Harry Truman Read online

  “Is there anything I can do for you?” Dad asked.

  Mrs. Roosevelt shook her head. “Is there anything we can do for you?” she asked. “For you are the one in trouble now.”

  Dad’s first reaction was a tremendous surge of sympathy and grief. My father had disagreed with some of President Roosevelt’s policies, but the disagreements were minor. His admiration for the man as a political leader, as the creator of the modern Democratic Party, was immense. No matter what office Dad held, he would have been grieved by the President’s death. Now, in the presence of Mrs. Roosevelt’s calm courage, and the awful knowledge of what the news meant to him personally, grief and awe and shock combined to create emotions of terrible intensity.

  Yet, within minutes, my father began making decisions. Here, in a passage which he omitted from the April 16 letter to his mother, part of which he published in his memoirs, he tells the events of the next hour:

  Just at this time the Secretary of State came in and he and Early thought a Cabinet meeting should be called at once so I authorized the Sec. of State to notify all the members of the Cabinet to report to the Cabinet Room at 6:15. I told Mrs. Roosevelt and her daughter and son-in-law that anything necessary to be done for their help and convenience would be done. Mrs. R. said she wanted to fly to Warm Springs that evening and did I think it would be proper for her to use a government plane. I told her that as soon as I was sworn in I would order that all the facilities of the government should be at her command until the funeral was over. That wasn’t necessary, but it made her feel that her using the plane was all right.

  I went to the Cabinet Room and was the first to arrive. They came in one at a time. Madm. Perkins [Frances Perkins, the Secretary of Labor] was the second or third to come in. She hadn’t heard the news which had been released and broadcast two minutes after I left Mrs. Roosevelt.

  As soon as all the Cabinet members in town had arrived, I made a formal statement, asking them to remain in their respective offices.

  Mr. Biffle, the secretary of the Senate, came to the White House right away and helped me get Bess and Margaret to the White House.

  I sent for the Pres. Pro Tempore of the Senate, the Majority Leader, Mr. Barkley, the Minority Leader, Mr. White, the Chm. of the Foreign Relations Committee, Mr. Connally, the Speaker of the House, Mr. Rayburn, the Majority Leader of the House, Mr. McCormack, the Minority Leader of the House, Mr. Martin, Mr. Ramspeck, the House whip, and one or two others from each of the legislative branches.

  I instructed the Attorney General, Mr. Biddle, to call the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court to come at once and administer the oath of office to me and if he could not get the Chief Justice to get Mr. Justice Jackson to come.

  I think these crisp words convey, better than anything I could write, the image of a man who was, in spite of his grief, taking charge as a national leader.

  My father personally called Mother and me from the President’s office in the west wing of the White House. In a party mood, I started to tease him about not coming home to dinner, grandly informing him I was going out. Miraculously, Dad did not lose his temper. He simply told me in a voice of steel to put Mother on the line.

  I went back into my bedroom to finish dressing. I was vaguely aware Mother had hung up rather abruptly. It wasn’t like her and Dad to have such brief conversations. Suddenly Mother was standing in the door of my bedroom with tears streaming down her face. My Grandmother Wallace, who shared the bedroom with me, gasped, when Mother, in a choked voice, told us President Roosevelt was dead.

  The next two hours were lived in a kind of daze. Things were seen, thought, felt, and heard with a strange mixture of confusion and clarity. It was rather like going under or coming out of anesthesia, or recovering from a blow on the head. I felt totally dazed, but certain things, sometimes important details, sometimes minor ones, leaped into focus with almost blinding clarity. I remember calling my boyfriend, Marvin Braverman, and telling him why I couldn’t keep our date, and his voice echoing the news back to me over the wire: “Dead!” I remember our doorbell ringing. I answered it in my slip - I was changing from my party dress - and found myself talking to a woman reporter from the Associated Press. I slammed the door in her face. Minutes later, Secret Service men arrived to inform us there was a big crowd gathering outside the apartment building. We went out the back door to avoid them, but some of the smart curiosity seekers were waiting for us there, along with numerous photographers. Flashbulbs exploded all around us, and for a moment I felt very angry. But Mother calmly ignored them. She steered me into the back seat of the car, and we headed for the White House.

