“I saw the President immediately after his speech had been concluded,” Truman wrote. “Plainly, he was a very weary man.” Roosevelt, as he told Truman, was leaving as soon as possible for Warm Springs, Georgia and a rest.
In the stack of mail on his desk to be answered the morning of Thursday, April 12, was a letter from Jim Pendergast, who needed his old friend Harry’s help. “For about a year,” Jim wrote, “the Pendergast Wholesale Liquor Company has been trying to get bottles and cartons in order to carry on their business. They have made three applications and these applications have all been approved by the local office of the War Production Board but when they get to Washington they have all been rejected.” The company, Jim explained, had over eleven thousand barrels of straight bourbon whiskey stored in Kentucky but no bottles or cartons. The situation was serious.
“We will see what we can do right away,” Truman dictated to Miss Odum.
He had dressed for the day with customary care, in a double-breasted gray suit with a white handkerchief in the breast pocket neatly folded so that three corners were showing, a white shirt, and a dark blue polka-dot bow tie. He looked scrubbed and well barbered, the picture of health and self-possession. In the Senate Chamber later in the day, reporters in the press gallery would comment on his obvious enjoyment of people as he moved among different groups of senators on the floor. “It’s wonderful, this Senate,” he had said in a press conference only the day before. “It’s the greatest place on earth…. The grandest bunch of fellows you could ever find anywhere.”
The rest of the mail took longer than usual, so that he was late getting over to the Senate Chamber, where the day’s work had already begun, Alben Barkley substituting for him on the dais. The time of Truman’s arrival was approximately 11:30 A.M.
Senator Willis of Indiana was just relinquishing the floor. Truman and Barkley shook hands and Truman, taking his seat, handed a few official communications to the reading clerk, who announced them to the Senate. One concerned plans being made by the town of Patton, Pennsylvania, for a welcome-home celebration in honor of General George S. Patton. Another was a request from the legislature of Alaska to increase the reindeer herds in Alaska’s national parks by declaring open season on wolves and coyotes.
Many of those in the chamber were people Truman had known since he first came to the Senate ten years earlier. And for all that the world had changed, all the tumult and tragedy of the war, the old room itself looked much the same, except for a mass of ugly steel girders overhead, supports put up in 1940 to hold an old ceiling that had been on the verge of collapse. They had been installed as a temporary expedient only, but then, because of the war, the restoration work had to be postponed, and so there they remained, “barn rafters,” beneath which the business of the Senate continued.
Senator Hawkes of New Jersey asked for printing in the Congressional Record of a petition from the Order of the Sons of Italy to invite Italy to the forthcoming San Francisco Conference to organize the United Nations. Senator Reed of Kansas asked that nineteen letters and telegrams be printed in the Record, all describing the critical shortage of boxcars for grain shipments. The boxcar situation, said the senator, was the worst he had ever seen; wheat was spoiling on the ground.
The main business before the Senate was the ratification of a water treaty with Mexico, affecting use of the Colorado and Rio Grande. As chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, Senator Connally spoke first, followed by Ernest McFarland of Arizona. Both urged ratification. Truman had a page deliver a note to Republican Senator Saltonstall of Massachusetts, asking Saltonstall to come up and take his place. “I have a Missouri soldier boy in my office,” explained Truman, who promised to be back in no more than an hour. Noticing an apple on the dais, Saltonstall asked what would happen if he ate it.
“You will take the consequences,” Truman said.
Truman had always been a man of his word, Saltonstall would remember, telling the story years later. “He was back in an hour.”
At another point, the Vice President was seen in a friendly huddle with Republicans Wiley of Wisconsin and Wherry of Nebraska. Allen Drury, watching from the press gallery, remarked to Tony Vaccaro of the United Press that Roosevelt was fortunate to have so good a man as Truman to deal with the Senate. Vaccaro, frowning, said Roosevelt would make no use of him. Vaccaro, who had lately been spending time with the Vice President, said, “Truman doesn’t know what’s going on. Roosevelt won’t tell him anything.”
As the record would show, Truman had met with the President exactly twice, except for Cabinet meetings, since becoming Vice President—once on March 8 and again on March 19, ten days before Roosevelt left for Warm Springs—and neither time was anything of consequence discussed.
About midway through the afternoon Senator Alexander Wiley, Republican of Wisconsin, commenced his remarks on the Mexican water issue, speaking not always to the point and in numbing detail when he did:
It may be noted that the report of the Bureau of Reclamation of the problems of the Imperial Valley and vicinity considered that 800,000 acres ultimately would be irrigated in Mexico, and that some storage would be required for this purpose. Under the present duty of water in the Mexico area, the 800,000 acres of land would require a diversion from the river of 4,800,000 acre-feet of water. The aggregate acreage under the two items to which the footnote in the above table applies is…
Truman decided to make other use of his time by writing a letter to his mother and sister, even though he had little news to report:
Dear Mamma and Mary—I am trying to write you a letter today from the desk of the President of the Senate while a windy Senator from Wisconsin is making a speech on a subject with which he is in no way familiar….
