His “sharp features taut,” as a reporter noted, Truman looked straight ahead through his thick, round glasses. The sudden, fervent way he kissed the Bible at the end of the ceremony impressed everyone present. It had all taken not more than a minute.
Afterward he asked the Cabinet to remain.
They were assembled about the table when Steve Early came in to say the press wanted to know if the San Francisco Conference on the United Nations would open as planned in twelve days, on April 25. As several in the room knew, Roosevelt had often sat alone at the same table looking at the Wilson portrait, pondering the tragedy of Wilson’s failure to create the League of Nations. The answer was emphatically yes, Truman said, making his first decision as President.
In his brief remarks to the Cabinet he said he intended to carry on with Roosevelt’s program and hoped they would all stay on the job. He welcomed their advice. He did not doubt that they would differ with him if they felt it necessary, but final decisions would be his and he expected their support once decisions were made.
Stimson, the senior member, said it was time to close ranks. When the meeting ended, Stimson remained behind. There was a matter of utmost urgency to be discussed, he told Truman. It concerned a new explosive of unbelievable power. But he gave no further details, which left Truman no better informed than before.
In his diary later that night, Stimson wrote that the new President had conducted himself admirably, considering the shock he had been through and how little he knew.
Truman, before leaving for home, remembered that Eddie McKim was in town and that they had a date to play poker that night at McKim’s room at the Statler. “I guess the party’s off,” Truman said, once the White House operator had McKim on the line.
By 9:30 he was back at 4701 Connecticut Avenue. Bess, Margaret, and Mrs. Wallace, he found, had gone to the apartment of neighbors next door, a general named Davis and his wife, where they were lingering over the remains of a turkey and cake. Margaret remembered her father saying little except that he had had nothing to eat since noon. Mrs. Davis fixed him a turkey sandwich and a glass of milk. Shortly, he excused himself, went to the apartment, and called his mother to tell her he was all right and not to worry. He then went to bed and, he later said, immediately to sleep.
Automobile traffic and streetcars passed beneath his open window as though nothing were different. People walking by took no more interest in the building than on other nights. Other residents, coming or going, some with dogs on leashes, were surprised to find reporters in the lobby and Secret Service men standing about.
The reporters had taken over two couches beside a stone fireplace. In a corner was the telephone switchboard for the building and a bank of mailboxes. Box 209 carried a printed card, “Mr. and Mrs. Harry S. Truman,” with “Margaret Truman” handwritten in ink below. The switchboard operator said she regretted very much that the Trumans would be leaving. “Such lovely people,” she said.
A widely repeated story in Washington that the switchboard at 4701 Connecticut Avenue was the busiest in town that night—because news of Roosevelt’s death and Truman’s swearing in meant there would soon be an apartment available in the building—is apparently apocryphal.
To the country, the Congress, the Washington bureaucracy, to hundreds of veteran New Dealers besides those who had gathered in the Cabinet Room, to much of the military high command, to millions of American men and women overseas, the news of Franklin Roosevelt’s death, followed by the realization that Harry Truman was President, struck like massive earth tremors in quick succession, the thought of Truman in the White House coming with the force of a shock wave. To many it was not just that the greatest of men had fallen, but that the least of men—or at any rate the least likely of men—had assumed his place.
“Good God, Truman will be President,” it was being said everywhere. “If Harry Truman can be President, so could my next-door neighbor.” People were fearful about the future of the country, fearful the war would drag on longer now. “What a great, great tragedy. God help us all,” wrote David Lilienthal, head of TVA. The thought of Truman made him feel physically ill. “The country and the world don’t deserve to be left this way….”
The fact that Roosevelt had died like Lincoln in the last stages of a great war, and like Lincoln in April, almost to the day, were cited as measures both of Roosevelt’s greatness and the magnitude of the tragedy. But implicit also was the thought that Lincoln, too, had been succeeded by a lackluster, so-called “common man,” the ill-fated Andrew Johnson.
