Harry Truman Read online

  On Sunday, April 22, the Soviet foreign minister arrived in Washington. He called on my father at Blair House that evening after dinner. Dad told him he “hoped that the relations which President Roosevelt had established between our two countries would be maintained.” Molotov expressed a similar sentiment and said he thought the Crimean decisions were “sufficiently clear” to overcome any difficulties which had arisen. He also wanted to know whether the agreements in regard to the “Far Eastern situation” still stood. Dad replied that he intended to carry out all of the agreements made by President Roosevelt.

  After drinking a toast to the three heads of state, Molotov departed with Ambassador Harriman and Secretary of State Stettinius. At the State Department, they were joined by Anthony Eden, the British foreign secretary, and they proceeded to get down to the hard facts about the future of Poland. The American and British spokesmen got nowhere with the stubborn Russian foreign minister. He absolutely refused to make any concessions to liberalize the Polish government. My father learned about this the next morning, and he immediately convened another top-secret meeting. For this crucial conference, he called in Secretary of War Stimson, Secretary of the Navy Forrestal, Admiral Leahy, General Marshall, Admiral King, Assistant Secretary of State James Dunn, General John R. Dearie, head of the military mission in Moscow, and Bohlen. Secretary of State Stettinius opened the meeting by reporting on his conversations with Molotov. He said it was “now clear that the Soviet government intended to try to enforce upon the United States and British governments” their puppet government in Poland and obtain its legal acceptance. Speaking very emphatically, Dad said he felt that agreements with the Soviet Union so far had been a “one-way street” and that could not continue. If the Russians did not wish to cooperate “they could go to hell.”

  A great deal has been made about this statement, but we must remember this was a remark my father made in private, surrounded by his top advisers. Some historians have a bad tendency to confuse presidential remarks made in private letters or conversations and the public policy of a President. For instance, Thomas Jefferson once remarked in a private letter to James Madison that every society ought to have a revolution every nineteen or twenty years. Madison demolished this theory in his reply, and Jefferson never mentioned it again, in public or in private. When he was confronted with a real revolution, led by Aaron Burr, President Jefferson reacted with angry vigor to maintain the authority of the American government.

  Similarly, although my father was privately angry with Molotov and determined to be firm, he never for a moment used intemperate or insulting language with him. He was blunt about telling him what he thought Russia should do. But this was precisely what he thought Roosevelt would have done in his place - and what all his top advisers, who had been Roosevelt’s advisers, felt he should do. His conversation with Molotov at 5:30 on April 24, 1945, makes this very clear.

  Practically everything Molotov said was pure double-talk. He discoursed on the importance of finding a common language to settle “inevitable difficulties.” He said his government stood by the “Crimean decisions,” but whenever my father asked him to apply these decisions to Poland, Molotov began talking about Yugoslavia. Not once throughout this labyrinth of evasion did Dad lose his temper. He reiterated that he desired the friendship of the Soviet government, but it could only be on the basis of “mutual observation of agreements and not on the basis of a oneway street.”

  Huffily, Molotov said, “I have never been talked to like that in my life.”

  “Carry out your agreements and you won’t get talked to like that,” Dad replied.

  At the end of the conference, my father handed Molotov a carefully worded statement, which he proposed to release that evening, calling on the Russians to fulfill their agreement on Poland. He asked Molotov to transmit it to Marshal Stalin immediately.

  I do not see how an objective observer can find anything but the right combination of firmness and frankness in Dad’s side of this historic conversation. We must remember, too, Molotov was no shrinking violet who might wither at a single harsh word. He was a tough, blunt, sarcastic character in his own right, a man who soon demonstrated at San Francisco his enormous capacity for being unpleasant in public. There may, in fact, be some grounds for blaming him for the early stages of the cold war. Many of the Americans who dealt with him remain convinced that he invariably gave Marshal Stalin the worst possible version of his negotiations with the United States and Britain.

  While he stayed in Lee House, next door to us in Blair House, Molotov provided lots of material for light conversation as well as serious reflection. He and his associates had a habit of staying up most of the night, a way of life they had apparently acquired during the revolution. They constantly startled the Secret Service by wandering into the Blair House garden at three and four o’clock in the morning. Whenever one of his suits came back from the cleaners, Molotov’s valet turned all the pockets inside out to make sure there were no concealed bombs. One of his bodyguards insisted on standing watch whenever the Blair House staff made the foreign minister’s bed. Dad noticed that Molotov never sat with his back to a door or window. His eating habits also caused mild consternation among the Blair House staff. The first morning his breakfast consisted of salad and soup. This, we later learned, was not an unusual breakfast for a Russian. But it made Molotov seem even stranger to those of us who were seeing a representative of Russia at close range for the first time.

  Two days after he saw Molotov, my father had an even more momentous conference with Secretary of War Stimson. He informed Dad in detail about the project to create the atomic bomb.