  After visiting Mrs. Roosevelt to express our sympathy, Mother and I went to the Cabinet Room, where all the members of the Cabinet except Postmaster General Frank Walker were assembled, along with the political leaders of Congress whom my father had summoned. Only Alben Barkley was absent. He had elected to stay with Mrs. Roosevelt. The White House staff was searching frantically for a Bible. Dad would have preferred to use his family Bible, which was in his office bookcase. But there was no time to send someone to get it. Finally, in William Hassett’s office, the searchers found a small, inexpensive Bible with red-edged pages, which had been sent to the correspondence secretary as a gift. William D. Simmons, the burly chief White House receptionist, apologized to my father for its rather garish style. But that was the least of Dad’s worries at that moment. He assured Simmons it was fine.

  My father was now ready to take the oath. He was standing beneath the portrait of Woodrow Wilson, one of his presidential heroes. Chief Justice Harlan F. Stone stepped to the end of the long Cabinet table. My father picked up the Bible in his left hand. Beneath his thumb, he held a small piece of paper, on which the presidential oath of office was typed. After the ceremony, he gave it to me. It is a very interesting historic souvenir.

  Chief Justice Stone began, “I, Harry Shippe Truman . . .”

  Dad raised his right hand and responded, “I, Harry S. Truman, 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 Chief Justice Stone, indicating his own deep emotion. These words are not part of the official oath, but they were used spontaneously by George Washington when he took his first oath of office.

  “So help me God,” said Dad and solemnly raised the Bible to his lips.

  This, too, was something George Washington had done. The time on the clock beneath Woodrow Wilson’s picture was 7:09.

  MOTHER AND I left the White House immediately after my father took the oath. He stayed to conduct a brief meeting of the Cabinet. Dad sat down in the raised chair at the head of the table for the first time. Before he could speak, Steve Early, the press secretary, came in and said the reporters wanted to know if the San Francisco Conference on the United Nations would begin as scheduled on April 25. Tom Connally, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, had issued a wholly unnecessary statement predicting a postponement. Without hesitation, my father told Early he considered the conference crucial to winning the peace. The press secretary departed to give this message to the newsmen.

  My father then spoke briefly and solemnly to the Cabinet members. He assured them he intended to carry out President Roosevelt’s foreign and domestic policies. But he also told them he was going to be “President in my own right.” He told them he wanted their advice and they should not hesitate to differ with him, whenever they felt it was necessary. But he was going to make the final decisions. Again, in this brief scene, there is the unmistakable note of a man taking charge, a man who knew what it meant to be President and was determined to do his utmost to live up to the responsibilities of the job Dad always called “the greatest in the world.”

  After the Cabinet meeting, Secretary of War Henry Stimson stayed behind. In a low, tense voice he told my father he had an extremely ur
gent matter to discuss with him. Briefly, with a minimum of details, he described a weapon of enormous explosive power on which the United States had been working for years. He did not use the term “atomic bomb,” which left Dad more puzzled than informed. The main impact of the conversation was to add a lot more weight to the already enormous responsibility on Dad’s shoulders.

  For another few minutes, my father discussed with Secretary of State Stettinius and White House press secretary Steve Early and Jonathan Daniels the need to reassure our Allies and the world that our support of the San Francisco Conference was unchanged. Dad directed Steve Early to issue a formal statement, making this clear. But he wisely declined to hold a press conference, although the White House correspondents were clamoring for one. Escorted by a small army of Secret Service men, he went out to his car and drove home to our apartment.

