthur titled “The Fall of China Imperils the U.S.” Time warned that the Red tide rising in Asia threatened to engulf half the peoples of the world.

Yet it was the administration’s own attempt to account for its China policy, an effort intended to clarify what was about to happen in China before it happened, and thereby calm the country, that gave focus to this momentous turn of history as nothing else had, and with unexpected consequences.

At a morning press conference on August 4, Truman announced the release of a massive State Department report, United States Relations with China: With Special Reference to the Period 1944–1949, 409 pages in length, with another 645 pages of appended documents in smaller print. He had asked to have it compiled, Truman said, as a “frank and actual record…clear and illuminating…everything you want to know about the policy” from the 1840s forward.

As Dean Acheson stressed in a preface to the report, the United States had poured more than $2 billion into support for Chiang Kai-shek since V-J Day—money and arms to help destroy communism in China—but it had not been enough. The fault, said Acheson, was in the internal decay of the Nationalist regime, its rampant corruption, lack of leadership, its indifference to the aspirations of the Chinese people. “The unfortunate but inescapable fact is that the ominous result of the civil war in China was beyond the control of the…United States…. It was the product of internal Chinese forces, forces which this country tried to influence but could not.”

Truman, his spelling no better than ever, had said in a handwritten note earlier that a “currupt” Nationalist government was the cause of China’s woes. “We picked a bad horse,” he told Arthur Vandenberg.

The “China White Paper” caused a sensation. Affection for China was widespread in the country. Generations of American children had carried nickels and dimes to Sunday School to support missionaries in China. Books by Pearl Buck about Chinese peasant life had won the hearts of millions of readers; Chiang Kai-shek, the Generalissimo, and his smiling, photogenic, Wellesley-educated wife had been America’s loyal allies through the war. Now the State Department was declaring officially that China, the largest nation on earth, was lost to communism. Instead of serving as a palliative, as Truman and Acheson intended, the report inflamed the controversy. The New York Times judged it a “sorry record of well-meaning mistakes.” More outraged critics called it a whitewash, a deliberate distortion, and worse, “a smooth alibi for the pro-Communists in the State Department who…aided in the Communist conquest of China.” In the Senate, Republican William Knowland of California wondered aloud, and without a shred of evidence, whether Alger Hiss had helped shape China policy. The China Lobby raised the cry that Truman and Acheson had “lost” China, as though China had been America’s to lose. A few Democrats, too, joined in the attack, including Representative John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts.

At the same time, Harry Vaughan was back in the news in what had all the signs of a full-blown White House scandal. A Senate subcommittee chaired by Democrat Clyde R. Hoey of North Carolina had begun investigating so-called “five percenters,” those who, for 5 percent commissions, used their supposed influence to secure contracts or favored treatment from the government. Vaughan, it was revealed by several witnesses, had used his high position—“his general’s stars, his White House telephone and his place in Harry Truman’s affections”—to ease the way for such men-about-Washington as James V. Hunt, a former Army officer who claimed to be one of Vaughan’s best friends, and “Mysterious” John Maragon, truly an old friend of Vaughan’s, who in the first weeks of Truman’s presidency in 1945 had been seen about the West Wing so often he was thought to be one of the staff.

When it was shown that Hunt had improper influence with the chief of the Army Chemical Corps and the Quartermaster General, Truman immediately ordered the retirement of the first and the suspension of the second officer.

Most of Vaughan’s activities in behalf of such friends dated from just after the war. As a favor to Hunt he had helped obtain scarce lumber for construction of a California race track, a project being blocked by government restrictions on building materials needed for housing. For Maragon, he secured a permit for the purchasing of molasses, another scarce item. For a Chicago perfume manufacturer, another of Hunt’s clients, he arranged a priority flight to Europe by Air Transport Command—at the time when Germany had just surrendered and virtually all transport facilities were preempted for military use—an arrangement whereby the Chicago manufacturer returned home with perfume essence valued at $53,000.

There was nothing illegal about the operations of the five percenters, nothing illegal about what Vaughan had done. But as had also been disclosed, the same Chicago perfume manufacturer, David A. Bennett, had made Vaughan a gift of a cold-storage food container, a “deep freezer,” valued at approximately $400. Moreover, at Vaughan’s suggestion, Bennett sent five more freezers: one to the First Lady, which broke down and had to be junked, one to Fred Vinson, who was then Secretary of the Treasury, one to J. K. Vardaman, who installed it in his Rappahannock County, Virginia, mountain retreat, another to Matt Connelly, and another to John Snyder, who returned it.