  The brief discussion of the bomb that Stimson had with Dad, a half hour after he became President, covered little more than a general description of the weapon’s power and its possible impact on the war. Major General Leslie Groves, who was in charge of the Manhattan Project, joined the meeting by entering the White House through the back door. This was typical of the super-secrecy with which the whole operation was shrouded. Stimson handed my father a memorandum which began, “Within four months we shall in all probability have completed the most terrible weapon ever known in human history, one bomb which could destroy a whole city.” The report went on to discuss in very wary terms the possibility that other nations could produce the bomb, adding, “Probably the only nation that could enter into production in the next few years is Russia.”

  Stimson feared that, in the state of moral achievement which the world had reached, the bomb was simply too dangerous to handle. He was afraid modern civilization might be “completely destroyed.” He also felt the new weapon was “a primary question of our foreign relations.” In their ensuing conversation, after my father finished reading this thoughtful, wide-ranging memorandum, Secretary Stimson added that if the bomb worked it would “in all probability shorten the war.” But that if was a very large word. When Vannevar Bush, head of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, gave my father a scientist’s version of the bomb, Admiral Leahy was present, and he scoffingly declared, “That is the biggest fool thing we’ve ever done. The bomb will never go off, and I speak as an expert in explosives.”

  General Groves’s report, twenty-four pages long and crammed with scientific data, stated that a test of the bomb would be made in the middle of July if everything remained on schedule. If it succeeded, the explosion would yield an equivalent force of about 500 tons of TNT. A second bomb, which could be used against Japan, would be ready around the first of August and would be the equivalent of 1,000 to 1,200 tons of TNT. The correct figure turned out to be 20,000 tons - graphic evidence of how little even the top people knew about the awesome weapon they were creating.

  In his memorandum, Secretary of War Stimson recommended the creation of a distinguished committee to study the question of using the bomb against Japan. My father immediately agreed and ordered the formation of this group, which came to be known as the Interim Committee. The impression some people h
ave, that my father made a snap decision to use the bomb, could not be further from the truth. Stimson, seventy-eight years old, one of the most respected Americans of his time, was the chairman of the Interim Committee. Byrnes was Dad’s personal representative. The other members included Dr. Vannevar Bush; Dr. Carl T. Compton, president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and James B. Conant, president of Harvard. Assisting the committee was a scientific panel, whose members were Enrico Fermi, Ernest O. Lawrence, Robert Oppenheimer, and Arthur H. Compton. All of them had played major roles in the development of the bomb.

  The same day my father had this fateful conference with Secretary Stimson, the United Nations Conference opened in San Francisco. In Europe, the war was hurtling toward a conclusion. German resistance was collapsing on all fronts. Ironically, Heinrich Himmler tried to negotiate a separate surrender to the Western Powers. Dad and Churchill agreed, in a telephone discussion, they must immediately reject the offer and notify Marshal Stalin.

  Here was an opportunity for the Americans and the British to commit the treachery which Stalin had accused Roosevelt of plotting. Having read these insulting telegrams, my father took not a little pleasure in informing Marshal Stalin he had rejected the German offer: “In keeping with our agreement with the British and Soviet governments, it is the view of the United States government that the only acceptable terms of surrender are unconditional surrender on all fronts to the Soviet, Great Britain, and the United States.”

  Two days later, word was flashed from Europe that American and Russian forces had finally met on the Elbe River. It meant the beginning of the end of the European war. From San Francisco, meanwhile, came word from Secretary of State Stettinius that Molotov was refusing to budge on the communization of Poland. The political problems of peace were already crowding into the White House. My father decided it was absolutely vital for him to know exactly what Marshal Stalin and Prime Minister Churchill were thinking on a broad range of topics. Random discussions of specific problems, attempts to deal with doctrinaire, obnoxious underlings like Molotov, were getting nowhere. So he asked Harry Hopkins to undertake a personal mission to Moscow. He also requested Joseph E. Davies, former ambassador to Russia, to make a similar journey to London, to talk with Churchill as the President’s personal representative. Both of these men were in poor health, and it bothered Dad’s conscience to ask them to undertake these grueling trips under wartime conditions. But they accepted their assignments without a moment’s hesitation, knowing what was at stake.

  On May 1, my father found time to write his mother: “I have been as busy as usual trying to make the country run. . . . I am hoping we will be able to move into the White House next week and then I want you to come to see us. I’ll make all the arrangements from here, so keep it dark until I tell you about it.” By this time, Mrs. Roosevelt had moved out of the White House, and Mother and I had gone over to inspect our future home. What we saw made me yearn to stay in Blair House. The White House looked splendid from the outside, and the public rooms which tourists visit were beautifully painted, decorated, and appointed. But the private quarters were anything but comfortable in those days. It was not unlike moving into a furnished apartment, where no new furniture or equipment had been purchased for twenty or thirty years. The furniture looked like it had come from a third-rate boarding house. Some of it was literally falling apart. Grubby was the overall word that leaped into my mind. Even more unpleasant was a bit of information Mrs. Roosevelt left with us before she departed. Here is how Dad reported it to his mother and sister: “Mrs. Roosevelt told Bess and me that it [the White House] is infested with rats! Said she was giving three high-hat women a luncheon on the south portico when a rat ran across the porch railing. She said each of them saw the rat but kept pretending that she didn’t. But they all finally confessed that they’d seen it.”