  Mother and I were still in a state of shock. If he had depended upon us for food and drink, he would have starved to death - and the poor man was starving. It was now almost 9:30 p.m. and he had had nothing to eat since noon. Fortunately, the parents of my friend Annette Davis, who was having the birthday party, had canceled their celebration. They fed Mother and me, and when Dad arrived home, we were sitting in their apartment talking. He joined us, and Mrs. Davis gave him a man-sized turkey and ham sandwich and a glass of milk.

  With that astonishing equilibrium which he never loses in moments of crisis, my father ate this impromptu supper and then calmly announced he was going to bed. From his bedroom, he called his mother in Grandview. Mamma Truman had, of course, heard the news by now. With the help of Dad’s brother Vivian, she had been fending off a cascade of phone calls from reporters. My father assured her he was all right, but for the next several days he was going to be very busy. It would be a while before she had a letter from him. Actually, it would only be four days. Then, what is most phenomenal to an insomniac like me, Dad turned out the light, slipped under the covers and was asleep within five minutes.

  The next morning, Friday, April 13, he began his first full day as President. Thank goodness he is not a superstitious man. He was up at 6:30, had his usual light breakfast, and then chatted for a half hour or so with Hugh Fulton, the former chief counsel of the Truman Committee. Poor Fulton was suffering from what Dad calls “Potomac fever.” Basically, this very common Washington disease involves delusions of grandeur and an itch for power and publicity. The news that my father had become President had aroused the virus in Fulton, in its most acute form. Dad soon learned from friends that Fulton was telling everyone in Washington he was going to be the acting President - the implication being that Harry S. Truman did not have the talent to do the job. Although they parted amicably enough that morning, Fulton was never offered an official post in the White House.

  As my father got into his car, surrounded by the inevitable swarms of Secret Service men, he saw one of his old friends, Associated Press reporter Tony Vacarro, standing nearby. He invited him to hop in, and they rode down to the White House together. He got there a little after 8:30 a.m. At nine sharp, Eddie McKim and Matt Connelly arrived. Dad had called them the night before, from the White House, and told them to be there at this time.

  My father apologized profusely for forgetting to invite Eddie to the ceremony the previous night. Eddie stood in front of Dad’s desk, completely at a loss for words for the first time in his life.

  “Well, Mr. President,” he said, shifting from one foot to another, “it doesn’t count what’s gone before. What counts is what happens now.” Then he just stood there, while Dad stared at him in astonishment.

  “Do you have to stand there?” Dad asked.

  “Well, Mr. President, I suddenly find myself in the presence of the President of the United States and I don’t know how to act!”

  It was Dad’s first glimpse of the tremendous awe with which so many people regarded the presidency. “Come on over here and sit down,” he said.

  Eddie obeyed, and Dad asked, “Do you have to go home?”

  “Well - I was leaving this afternoon for Omaha.”

  “Well,” Dad said, “I need you. Stick around a while. I need some help.”

  From the very first moment of the first day, my father understood the importance of having men around him who were personally loyal to him. He had no illusions that the deep devotion Roosevelt’s staff felt for him could be transferred to a new President. Dad had the same attitude toward the Cabinet, but there he knew it would be necessary to make the transition more gradually because Cabinet appointments involved Congress and the President’s political relationship to the nation.

  Matt Connelly brought with him the letters my father never had gotten around to signing the previous day. One of them was a letter to Olive Truman, the wife of his cousin Ralph. After signing it, Dad scribbled the following postscript: “I’ve really had a blow since this was dictated. But I’ll have to meet it. Hope it won’t cause the family too much trouble.”

  That morning my father saw Secretary of State Stettinius and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Secretaries of War and the Navy, and Admiral William D. Leahy, who functioned as President Roosevelt’s Chief of Staff in the White House. Dad immediately asked the Secretary of State for a thorough report on the major foreign policy problems of the United States, particularly in Europe. By that afternoon, it was in his hands, and it made grim reading. Relations with Russia had deteriorated disastrously since the Yalta Conference. The Joint Chiefs of Staff expected the war with Germany to last another six months, and the war with Japan another eighteen months. Both predictions were, of course, wrong. In little more than four months, the President and the nation would be catapulted into the postwar era.