Summoned before the Hoey Committee, Vaughan insisted he had only been trying to be helpful. “I do these people a courtesy of putting them in contact with the persons with whom they can tell their story,” he explained.

It was, of course, what every politician in Washington did almost daily. Nor was there a law against public officials accepting gifts from friends and constituents, as many news accounts were careful to point out. The President himself was constantly receiving and accepting gifts of all kinds—paintings, prize turkeys, country hams, Havana cigars, liquor, even a Ford automobile, during his first year in office. The freezers, said Vaughan, were “an expression of friendship and nothing more,” and Chairman Hoey, after Vaughan’s two days of testimony, acknowledged there was no evidence of corruption on Vaughan’s part. Yet the damage was done. The freezers had been kept confidential and Vaughan’s use of his privileged position, if not illegal, had been decidedly inappropriate and inept. His poor judgment, the almost ludicrous lack of propriety that had so long concerned others at the White House like Charlie Ross and Eben Ayers, had caught up with him.

Though his manner before the committee was calm and respectful, even impressive at times, by appearance Vaughan seemed anything but a figure of rectitude. Grossly overweight, his uniform, for all its brass and ribbons, looking about as military as pajamas, he was like a cartoonist’s portrait of corruption. Thomas Nast would have gloried in the chance to draw him, as slouching back in his witness chair Vaughan lit up a big cigar.

The Republicans on the committee had prepared, as Time wrote, for a political barbecue with Vaughan as the pig on the spit. But the one who enjoyed it most, glowering at the witness, pointedly addressing the uniformed general as “Mr. Vaughan,” was Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin.

Was it true, asked McCarthy, that he had taken campaign contributions from “Racket King” Frank Costello?

“Am I supposed to know Frankie Costello?…How did he get in here?” responded Vaughan, rightfully incredulous.

If the hearings had proven anything, it was only that Vaughan was an embarrassment who in the guise of a general played courthouse politics from the White House in a style reminiscent of the Harding days. “Five percenters” and “deep freezers” became odious new catchwords, to the extreme pleasure of the Republicans.

“Ross and I discussed the whole thing at some length,” wrote Eben Ayers. “We agreed that Vaughan is entirely to blame for his troubles and the troubles he has brought on the President and others. But he seems to have no realization of what harm he has caused….”

What Truman did was just what everyone who knew him well knew he would do. Had he been constituted differently, had he been able to see the commotion over Vaughan as justified, and not an attack on him personally—which was how he interpreted it—had he been able to see that Vaughan was a serious liability and been willing to sacrifice him for the sake of the public trust, not to say his own reputation, then things might have gone differently. But he did not, and this, as time would tell, was a mistake.

Beneath everything, Truman not only liked Vaughan, but liked how Vaughan conducted himself, and particularly with respect to the press. When, in the midst of the hearings, Vaughan had arrived back in Washington after a vacation and was confronted by reporters at Union Station, he had warned them to go easy on him. “After all I am the President’s military aide, and you guys will all want favors at the White House someday.” Asked about his connection with the five percenters, he said, “That’s nobody’s goddamn business and you can quote me,” a response that so warmed Truman’s heart when he read it that he pinned a mock decoration on Vaughan for “Operation Union Station.”

“I think,” Alben Barkley would later comment, “that Mr. Truman was far too kind and loyal to certain old friends who took advantage of him and whose actions sometimes were no credit to his administration.”

When Vaughan offered to resign, Truman told him to say no such thing in his presence ever again. They had come into the White House together, Truman said, and they would go out together.

Only weeks later came the most stunning news of all, portending, as David Lilienthal wrote, “a whole box of trouble.” An Air Force weather reconnaissance plane, flying at 18,000 feet from Japan to Alaska, had detected signs of intense radioactivity over the North Pacific, east of the Kamchatka Peninsula. Soon planes elsewhere over the Pacific were reporting radioactivity as much as twenty times above normal. The radioactive cloud was tracked by the Air Force from the Pacific nearly to the British Isles, where it was picked up by the RAF.