Hope you are having a nice spell of weather. We’ve had a week of beautiful weather but it is raining and misting today. I don’t think it’s going to last long. Hope not, for I must fly to Providence, R.I., Sunday morning.
Turn on your radio tomorrow night at 9:30 your time and you’ll hear Harry make a Jefferson Day address to the nation. I think I’ll be on all the networks so it ought not to be hard to get me. It will be followed by the President, whom I’ll introduce.
Hope you are both well and stay that way.
Love to you both.
Write when you can.
Harry
At the conclusion of Wiley’s speech, Barkley moved for a recess. It was four minutes to five by the clock over the main lobby entrance.
Truman came down from the dais, went out through the swinging doors on his left, crossed the Senators’ Private Lobby, and stepped into the Vice President’s office to tell Harry Vaughan that he would be with Sam Rayburn should anybody want him.
Then, eluding his Secret Service guard, the Vice President walked the length of the Capitol, cutting through the Senate Reception Room, out past the eight-foot white marble statue of Benjamin Franklin, down the long, tiled corridor, around “Mark Twain’s Cuspidor” (the columned well of the Senate Rotunda, so named by Twain because of the tobacco leaves on its columns), on through the main rotunda under the dome, through Statuary Hall (the old House Chamber), and briefly along another corridor to a stairway; down the stairs to the ground floor, left down one hall, right down another to Room 9, Sam Rayburn’s private hideaway, known unofficially as “the Board of Education.”
Rayburn, who referred to it simply as “downstairs,” met there for a “libation” every afternoon, once the formal business of “upstairs” was concluded. It was an important part of his day, and to be invited to join him, even once or twice in a term, was considered the sign that one had arrived. Truman was among the regulars.
Moving along at his usual brisk pace, he would have covered the distance from the Vice President’s office in less than three minutes. So it must have been just after five o’clock when he came in.
Though pictured often as small and plain, the room was about 20 feet in length, its ornate ceiling busy with painted birds
and animals. The furnishings, too, were large, comfortable and utilitarian—big, worn black leather chairs, a long couch, a sink, and a large refrigerator that was camouflaged with veneer to more or less match the big desk, where Rayburn kept the whiskey.
Two others were already with the Speaker when Truman arrived, Lewis Deschler, the House Parliamentarian, and James M. Barnes, a staff man at the White House assigned to congressional liaison. The gray afternoon outside was fading, the room growing dim. No one had bothered yet to turn on the lights.
Apparently it was Deschler who reminded Rayburn that Truman had had a call from the White House.
“Steve Early wants you to call him right away,” Rayburn said. Truman mixed himself a drink, then dialed the number, National 1414.
“This is the V.P.,” he said.
Steve Early’s voice sounded tense and strange. Truman was to come to the White House as “quickly and as quietly” as he could, and to enter by the main entrance on Pennsylvania Avenue.
As Lewis Deschler later recounted, Truman lost all his color. “Jesus Christ and General Jackson,” he said, putting down the phone.
He was wanted at the White House right away, he told the others. They must say nothing.
He went out the door alone. Then he began to run, taking a different route. He kept to the ground floor this time, racing down a hall between a double line of bronze and marble Civil War generals and forgotten state governors, his shoes pounding on the marble floor. He ran through the echoing old Crypt, past the Senate barbershop, then up a flight of stairs with brass banisters to his office—to get his hat.
He told Harry Vaughan he was on his way to the White House and to keep that to himself. In minutes he was in the big Mercury with Tom Harty driving, but still no Secret Service guard, moving with all possible speed through the evening traffic. By now it was approximately 5:15 P.M.
What thoughts were rushing through his mind, he never fully revealed. “I thought I was going down there to meet the President,” he later said.
“I didn’t allow myself to think anything else.” To his mother he would write it occurred to him that perhaps Roosevelt had returned from Warm Springs because the retired Episcopal bishop of Arizona, an old friend of the President’s, had been buried that day. “I thought that maybe he wanted me to do some special piece of liaison work with the Congress and had sent for me to see him after the funeral.”
But if this was so, why had he run back to his office? “I ran all the way,” he told her. What did he imagine he was running toward? Or leaving behind?
At the White House, the long black car turned off Pennsylvania, through the northwest gate, and swept up the drive, stopping under the North Portico. The time was 5:25.
Two ushers were waiting at the door. They took his hat and escorted him to a small, oak-paneled elevator, more like an ornate cage, that had been installed in the Theodore Roosevelt era and that ascended now very slowly to the second floor.
In the private quarters, across the center hall, in her sitting room, Mrs. Roosevelt was waiting. With her were Steve Early and her daughter and son-in-law, Anna and John Boettiger. Mrs. Roosevelt stepped forward and gently put her arm on Truman’s shoulder.
“Harry, the President is dead.”
Truman was unable to speak.
“Is there anything I can do for you?” he said at last.
“Is there anything we can do for you,” she said. “For you are the one in trouble now.”
Part Three
To the Best of My Ability
9
The Moon, the Stars, and All the Planets
So ended an era and so began another.
—ALLEN DRURY
I
The news broke at 5:47 P.M., Eastern War Time, April 12, 1945.