  After the Joint Chiefs left, Admiral Leahy stayed behind to ask my father if he wanted him to remain on the job. The Admiral was as crusty an old sea dog as they come. He had graduated from Annapolis in 1897 and rounded Cape Horn in a sailing ship in 1898. He had no illusions about the saltiness of his own character and was not at all sure Dad could take him, ungarnished, as it were. He was the first but by no means the last public official to misjudge President Harry S. Truman.

  “Are you sure you want me, Mr. President? I always say what’s on my mind.”

  “I want the truth,” Dad told him. “I want the facts at all times. I want you to stay with me and always to tell me what’s on your mind. You may not always agree with my decisions, but I know you will carry them out faithfully.”

  The Admiral was surprised - pleasantly surprised. “You have my pledge,” he told Dad. “You can count on me.”

  At noon that day, my father went up to the Capitol and lunched with thirteen key senators and four representatives. In some personal memoranda he made at the end of the day, he noted that by the time the luncheon was over, and he went back to the White House he had seen “all the senators.” He added he was “most overcome” by the affection and encouragement they had showered on him.

  At the time, many people regarded this as simply a sentimental gesture. But my father knew exactly what he was doing. He was trying to bridge the chasm which had opened between the White House and the Senate. Later that day, Senator Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan, the leading Republican internationalist and a key figure in the American delegation to the San Francisco UN Conference, wrote in his diary: “Truman came back to the Senate this noon for lunch with a few of us. It shattered all tradition. But it was both wise and smart. It means that the days of executive contempt for Congress are ended; that we are returning to a government in which Congress will take its rightful place.” With obvious pleasure, Senator Vandenberg added that at Dad’s request General Vaughan had sent him the last box of cigars they had in the old vice presidential office, with Dad’s card. On the card General Vaughan had written, “Our swan song.”

  The main purpose of the luncheon, aside from healing political wounds, was to discuss with the Senate and House leaders my father’s desire to address a joint session of Congress on the following Monday. Su
rprisingly, several of the senators thought this was a bad idea. They seemed to feel Dad should not expose himself so soon to a comparison with President Roosevelt’s undoubtedly superior oratorical gifts. My father listened politely to these and other objections and then quietly informed them he was coming, and they had better prepare themselves for his visit.

  Later that afternoon, my father conferred with Jimmy Byrnes. He had resigned as assistant president five days before Roosevelt’s death and returned to South Carolina. James Forrestal, the Secretary of the Navy, had telephoned Byrnes from the White House on the night of President Roosevelt’s death and sent a government plane to South Carolina to fly him to Washington - two rather startling gestures, wholly unauthorized by Dad.

  Nevertheless, my father was glad to see Byrnes for several reasons. Perhaps most important, Byrnes had accompanied Roosevelt to Yalta and had taken extensive shorthand notes of the conference. Dad desperately needed to know, as soon as possible, all the agreements and the nuances of the agreements Roosevelt had made at this crucial meeting. For more than a half hour, my father queried Byrnes intensively on Yalta, Teheran, and other conferences between Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin. As they talked, my father decided to make Byrnes his Secretary of State.

  Dad’s chief reason was his concern over presidential succession. According to the Constitution at that time, the Secretary of State was next in line to succeed the vice president. But my father was convinced that any successor to the President should be an elected official, not an appointed one. The fact that Edward Stettinius was Secretary of State made Dad’s concern on this point even more acute. Stettinius had never even been a candidate for elective office. Byrnes had been a senator from South Carolina, had served briefly as a Supreme Court Justice, and then had gone to the White House as Roosevelt’s chief assistant on the home front. He was eminently qualified to serve as President. Finally, my father felt this appointment - the highest he had in his power to dispose - might mitigate the bitter disappointment Byrnes obviously felt over FDR’s failure to back him for the vice presidency in Chicago.