Stettinius, who as Secretary of State was next in line now to succeed to the presidency, wondered privately if the parallel was not closer to what followed Woodrow Wilson, after the last war, if the country was in for another Harding administration, with cheap courthouse politicians taking over.
Senators, according to the conventional wisdom, didn’t make strong presidents. Harding had been the only other President drawn from the Senate thus far in the century and the feeling was he had been taken from the bottom of the barrel. Theodore Roosevelt, Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, even Coolidge had all been governors. And governors, from experience, knew something about running things.
In a house at Marburg, Germany, three American generals, Eisenhower, Bradley, and Patton, sat up much of the night talking about Roosevelt and speculating on the sort of man Truman might be. All three were greatly depressed. “From a distance Truman did not appear at all qualified to fill Roosevelt’s large shoes,” Bradley wrote. Patton was bitter and more emphatic. “It seems very unfortunate that in order to secure political preference, people are made Vice President who are never intended, neither by Party nor by the Lord to be Presidents.”
It had been an unusually difficult day for the three commanders, even before the news about Roosevelt. They had seen their first Nazi death camp, Ohrdruf-Nord, near Gotha. As they bid good night to one another, an aide recalled Eisenhower looking deeply shaken.
For thousands of men in the ranks, as for many at home, the question was not so much was Truman qualified, as who was he.
In the chill of dawn in Germany, a private named Lester Atwell remembered, his battalion had been lined up for breakfast beside a country road:
“Men”—an officer came quickly along the line…“I have an announcement to make: President Roosevelt died last night.”
“What?” You heard it from all sides. “What? President Roosevelt? Roosevelt’s dead?” We were astounded.
The officer’s voice continued. “We don’t know any particulars, except that he’s dead. I think it was very sudden. Probably a stroke. Truman, the Vice-President, will take over.”
“Who? Who’d he say?”
“Truman, ya dumb bastard. Who the hell you think?”
There were some, however, who, facing the prospect of a Truman presidency, felt confident the country was in good hands. They knew the man, they said. They understood his origins. They had seen how he handled responsibility and knew the inner resources he could draw on. As before and later in his life, confidence in Harry Truman was greatest among those who knew him best.
“Truman is honest and patriotic and has a head full of good horse sense. Besides, he has guts,” wrote John Nance Garner to Sam Rayburn, who was himself assuring reporters that Truman would make a good, sound President “by God,” because, “He’s got the stuff in him.” To arch-Republican Arthur Vandenberg, writing the night of April 12, Truman was “a grand person with every good intention and high honesty of purpose.” Could Truman “swing the job?” Vandenberg speculated in his diary. “I think he can.”
Asked years later what his feelings were when he realized Truman was President, John J. McCloy, the Assistant Secretary of War, said, “Oh, I felt good. Because I knew him. I knew the kind of man he was.”
Assistant Secretary of State Dean Acheson wrote to his son in the Navy that as a consequence of a long, recent meeting with Truman he had a definite impression:
He was straightforward
, decisive, simple, entirely honest. He, of course, has the limitations upon his judgment and wisdom that the limitations of his experience produce, but I think that he will learn fast and will inspire confidence. It seems to me a blessing that he is the President and not Henry Wallace.
Even I. F. Stone of The Nation, long an outspoken Wallace supporter, would write: “I hate to confess it, but I think Mr. Roosevelt was astute and farsighted in picking Mr. Truman rather than Mr. Wallace as his successor. At this particular moment in our history, Mr. Truman can do a better job.”
At home in Independence, editor William Southern wrote in the Examiner that the country was “in the hands of an honorable man, not just a politician.”
Among such old faithfuls as Eddie McKim, Ted Marks, John Snyder, Jim Pendergast, and Eddie Jacobson, there was never a doubt. “GET IN THERE AND PITCH. YOU CAN HANDLE IT,” Jim Pendergast cabled immediately from Kansas City. “I wish people knew him as I do,” Eddie Jacobson told a reporter.
At Grandview a day or so later, questioned by reporters, the mother of the new President offered as fair and memorable a comment as any: “I can’t really be glad he’s President because I am sorry President Roosevelt is dead. If he had been voted in, I would be out waving a flag, but it doesn’t seem right to be very happy or wave any flags now. Harry will get along all right.”