It took several days for scientists to analyze the data. Their conclusion was reached the afternoon of Monday, September 19. Lilienthal, who was on vacation at Martha’s Vineyard, received the news that night in memorable fashion. As he and his wife were returning from a dinner party to their house near the northern shore of the island, they saw the figure of a man suddenly loom up out of the ground fog, caught in the glare of their headlights. It was General James McCormack, who looked bemused, thought Lilienthal, “as if I frequently found him on a windswept moor, in the dead of night, on an island….”

Later, alone with Lilienthal in an upstairs room lit by a single kerosene lamp, McCormack gave Lilienthal his report.

The coal-oil lamp between us [Lilienthal wrote], the shadows all around; outside, through…[the] windows, the Great Dipper and the North Star off toward the lights of New Bedford…. I took it with no outward evidence of anything more than a budget problem….

Was he disturbed over something, his wife asked after they had gone to bed. “Oh some. One of those things,” he said.

By 8:20 the next morning, he and McCormack were on their way to Washington in an Air Force C-47. Lilienthal was to see Truman at the White House that afternoon. By 11:30 he was at his office conferring with a hurriedly assembled advisory commission of nuclear scientists, chaired by J. Robert Oppenheimer, who looked frantic. There was no question, said Oppenheimer, the Russians had detonated an atomic bomb.

“Vermont affair, we are here,” Lilienthal wrote, “Vermont” being the code name for the Russian bomb.

How was the President taking the news? Would he tell the country? And how soon?

Lilienthal saw Truman promptly at 3:45 and later, in his diary, in almost telegraphic style, he put down this extraordinary account of their half hour together:

The President was reading a copy of the Congressional Record, as quiet and composed a scene as imaginable; bright sunlight in the garden outside….

He said: want to talk about this detection report—knew about it—knew it would probably come—German scientists in Russia did it, probably something like that. Be glad to call in the Joint Committee [on Atomic Energy] chairman, ranking minority member, tell them…. Not going to say anything myself now; later when this [Truman pointed to a newspaper with headlines about the devaluation of the British pound] quiets down, maybe in a week; realize may leak, lots people know—still take that chance, meet it when it comes.

I said: may I have permission to state [my] views, despite fact you have reached conclusion? He took off his glasses, first time I saw him without them, large, fine eyes. Considerate, fine air of patience and interest. I tried to set out affirmative virtue of making it [the announcement] now and initiating matter rather than plugging leaks…. First, would show Pres. knows what is going on in Vermont [Russia]…. Second, Pres. knowing and saying so would show him not scared, hence others needn’t be; third, would show Pres. will tell people when things come along they need to know that won’t hurt being told.

[The President agreed that] maintaining confidence of people in him, taking cue from his own calm, was good point, but not afraid of that. Can’t be sure anyway [that the Russians actually had the bomb]. I stepped into that: is sure, substantial—and great surprise even to [the] most pessimistic. Really?—sharp look….

But [an announcement] by him [might] cause great fears, troubles. They [the Russians] changed…talking very reasonably again, things look better [since the end of the Berlin crisis]; this may have something to do with it. Not worried; took this into account; going to work things out….

Three days later, the morning of Friday, September 23, with the White House press crammed into his office, Charlie Ross asked first that the door be closed, then passed out a mimeographed statement from the President. In an instant reporters were stampeding for the press telephones, smashing the head of a stuffed deer in their rush.

I believe the American people, to the fullest extent consistent with national security, are entitled to be informed of all developments in the field of atomic energy. That is my reason for making public the following information.

We have evidence that within recent weeks an atomic explosion occurred in the U.S.S.R….

As the statement also said, the eventual development of “this new force by other nations was to be expected.” Nonetheless, the news was three to five years ahead of most predictions and the realization came as an immense shock. The four-year American monopoly on the atomic bomb was over. And though there was no panic in the country, the fears and tensions of the Cold War were greatly amplified. It was a different world now.

A week later, on October 1 in Peking, the People’s Republic of China, the most numerous Communist nation in the world, with more than 500 million people, one fifth of humanity, was officially inaugurated.

Very soon afterward, in October 1949, in a series of highly secret meetings at the offices of the Atomic Energy Commission, discussion began on the subject of a thermonuclear or hydrogen weapon—a superbomb, or “Super”—which would have more than ten times the destructive power of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Russian bomb, it was felt, had changed the situation “drastically.” And if the Russians were capable of producing an atomic bomb, then the Russians too were in a position now to push forward with the more devastating weapon.

The initial proposal for the “Super” had come from Lewis Strauss of the Atomic Energy Commission, with strong support from the physicist Edward Teller.

