Until that afternoon the Soviets had been refusing to send their foreign minister, V. M. Molotov, to the San Francisco Conference. Now, suddenly, Stalin had changed his mind, as a gesture in memory of Franklin Roosevelt, a gesture that had been urged on him by the American ambassador in Moscow, Harriman. He would send Molotov, Stalin said, if the new President would request it—which Truman did at once, achieving thereby what appeared to be a first diplomatic breakthrough. But as Harriman himself wrote, the gesture resolved none of the basic difficulties. Churchill and the British government were more apprehensive than ever about Russia.
Truman had had no experience in relations with Britain or Russia, no firsthand knowledge of Churchill or Stalin. He didn’t know the right people. He didn’t know Harriman. He didn’t know his own Secretary of State, more than to say hello. He had no background in foreign policy, no expert or experienced advisers of his own to call upon for help. Most obviously, he was not Franklin Roosevelt. How many times would that be said, thought, written?
Roosevelt had done nothing to keep him informed or provide background on decisions and plans at the highest levels. Roosevelt, Truman would tell Margaret privately, “never did talk to me confidentially about the war, or about foreign affairs or what he had in mind for peace after the war.” He was unprepared, bewildered. And frightened.
“It is needless to say that President Truman comes into this gigantic assignment under a handicap,” said the solemn editorial in that morning’s Washington Post.
He must pick up the work of a world-renowned statesman who had had more than 12 years of experience in the White House…[and] we should be less than candid at this grave moment…if we did not recognize the great disparity between Mr. Truman’s experience and the responsibilities that have been thrust upon him.
He was the seventh man to have succeeded to the office after the death of a President, the first having been John Tyler of Virginia, to whom Truman mistakenly believed he was related through his great-grand-mother, Nancy Tyler Holmes. John Tyler had replaced William Henry Harrison in 1841, the year Solomon and Harriet Louisa Young migrated to Missouri, and Tyler had set an important precedent, by deciding to be President in name and in fact and not the Vice President acting as President, which many at the time thought proper, the Constitution being somewhat ambiguous on the subject. Truman was born during the White House years of Chester A. Arthur, who succeeded to the presidency after the assassination of Garfield, and in Truman’s lifetime two more vice presidents, Theodore Roosevelt and Calvin Coolidge, had become President following the deaths of McKinley and Harding. But with the exception of Andrew Johnson, no Vice President had ever succeeded so towering a figure as Franklin Roosevelt, and though Lincoln loomed larger than any President in history, Lincoln had not been a world leader, nor the Civil War a titanic, global conflict.
Truman felt great division within himself. Like John Tyler, he must be President, act presidential, but could he ever feel he was? “I’m still Harry Truman,” he had said several times to different people since 7:09 the evening before.
A Pentagon information officer who had been sent to the White House that morning with a statement to the overseas troops for the President to sign, was asked to wait in the Fish Room and would remember always the moment when a “small, gray man” walked in, put out his hand, and said, “I’m President Truman,” with the accent on the “I,” as though there might be some other President Truman.
On the one hand he was determined to establish that he was in fact in charge. On the other, he felt the constant, nearly overbearing presence of Roosevelt. He would have a portrait of Roosevelt—Roosevelt in his Navy cape turned as if facing a storm—hung to the right of the desk and, pointing to it, would tell visitors, “I’m trying to do what he would like.” Grace Tully, Roosevelt’s secretary, complained to friends, “I still can’t call that man [Truman] President.” But then Truman himself still thought of Roosevelt as President. “He’s the only one I ever think of as President,” he would write to Mrs. Roosevelt months later.
His own favorite President of the century, Woodrow Wilson, had had a brilliant academic career. Herbert Hoover had been a world-famous engineer. Franklin Roosevelt, heir to a great name, had been the popular governor of New York, the nation’s richest, most populous state. And who was he, Harry Truman? What qualifications had he beside such men, or so many others in public life who wanted the job?
Alben Barkley told Truman he must stop deprecating his ability to carry on. “Have confidence in yourself,” Barkley said. “If you do not, the people will lose confidence in you.”