  Mother, ever the good soldier, plunged into conferences with painters and White House staff people. She assured me the old place would look a lot better once we got some fresh paint on the walls, and she was right. I chose Wedgwood blue for my sitting room, which had a pretty marble fireplace. For my bedroom, with my own antique white furniture, I chose pink with deep pink draperies and white window curtains. Mother preferred blue for her bedroom and gray for her sitting room and cream for Dad’s bedroom and off-white for his oval study. Getting my grand piano into my study proved to be quite an engineering challenge. They had to take the legs off and swing it through a second-floor window with a block and tackle. Dad decided he wanted a piano in his study, too.

  We moved in on May 7, so that Dad could celebrate his birthday in the White House, the following day. We had no idea just how much celebrating we and the rest of the country would do on that day.

  On May 6 and May 7, reports of the final collapse of German resistance poured into my father’s office. Finally, on May 7, General Eisenhower cabled that the German generals had surrendered unconditionally to him at 2:40 that morning. The next day, he expected to have Russian signatures on the agreement. That morning Dad got up and wrote a letter to his mother, telling her the story:

  Dear Mamma & Mary:

  I am sixty-one this morning and I slept in the President’s room in the White House last night. They have finished the painting and have some of the furniture in place. I’m hoping it will all be ready for you by Friday. My expensive gold pen doesn’t work as well as it should.

  This will be an historical day. At 9:00 o’clock this morning I must make a broadcast to the country announcing the German surrender. The papers were signed yesterday morning and hostilities will cease on all fronts at midnight tonight. Isn’t that some birthday present?

  In that letter, he commented on the trouble he had had with both Churchill and Stalin about the cease-fire date. A few days later he was far more explicit in a letter he wrote to Mrs. Roosevelt, here published for the first time. My father told her how the Germans continued trying to surrender only to the Americans and British, and kept fighting the Russians, until General Eisenhower warned them we would reopen full-scale hostilities and “drive them into the Russians” (Dad’s words). The Germans finally agreed to surrender unconditionally to be effective at 12:01 midnight of May 8-9.

  Stalin and I had agreed on a simultaneous release [of the victory statement] at 9 a.m. Washington time, 3 p.m. London and 4 p.m. Moscow time. . . . The Germans kept fighting the Russians and Stalin informed me he had grave doubts of the Germans carrying out the terms. There was fighting on the Eastern front right up to the last hour.

  In the meantime Churchill was trying to force me to break faith with the Russians and release on the 7th, noon Washington time, 6 p.m. London, 7 p.m. Moscow. I wired Stalin and he said the Germans were still firing. I refused Churchill’s request and informed Stalin of conditions here and in England and that unless I heard from him to the contrary I would release at 9 a.m. May 8th. I didn’t hear so the release was made, but fighting was still in progress against the Russians. The Germans were finally informed that if they didn’t cease firing as agreed they would not be treated as fighting men but as traitors and would be hanged as caught. They then ceased firing and Stalin made his announcement the 9th.

  He had sent me a message stating the situation at 1 a.m. May 8th and asking postponement until May 9th. I did not get the message until 10 a.m. May 8, too late, of course, to do anything.

  I have been trying very carefully to keep all my engagements with the Russians because they are touchy and suspicious of us. The difficulties with Churchill are very nearly as exasperating as they are with the Russians. But patience I think must be our watchword if we are to have World Peace. To have it we must have the wholehearted support of Russia, Great Britain and the United States.

  My father’s first thought, after announcing the glorious news of the victory in Europe, was the war with Japan. In a letter to his mother, written the day before the Germans surrendered, he said: “We have another war to win and people must realize it. I hope they will, any
way.” He ended his V-E Day statement with the words, “Our victory is only half over.” He then added a plea to Japan’s leaders to lay down their arms in unconditional surrender - the only terms which Roosevelt had said he would accept from either Germany or Japan.

  Some people have criticized this approach, claiming modification of this demand would have persuaded Japan to surrender earlier and avoided the use of the atomic bomb. It is sad, how each generation’s hindsight is based on a criticism of the preceding generation. Roosevelt and Churchill were attempting to avoid the error of World War I, which left Germany uninvaded, virtually intact. This permitted Hitler to propound the myth that Germany had not really lost the war and create a new military machine to launch World War II.

  My father was aware that unconditional surrender was particularly unfortunate for dealing with Japan, where military fanaticism already made suicide preferable to surrender on the field of battle. On Okinawa, thousands of Japanese soldiers destroyed themselves with hand grenades rather than give up, in spite of the obvious fact the battle was lost. So, in this announcement, Dad did his utmost to soften the term unconditional surrender for Japan:

  Just what does the unconditional surrender of the armed forces of Japan mean for the Japanese people?

  It means the end of the war.

  It means the termination of the influence of the military leaders who brought Japan to the present brink of disaster.