Truman was immensely pleased and proud of her. Her statement was “a jewel,” he wrote in his diary. “If it had been prepared by [the] best public relations [advisers] it could not have been better.”
Only gradually would he reveal his own feelings, making plain that if anyone was stunned by the turn of fate, or worried over the future, or distressed by the inadequacies of the man stepping into the place of Franklin Roosevelt, it was Harry Truman.
At the White House the difference was felt at once. Arriving at 9:00 the next morning at the West Wing, where a cluster of reporters were waiting, Truman stepped from the big White House Cadillac followed by Tony Vaccaro of the Associated Press. Vaccaro had gone early to the Connecticut Avenue apartment. He had been standing alone on the curb outside the building hoping to catch a glimpse of the new President as he started off for his first day. Truman told him to hop in if he wanted a ride.
“There have been few men in all history the equal of the man into whose shoes I am stepping,” Truman had said as they headed downtown. “I pray God I can measure up to the task."
It was Friday, April 13, 1945, twenty-seven years to the day since he landed at Brest as a First Lieutenant in the American Expeditionary Force.
In the President’s office everything was as Roosevelt left it, the arrangement of furniture, his ship models, his naval prints on the apple green walls. Only the desk had been touched, cleared of its pictures and knick-knacks by Jonathan Daniels of the Roosevelt staff, who stood by waiting now as Truman came in. He felt the presence of Roosevelt acutely, Truman later wrote, and so did Daniels, whose personal ties to Roosevelt went back to World War I, when his father, Josephus Daniels, the Secretary of the Navy, had been Roosevelt’s boss. “It seemed still Roosevelt’s desk and Roosevelt’s room,” Daniels remembered. “It seemed to me, indeed, almost Roosevelt’s sun which came in the wide south windows and touched Truman’s thick glasses.” He watched as Truman sat in the President’s high-backed leather chair, rolled back and forth, turned, leaned back, as if testing it, and he thought how pathetically undersized Truman looked.
The first visitor was Eddie McKim. “Eddie, I’m sorry as hell about last night,” Truman greeted him, getting up from the desk. McKim, who was extremely nervous and straining at formality, felt he must remain standing as Truman sat down again. He didn’t know what to do in front of a President, McKim blurted. Truman told him to come over and have a chair. When McKim remarked that he would be heading home that afternoon, Truman asked him to stay on, saying, “I need you.”
He saw Secretary Stettinius twice, for forty-five minutes that morning and again at the end of the day. (At the conclusion of the morning meeting Truman asked Stettinius for a written report summarizing diplomatic problems in Europe and said he wanted it by the close of business.) Stimson, Marshall, Leahy, Forrestal, and Admiral Ernest J. King came in about an hour before noon to sketch in general terms the status of the war. And beginning about three o’clock he talked about “everything from Teheran to Yalta…everything under the sun,” with Jimmy Byrnes, who had flown in from Spartanburg, South Carolina, the night before, as soon as he heard the news.
The White House was in a state of chaos meanwhile. Several of the Roosevelt staff had been up all night making arrangements for the funeral. Reporters jammed the press room and lobby. The President was granting no interviews, they were told, yet apparently the President was taking almost any out-of-town call from friends. Once Byrnes departed, the door was opened to Roy Roberts of the Kansas City Star, who squeezed his immense bulk into one of the maple armchairs beside the President’s desk to carry on a half hour conversation that resulted in a widely syndicated article in which Roberts made much of the fact that Truman was the typical, average American. “What a test of democracy if it works!” he wrote.