Sam Rayburn came to deliver stern advice of another kind. “I have come down here to talk to you about you,” Rayburn began.
You have got many great hazards, and one of them is in this White House. I have been watching this thing a long time. I have seen people in the White House try to build a fence around the White House and keep the very people away from the President that he should see. That is one of your hazards. The special interests and the sycophants will stand in the rain a week to see you and will treat you like a king. They’ll come sliding in and tell you you’re the greatest man alive—but you know and I know you ain’t.
On Saturday morning, April 14, his second day in office, having decided to make John Snyder a federal loan official, Truman called Jesse Jones, head of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, to tell him that “the President” had made the appointment. Jones, understandably, asked if the President had made the decision before he died. “No,” snapped Truman. “He just made it now.”
Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau arrived, intending to ask Truman a number of questions, as a way of assessing him. Truman said he did not wish to take up Morgenthau’s time. He asked for a comprehensive report on the nation’s financial standing and, as with Stettinius, he said he wanted it quickly, demonstrating that he, Harry Truman, was not on trial, Morgenthau was.
To Morgenthau, who had not known him, Truman seemed courteous as well as decisive. “But after all, he is a politician,” added Morgenthau in his diary, “and what is going on in his head only time will tell.”
When the train bearing Roosevelt’s body came into Union Station from Warm Springs later the morning of Saturday the 14th, Truman was waiting on the platform beside the Roosevelt family and flanked by the two men who had the most reason to see themselves in his place, Henry Wallace and Jimmy Byrnes. Truman had asked them to accompany him to the station, knowing the photographers would record the moment. It was a generous, respectful gesture on his part, but seen also as a mark of confidence. Like the lunch at the Capitol, it seemed exactly the right thing for him to have done.
The day was extremely warm and muggy, the sun burning through a haze. To the steady beat of muffled drums, the three men in their dark suits rode together in the long, slow funeral procession to the White House. Tremendous crowds stretched the length of Constitution Avenue, waiting to see the caisson and casket roll past pulled by six white horses. Never would he forget, Truman wrote, the sight of so many people in grief.
At midday the weather changed dramatically, with heavy clouds rushing in and the wind whipping the flags that stood at half-mast everywhere in the city. Then rain came in torrents. At the four o’clock service in the East Room, where several hundred had gathered—the Cabinet, Supreme Court, foreign diplomats, the Chiefs of Staff in uniform, Thomas E. Dewey, Mrs. Woodrow Wilson—not one person thought to stand when Truman entered, nor did he appear to notice. With Bess and Margaret beside him, he sat motionless through the service, staring straight ahead at the flag-draped casket.
His schedule had been crowded all day. With the capital and nation in mourning, with the Roosevelt family still in residence, he had wanted no more attention than necessary drawn to activities in the West Wing—no further official pronouncements, nothing until Roosevelt was decently buried. Still, in the time between the return from the station and the East Room service, there had been a steady procession i
n and out of his office—Harry Hopkins, Ed Flynn, Admiral Leahy, Jimmy Byrnes. The longest session was with Hopkins, who had left a sickbed in Minnesota to attend the funeral and looked like death itself. Truman asked him how he felt. “Terrible,” Hopkins answered. “I knew what he meant,” Truman wrote. For nearly two hours they reviewed the history of the Roosevelt years, talked about Stalin and Churchill, as the rain beat against the tall windows. Lunch was brought in and Hopkins pulled his chair up to the desk.
There were no eulogies in the East Room service, at Mrs. Roosevelt’s request. Two hymns were sung, “Eternal Father, Strong to Save,” and “Faith of Our Fathers.” After the final prayer, Bishop Angus Dun, again as Mrs. Roosevelt wished, read the famous line from the 1933 inaugural address, “Let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself….”
On Sunday morning, April 15, after a night trip by presidential train, many of the same group were gathered at the graveside in the rose garden of Roosevelt’s Hyde Park estate. The weather, mercifully, had turned fair and cool. It was a perfect spring day, the Hudson Valley glorious with spring green, the river sparkling. Truman stood with Bess and Margaret, hat in hand, his head bowed as Taps were sounded.
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, “Go
od 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.