International News Service was first on the wire, followed seconds later by the Associated Press, United Press, the four radio networks, and the Armed Forces Radio Service. In New York CBS interrupted a children’s serial about Daniel Boone called “Wilderness Road.” NBC broke into “Front-Page Farrell,” ABC interrupted “Captain Midnight,” and Mutual, “Tom Mix.”
In minutes the bulletin had reached every part of the country and much of the world. The time in London was near midnight. In Berlin, where it was already another day, Friday the 13th, an ecstatic Joseph Goebbels, Nazi propaganda minister, telephoned Hitler personally to proclaim it a turning point written in the stars. In Moscow, the American ambassador, Averell Harriman, was hosting an embassy party when a duty officer called to report what he had heard on a late broadcast on the Armed Forces Radio Service. At the Armed Forces Radio Station in Panama, Sergeant James Weathers, assigned to answer incoming calls, began picking up the phone and answering, “Yes, it’s true,” “Yes, it’s true,” over and over again.
Franklin Roosevelt had died of a cerebral hemorrhage at the “Little White House” in Warm Springs, Georgia, at 4:45 in the afternoon (3:45, Warm Springs time). Two hours earlier, sitting at a card table signing papers, he had complained of a terrific headache, then suddenly collapsed, not to regain consciousness. As many accounts stated, his death at age sixty-three came in an hour of high triumph. “The armies and fleets under his direction as Commander-in-Chief were at the gates of Berlin and the shores of Japan’s home islands…and the cause he represented and led was nearing the conclusive phase of success.”
From the White House, Mrs. Roosevelt sent cables to her four sons in the service, saying their father had done his job to the end, as he would want them to do, a point Steve Early included in the initial White House announcement. To Early and Harry Truman she had also expressed a wish to fly to Warm Springs, but questioned whether it would be proper now for her to use a government plane. Truman, unhesitatingly, said she should. This and the arrival of Secretary of State Stettinius were among the few things he would remember from the scene in her study. Stettinius had appeared in the doorway with tears streaming down his face.
They agreed the Cabinet should be assembled at once and the Chief Justice summoned to administer the oath of office. Truman started downstairs for the West Wing. From the President’s office he telephoned Les Biffle. He wanted the congressional leadership to come at once, and a car sent for Mrs. Truman and Margaret. He then called the apartment and told Bess what had happened. She had not had the radio on. It was the first she had heard.
The West Wing throbbed with activity and tension. Reporters, photographers, White House staff people, the Secret Service, and a few of Truman’s own staff converged from several directions, crowding corridors and offices. Voices were hushed and tense. Telephones kept ringing. In the twilight outside, across Pennsylvania Avenue, in Lafayette Square, thousands of people gathered in silence.
By seven o’clock nearly everyone who was supposed to be there had assembled in the Cabinet Room: Stettinius and Chief Justice Harlan Stone, Sam Rayburn, John McCormack, Joe Martin, Henry Stimson, Henry Wallace, Harold Ickes, Attorney General Francis Biddle, Secretary of Agriculture Claude Wickard, Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal, Julius Krug, War Production Board Administrator, Fred M. Vinson, Director of the Office of War Mobilization, Admiral William Leahy, who was Roosevelt’s personal chief of staff, Bob Hannegan, and Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins, the only woman present until the arrival of Bess and Margaret. Missing were Postmaster General Frank Walker, who was ill, and Alben Barkley, who had decided to stay with Mrs. Roosevelt. Uniformed White House guards were at the doors.
Truman sat by himself in a brown leather chair, looking dreadful, “absolutely dazed.” When Bess came in, he crossed the room and took her hand. Little was said by anyone. Then, for what seemed an extremely long time, they all stood waiting while several of the staff went in search of a Bible. “It was a very somber group,” Stimson would record.
Bess, who had been crying almost from the moment she heard the news, dabbed repeatedly at her eyes with a handkerchief. Margaret would remember feeling as if she were going under anesthesia. None of it seemed qui
te real.
The only Bible to be found was an inexpensive Gideon edition with garish red edging to the pages. It had been in the desk drawer of the fastidious head usher, Howell Crim, a short, stooped, bald-headed man who now made sure it was properly dusted before placing it on the table. Truman would later tell his mother he could have brought Grandpa Truman’s Bible from his office bookcase had he only known.
He and Justice Stone took their places by the marble mantelpiece at the end of the room, beneath a portrait of Woodrow Wilson. Bess, Margaret, and the others filed in around them. A few reporters, photographers, and newsreel cameramen were told to come in. One of the staff recalled much milling about and confusion. The time on the clock on the mantel was 7:09, 2 hours and 24 minutes since Roosevelt’s death.
Truman glanced at the clock. “It said nine past seven when I started to swear the oath—I remember,” he later said. “I looked at it. And I remember the faces all around me….”
He picked up the Bible and held it in his left hand. He raised his right hand.
“I, Harry Shipp Truman,” Justice Stone began.
“I, Harry S. Truman,” Truman corrected him.
“…do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of the President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”
“So help you God,” added the Chief Justice.
“So help me God.”