James B. Conant, who had served on the President’s Interim Committee on the first bomb, was flatly opposed. So was Oppenheimer. Enrico Fermi seemed at first to favor going ahead, then changed his mind. In the end, the scientific advisory committee expressed its opposition to the project on both technical and moral grounds. General Bradley was for it mainly for its “psychological” importance. Clearly, there would have to be a presidential decision.

Lilienthal had privately concluded that he, too, was against the Super. (“We keep saying, ‘We have no other course!’ Lilienthal wrote. “What we should be saying is, ‘We are not bright enough to see any other course.’”) But the morning of Tuesday, November 1, he met with Dean Acheson to explain the “essence of the business,” so Acheson might take it up with the President “soon,” before he, Lilienthal, and others presented it in greater detail.

What a depressing world it was, Acheson remarked after listening to Lilienthal. He didn’t know how Lilienthal had lived with “this grim thing.”

In the evening of that same first day in November 1949, the President sat down to dinner at Blair House alone. Bess Truman, as she had been for most of the summer, was away in Independence, looking after her mother; Margaret was in New York, pursuing her singing career, and as always, their absence left him feeling downcast, if not occupied with work or people around him. Several times over the long, difficult summer, in letters home, he had grown more reflective than usual, recounting events that had brought him to where he was. “We can never tell what is in store for us,” he had said to Bess. “Never in my wildest dreams did I ever think or wish for such a position,” he told Nellie and Ethel Noland. He had “succeeded in getting myself into more trouble than Pandora ever let loose in the world.”

If he felt Bess’s absences more than usual, it was because their life together now, in Blair House, seemed such an improvement over what it had been across the avenue. The house itself, even with the quick cosmetics applied the year before, was not only nothing very grand, but a bit dowdy. It creaked and groaned, trembled noticeably whenever streetcars passed by outside. Its dark, old cellar was full of rats, as was well known by the Secret Service men, who hated ever having to go down there. And with Washington’s Emergency Hospital located just around the corner on F Street, ambulance sirens screamed by in the street below the President’s bedroom window often several times a night. Of all the presidents they had known, some of the Secret Service men would later say, only Harry Truman would have been willing to live in the place.

But with Margaret no longer at home, and without the burden of White House entertaining, the President and the First Lady had more time alone together, sitting in the small back garden reading, having lunch, or resting. Indeed, it was the first time in their married life that they had ever had a house to themselves. “Very discreet, very polite, they spent a lot of time behind closed doors in Blair House,” remembered J. B. West. Maids joked about the “lovebirds” upstairs, and in recounting his memories of the Truman years, West would later provide the one known suggestion of the sexual attraction between these two very private, essentially Victorian people.

Sometime earlier that fall, when Bess had returned from a long stay with her mother in Independence, both she and the President had been so “jubilant,” so obviously happy to be with each other again, that the whole domestic staff felt a lift of spirits. Everybody kept grinning, West remembered.

The next morning, when West reported to the First Lady’s study at nine as usual, to go over the day’s menu, she told him “in a rather small, uncomfortable voice” that there was a little problem with the President’s antique bed. Two of the slats had broken during the night, she said, blushing.

He would attend to it immediately, said West, who had concluded, as he later wrote, that the Trumans were definitely not “antiques.”

Now, the evening of November 1, with Bess back again in Independence, and after “another hell of a day,” Truman penned one of the most delightful of all his diary sketches of himself—part melancholy, part amusing, entirely human and in character:

Had dinner by myself tonight. Worked in the Lee House office until dinner time. A butler came in very formally and said, “Mr. President, dinner is served.” I walked into the dining room in the Blair House. Barnett in tails and white tie pulls out my chair, pushes me up to the table. John in tails and white tie brings me a fruit cup. Barnett takes away the empty cup. John brings me a plate, Barnett brings me a tenderloin, John brings me asparagus, John brings me carrots and beets. I have to eat alone and in silence in a candle lit room. I ring—Barnett takes the plate and butter plates. John comes in with a napkin and a silver crumb tray—there are no crumbs but John has to brush them off the table anyway. Barnett brings me a plate with a finger bowl and doily on it—I remove finger bowl and doily and John puts a glass saucer and a little bowl on the plate. Barnett brings me some chocolate custard. John brings me a demitasse (at home a little cup of coffee—about two good gulps) and my dinner is over. I take a hand bath in the finger bowl and go back to work.

What a life!