But the big surprise of the day came at noon, when suddenly, defying tradition, Truman left the White House and drove to the Hill, saying he wanted to be with his friends. A lunch had been arranged in Les Biffle’s office for a select seventeen from both parties and both houses, but mostly from the Senate. Truman arrived at the Capitol with full presidential entourage—cars, police, Secret Service—and walked surrounded by armed men down halls where only the day before he had walked free and alone. The lunch was private, reporters excluded. Pale and tense-looking, Truman took a drink and insisted on informality. The meal was salmon, cornbread, peas, and potatoes, and soon most of the group were calling him “Harry” again. He wanted to tell them in person, he said, that he needed their help in a “terrible job.” He felt overwhelmed and he didn’t mind saying so. What did they think of an address to a joint session on Monday, after the funeral? There was some discussion and indecision. He told them he would be coming and to prepare for it.
When, the lunch over, he came out into the hall still looking tense, a crowd of reporters stood waiting. “Isn’t this nice,” Truman said, his eyes suddenly filling with tears. “This is really nice.” In his years in the Senate he had made no enemies among the working press. Reporters liked him, he was relaxed, easy with them, liked them individually, considered several real friends.
“Boys, if you ever pray, pray for me now. I don’t know whether you fellows ever had a load of hay fall on you, but when they told me yesterday what had happened, I felt like the moon, the stars, and all the planets had fallen on me.”
“For just a moment he had taken us into his confidence,” wrote Allen Drury, “and shown us frankly the frightening thing that had happened to him—shown us, who represented something, a free and easy camaraderie and naturalness to which he knew he could never, for the rest of his life, quite return.” Also, for a new, untried President to have come to the Hill in such fashion seemed an auspicious first move. “Characteristically he came to them. He did not, this first time, ask them to come to him,” wrote Drury.
To Republican Arthur Vandenberg, Truman’s surprise appearance on the Hill marked an end to years of “executive contempt for Congress” under Roosevelt. But among Roosevelt’s people, the reaction was altogether different, as Jonathan Daniels recorded. They took it as a sign of regression, from a strong, independent presidency to a lonely, perhaps subservient one. Daniels himself felt crushed and resentful, anything but admiring of Truman.
Signing his first official document late the afternoon of his first day, a proclamation announcing Roosevelt’s death, he felt strange writing his name, Harry S. Truman, President of the United States. Had he come into the office in normal fashion, there would have been two months grace after election day, time in which to get used to the idea and prepare himself. As it was, he had no time. He was President now and woul
d be all the rest of the day, and all night, and all tomorrow and the next day and the next. He had been through the morning papers before breakfast. The war news ran on for pages. Ninth Army tanks had pushed beyond the Elbe River, nearly to the suburbs of Berlin. At some points, American and Russian forces were only seventy-five miles apart. The terrible Battle of Berlin was nearing its climax. In the Pacific, American infantry had landed on Bohol, last of the central Philippines still in enemy control. In one huge daylight raid more than four hundred B-29 Superfortresses had bombed Tokyo for two hours.
As the morning papers reported, the war thus far had cost 196,999 American lives, which, as Truman knew, was more than three times American losses in his own earlier war. The new total for American casualties in all categories—killed, wounded, missing, and prisoners—was 899,390, an increase in just one week of 6,481, or an average of more than 900 casualties a day. In the Pacific the cost of victory was rising steadily.
And he, not Roosevelt, was responsible now. He was the Commander in Chief—of armed forces exceeding 16 million men and women, of the largest naval armada in history, of 10 battleships, 27 aircraft carriers, 45 cruisers, of more planes, tanks, guns, money, and technology than ever marshaled by any one nation in all history, and in the critical last act of the most terrible war of all time. In their report that morning, the Chiefs of Staff had said fighting in Europe could last six months longer; in the Pacific, possibly another year and a half.
And what would follow? What might peace bring? Relations with Russia were deteriorating rapidly. The State Department report provided by Stettinius was hardly encouraging: “Since the Yalta Conference, the Soviet Government has taken a firm and uncompromising position on nearly every major question….” In Poland, now occupied by Soviet forces, the situation was “highly unsatisfactory,” with Soviet authorities failing repeatedly to keep agreements made at Yalta. The Russians were trying to “complicate the problem” by supporting their own Warsaw Provisional Polish Government to speak for Poland. There was no exchange of liberated prisoners. Direct appeals to Stalin had had little effect.